Archive for January, 2017

Mailgun is an email sending service made by Rackspace. Specifically, it is designed to be used as an API for sending automated emails.

This is different from a mailing list manager such as MailChimp or Infusionsoft. These allow you to build up a mailing list and send out newsletters. Mailgun is designed to be used by web applications looking to send emails behind the scenes. For example, I use it in my IT contracting course to send out welcome emails when someone registers.

Setup is relatively straightforward. You register, enter your domain name, and then Mailgun gives you a whole host of DNS entries you need to add to your domain. You are then given an API key that your scripts can use to send messages out from. They have a PHP library you can bring in via Composer (and libraries for all the other languages too), so it was just a case of wrapping that in my own code.

Best of all, they have a free tier: you do not pay anything for your first 10,000 emails.

Of course, the real test of success is delivery rates. Time will tell whether that is successful or not. However, my old solution was setting up a gMail account and sending email through their SMTP servers is unreliable (Google occasionally thought I was being hacked and locked my scripts out) and meant the email was coming from an @gmail.com account, which is not very professional. So, this promises to be a big improvement even if delivery rates are only just as good.

I have been meaning to write about funerals for a while. Looking back, I think there has been quite a lot of emotional resistance, so I will probably keep this post brief.

I was only six when both my grandfathers passed away, and not much older when my uncle died. Therefore, when my grandma passed away in August, it was the first funeral I had been to as an adult and the first one where I really knew what was going on.

In a way, I was actually curious to see how I would cope with the whole affair. For years I had known that eventually, someone would die, and had no idea how it would affect me. It turns out that I coped just fine. There was no emotional breakdown, nor much in the way of tears. Nor was it a surprise, though: when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I knew we were on the clock.

Mostly, I felt bitter at the world for my own selfish reasons. Venla, who arrived two months later, would have been her first great-grandchild. I felt I had failed her in some way.

It has been a while since I have been truly nervous before giving a speech. Even my wedding was fine. But delivering the eulogy was a tough one. I always joked at my public speaking club “humour improves any speech: but I have not had a chance to try it out in a eulogy yet”. Well, now I have had that chance, and I can confirm it is a good idea. If anything, humour is even more important at occasions that are bound to include an element of sadness.

The truth is, I already had a few ideas for what I was going to say, should I be called upon to give a eulogy. Because that is what happens when you have an anxious mind that never switches off: you think about all the horrible things that could happen to everyone you love, and what you would do if it happened.

That all sounds very gloomy, and that is not the message I want to convey. Actually, funerals are fun. They are enjoyable, in a macabre way. Not because it is a celebration of life, which it is, but because it is a time when an entire family comes together.

Over the past year, I have witnessed the match and dispatch of the hatch-match-dispatch triangle. These events are important. They bring families together, using social rules and customs that other events have not been able to achieve. You get to see people you do not normally see, and bond over an emotional event, forming stronger ties between those that remain.

Funerals are always going to be bittersweet by nature. But they provide more than closure. More than a celebration of someone’s life. They are part of the social glue that help hold families together.

James’s leaving do, before he departs for South Kora.

The first scan of Baby Worfolk.

The 20-week scan of Elina Junior.

Me dying after completing the Leeds Half Marathon.

Our honeymoon in Iceland.

Group trip to Anglesey.

My grandma passing away.

The arrival of Baby Worfolk.

Venla gets a name and starts to grow. Here she is with a very tired daddy.

The expanded family together for the first time.

Coinbase is generally regarded as the biggest and most accessible way to get into Bitcoin.

Unfortunately, my experience has not left a great impression.

Registration

Registering with them is a big hassle. First, you have to go through phone verification. Which would be fine if it worked. But it doesn’t. The text message never arrived, even after I retried it. In the end, I had to wait 24 hours, delete my phone number and re-add it to get it working.

Then you move onto identity verification where you have to submit a passport scan.

But this isn’t easy either. The pop-up window that appears has a link to the page. Except it is the wrong page and you get a 404 page. The only way to find the correct page is to trawl through your account settings to find the verification page.

Next step, submitting a picture via your webcam. This step doesn’t work either. The website cannot read my passport from my webcam. They have another option to do it via your phone and luckily this option did work.

Deposits

Coinbase has lost their ability to accept UK deposits. Therefore the only way to deposit money into your account is using the SEPA payment to their Estonian bank account. You know, like all legitimate operations ask you to do.

Bank account verification

The next thing you need to do is to verify your bank account so you can make a deposit. I did this via the SEPA payment and everything seemed to work.

Except, a few days later, my verification mysteriously disappeared. So, I opened a ticket with Coinbase support. This was difficult. You have to go through an almost endless series of FAQs before you are allowed to contact support.

Once you do, they wait an hour and then send you an automated email with more FAQs, telling you to get back in touch if that doesn’t solve your problem. This is based on their very limited set of support categories which make it impossible to ask the correct question.

Once you have done this your request sits in their support queue.

Support

Their customer service appears to be none existent. I raised a support ticket about my account not working and, at time of writing, they still haven’t responded to me.

Spam texts

Shortly after registering with Coinbase, I began receiving a series of spam texts, and even a spam call, about investing in Bitcoin and trading on markets. I have no evidence that it was Coinbase that leaked my details, just the correlation that it started happening when I registered with them.

