Archive for June, 2017

Many people imagine that software engineers spend most of their time writing code. Even in a perfect world, that would not be the case. A properly planned and designed system is always going to beat out a rushed and poorly designed one. But regardless, we are not in such a world. In reality, our time looks like this.

In April, my parents retired. Typically, you think of this as the period of your life when you have lots of free time. But that does not last long. Soon you have filled it up with so much stuff that you have no idea how you ever managed to fit a job in.

Which is why, two months later, we were still trying to find a weekend when we could all go out for a surprise trip to Fazenda to celebrate my dad’s birthday.

It had to a lunch time as they don’t allow children after 6 pm. That sucks because it is way better on an evening. However, the experience child-wise was kick ass. The high chair was already set out when we arrived and Venla got her own plastic plate, cutlery set and breaker. Hats off to them they have it down: and it’s free for under 5s!

Afterwards, we headed over to the Golf Bar and played some golf.

It’s a lot of fun. It does feel like real golf: the clubs feel a bit light but other than that you are really hitting a ball with real clubs. It’s £40 per hour which is a little steep, but not too bad when split between a group of you.

In May, we took Venla for her first trip to the beach.

She enjoyed herself. There were lots of new things to put in her mouth. Including pebbles. And sand. She ate lots of sand. In fact, the only thing that didn’t go in the mouth was the one thing you are supposed to eat: seaweed.

Flamborough often has it’s own weather system and it held out well for us: it was warm and sunny for most of the trip.

Earlier this month saw the 2017 AGM of West Yorkshire Humanists. It was a changing of the guard as Moz, our chair for almost the past decade, stepped down to let the younger dynamic young go-getters take over.

Laurence and Chris H were elected as joint chairs.

We then followed this with a group discussion on “should Humanism be political”. It seemed very apt given the same day was the General Election. Finally, we headed over to The George for some drinks.

Earlier this month, Kerny turned one. We celebrated with a picnic at Tetley Green.

Missing out on the latest Venla pictures? You probably need to follow me on Instagram. For those of you who are not down with the kids, here are some photos…

Venla learnt to wave last month. SHe’s enjoying it.

In May, we went back to Leeds SOUP to report on the progress at Anxiety Leeds. Venla screamed her head off last time, so this time I took her up to the front to give the talk with me. She seemed much happier in the limelight.

We went for a walk along the canal and let Venla sit in the grass. She was not sure about it at first but got used to it after a while.

You know Oreo’s? The biscuit that nobody likes because once you take the cream away from them they are just this really dry, flavourless biscuit? Well, turns out they are incredibly chocolatey in the right hands. This was shortly before Venla sent my cocktail glass smashing to the ground.

Last month, we had a bake sale at Sky to support International Day Against Homophobia. The crowning jewel of the sale was this…

…which was self-described by the bake-sale team as “the gayest cake in the world”. It was also delicious.

Baby food pouches come with a variety of ingredients and flavours listed on the front. But there are often not as accurate a one might hope. With these pouches, for example, it turns out that a significant percentage of each of them is apples.

Not just a little bit of apple. In the case of the Heinz baby pouch, most of it is apples. But Ella’s Kitchen does make the grade. Their banana baby pouch is made of just one thing: bananas. How crazy is that? Apparently, far more crazy than it should be.

Watch the video. You get to hear the amusing baby screams.

But, if you’re at work, here are the stats:

Venla seems to enjoy music and has lots of fun kicking her piano. So, I decided to take the next logical step and get her a xylophone.

Technically, it’s a glockenspiel. But it seems to me that the skills ought to be transferable if she wants to expand to actually playing xylophone in later life.

She still has a lot to learn. For example, how to use the mallet to hit the keys, rather than putting it in her mouth.

AppSpotr is a cloud-based service that allows you to make your own apps for iOS and Android.

I had a very brief play around with it so I won’t pretend this is anything like an in-depth review. It allows you to create apps using a drag-and-drop editor. You can add a number of different pages to the app, the basic ones are free and then there is a monthly price for the rest of them.

So, for example, if you want to add a form to capture people’s details, that costs $5 per month. Or the enhanced content pages which you need to add videos costs $1 per month.

It seems like a useful service if you are, for example, a restaurant or hotel that needs a little app with a simple menu and some content pages. But, for anything more advanced, it probably will not provide you with what you need. There is no logical, for example, it is just a list of pages.

You also need a developer account with whatever platform you want to publish to.