Chris Worfolk's Blog

I am currently busy working on some follow up books to Technical Anxiety. However, I took some time off over the holidays to write a different book. This one is called Why Restaurants Fail – And What To Do About It. It’s a fun read. Unless you are a restaurant owner, in which case it probably isn’t.

The premise is simple: people start restaurants thinking their excellent food is enough. It’s not. In fact, the food is not even that important. Time and time again we saw our favourite independent restaurants go under because they thought they were in the restaurant business. They’re not: they’re in the money business. And the only way to win is to put aside your ego and your snobbery and learn from the best (typically fast food joints).

This book is an experiment. At just under 11,000 words, it is only 42 pages long. Super-short for a book, But as Sean D’Souza and Michael Hyatt both pointed out, people like short books. Here are the stats Michael Hyatt provided in a webinar last month:

• 60% of readers finish a book of 100 pages or less
• 20% of readers finish a book of 200 pages or so
• More than 200 pages, 3% readers finish

Will customers feel cheated because the book is only 11,000 words long? Or will they actually enjoy the book more? I am interested to find out.

It is also an experiment in applying MVP (minimal viable product) development to books. When Sean D’Souza first published The Brain Audit it was half the length it is now. Similarly, Why Restaurants Fail may grow much longer over time. But right now, I have said everything I want to say, without diluting the content.

With eBooks, I can even push out these updates for free. This is what we have done for all five editions of the Leeds Restaurant Guide. If you bought the first edition as an eBook, you received all of the updated editions free of charge.

I do not have a fixed release date yet, but I expect it to arrive in the next 30 days.

In what possible way could this ever be a comfortable position to sleep?

It is hard to believe that this is the 9th year we have run a New Year’s Eve party. Luckily, the new additions to the circle have not detracted from the atmosphere. As ever, it was a pleasure to catch up with friends: new and old, near and far. It even featured a Skype call from Dr Murray who is beavering away with research projects in South Korea.

The food was popular. It appeared that we would have too much of it when we first started. However, by the end of the evening, a valiant attempt had been made to get through it all. There were plenty of desserts left over. This has worked out well: we’re still eating most of the cake people brought.

Despite the party going on until just after 3am, I still managed to make it up in time for the New Year’s Day Parkrun. The benefits of having a human alarm clock. NYD is a special day in the Parkrun calendar: it is the only day when you are allowed to compete in multiple events. Because of this, Leeds stagger their runs: 9am for Woodhouse Moor and 10:30 for Temple Newsam.

That represents my 98th and 99th Parkrun: next week, the big 100.

After that it was onwards to Miller & Carter for recovery steak. There I immediately piled into my body all of the calories I had just burned off. Venla was less happy here: a new year’s hangover will do that to a baby.

Next year is our tenth anniversary, and I have something rather special planned…

It has been a writing-heavy month over at the Worfolk household. On Saturday, I am going to be announcing my new restaurant book. But, between finalising that and sending it to the printers for proofing, I have finished another, and I am announcing that one today.

The title is How to Exit Vim.

For months I have been joking that what would be really useful is a book on all the different ways there are to exit Vim. For those not in-the-know, Vim is a command-line text editor for Linux. It is notoriously difficult to exit once you enter the program.

The truth is, though, that book would be genuinely useful. So I have written it. It comes out on 15 January. You can pre-order it now from Amazon and iBooks.

When my daughter arrived, I assumed that my days of eating in restaurants were over. Everyone told me it was just too difficult. We would not be living the high-life anymore. It turns out that such predicts were massively incorrect, at least initially.

In her first five weeks, Venla ate in nine different restaurants. Different restaurants. This does not even include the ones we visited multiple times.

• Byron
• Miller & Carter
• McDonald’s
• All Bar One
• Ricci’s Tapas
• Bossa
• Weatherspoon’s
• Turtle Bay
• The Pour House

That equates to a new restaurant for every four days she had been alive.

Things have slowed down a little now, as we are getting back on top of our budgets and meal schedules. However, one thing is certainly clear: rumours of the demise of our restaurant dates have been greatly exaggerated.

Well, we have survived Venla’s first Christmas. Here is a guide on how to do it. First, buy a gammon joint as big as your baby…

6kg. It took us until New Year’s Day morning to finish it off. Second, build a gingerbread house…

You cannot have a proper Christmas without a gingerbread house. Step three, start the day off right…

And by “right”, I mean have a bacon sandwich for breakfast, where you use gammon for bread. Completing the Parkrun is optional. Step four, pretend your baby has any kind of knowledge of what is going on…

Finally, step five, try and find somewhere to put the mountain of gifts your baby has received.

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.