Summary

I would recommend looking at alternatives to Coinbase. Their systems are flaky, I worry about their data protection and, most of all, they don’t seem to respond to support requests. That isn’t a disaster if you have £10 in there, but a massive problem if you have £1,000.

I’m not the only person who has had a horrible experience. They have one star on Trust Pilot. I have never seen anyone with a rating that low.

When I started following American football, there was only one sensible choice for who to support: San Francisco is the Mecca of software development, so the 49ers it had to be. As it happens, much like the team’s namesake, I had struck gold. Jim Harbaugh was in charge and doing amazing things.

In Harbaugh’s first three seasons in charge, the 49ers went to the championship game in all of them. He was the first NFL head coach to do this. The second of those saw the 49ers go the Super Bowl and were just one play away from winning the thing.

Then, in 2014, the team went 8-8 and Jed York fired him.

Jim Tomsula was given the head coaching job, while the two highly commended coordinators, Vic Fangio and Greg Roman, both left the team too. The team went 5-11. Tomsula was fired and replaced with Chip Kelly. This had promise. Kelly had taken the Philadelphia Eagles from a 4-12 season to a 10-6 season in which they went to the championship game, before being fired a year later for a still-respectable 7-9 season.

But this year, things have been even worse.

Should Kelly be fired? Well, maybe. But it is worth noting Bill Walsh’s record. Bill Walsh is the greatest 49ers coach of all time. In his ten seasons in charge, he won three Super Bowls. Even Bill Belichick’s record with the Patriots is not that good. What was Walsh’s record the first year in charge? 2-14. It was the equal-worst season ever for the 49ers. But they stuck with it, and it turned out to be the best decision they ever made.

Things started strong in January. I finished reading all the books while Finland junior team won the ice hockey world championship. We had fish month and the Humanist Action Group organised a food drive for local homeless shelters. James said goodbye to us and hello to South Korea.

In February we launched the print edition of the Leeds Restaurant Guide while Denver bested Carolina in Super Bowl 50. We rocked out at Sunday Assembly and I took the middle class plunge and bought a stand mixer.

We had a family get-together for Mother’s Day in March. I went fishing for the first time and was cruely cheated in the Sky bake-off. I received my Advanced Communicator Silver award from Toastmasters, but failed to win the Yorkshire final for the first time ever. We had Nordic month and went duck racing.

After three months if waiting, we finally announced that Elina was pregnant: on April Fool’s Day. The wait almost killed me but was completely worth it. A great way to start April. I completed my first 20k run and my novel was published.

May started off cold. It was mostly less than 10 degrees. Except for the day of the Leeds Half Marathon, when it went up to 25. At least it was warm enough to barbeque. Elina had her 20-week scan and I launched a new version of my website. Democracy won in Wales, where the Loony Party achived a record 0.6% of the Welsh Assembly vote, and was defeated when the government announced it was not interested in respecting the will of the people. Ukraine triumphed in Eurovision and Leciester were crowned the unlikely champions of the Premier League. Finland went into the world ice hockey final unbeaten, only to cruelly lose 1-0 to Canada.

We had our honeymoon in June, flying to Iceland in style, relaxing in the Blue Lagoon and taking in the sights of Gullfuss, Geysir, Snæfellsnes, whales and of course the Icelandic Phallological Museum. I came home sun burnt. It was a sad month for politics: Brexit happened and Jo Cox was murdered. West Yorkshire Humanists held their AGM, announcing a big increase in membership, and we once again rocked out at Sunday Assembly Leeds. I released the Word Search PHP library and completed the Leeds 10k, going sub-60 for the first time with a result of 59:59. England crashed out of Euro 2016 in a miserable fashion.

I had finally managed to lose some weight by the time July came around. We packed out bags and headed to Anglesey for our annual group trip. Michelle flew in from China to attend. More music was made at Sunday Assembly. It was picnic month: both the Finnish picnic and the Humanist picnic took place.

In August Team GB crushed it at the Rio Olympics, finishing second in the medals table. Tradgy stuck as my grandma passed away just two months before her fist great grandchild was due to arrive. We celebrated Leeds Pride and launched Rena Men. I helped Sky Sports go live with their new Premier League clips system.

It was still warm enough to eat outside in September. I finally cracked the secrets to making a good pizza and we had sauce month. Anxiety Leeds held a picnic. Yarndale look place and Jeremy Coryn won a second Labour leadership election.

October was dominated by the arrival of Baby Worfolk, who later turned out to be called Venla. We drank champagne and smoked chocolate cigars. Venla spent the month laying around and looking cute. The Leeds Restaurant Guide was made available on iBooks as was my novel, Summer on the Horizon. Elina and I celebrated our first anniversary and Team Europe was bested in the Ryder Cup. At the end of the month, I turned 30 and the Victoria Gate shopping centre opened.

The big news in November was Donald Trump being elected US president. I felt this rather overshadows the launch of Worfolk Anxiety Management and my new book, Technical Anxiety. I smashed it in the Abbey Dash, setting a new 10k personal best of 56:45 – a full 10 minutes faster than my previous Dash (though that one was a personal worst). Finnish Christmas Carols were sung.

In December we celebrated my sister’s birthday and I launched the Worfolk Anxiety Podcast. Venla met her other grandma for the first time, and we took a family trip to Tropical World. I said goodbye to long-time client Sky Sports. West Yorkshire Humanists held their Winter Social and Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters. My mum turned 60. I went sub-28 in Parkrun for the first time while my dad completed his 100th.