3 Dreams

 Number, Number, Weight, Division , or so goes the famous Pharos's dream. Mine are rarely that dramatic.

Virus, Parking, Fire ? Hardly going to make this one ground breaking. But as in the past I like to sometimes use my dream as a sounding board. It was unusual to recall 3 dreams in one night, so this is a little unpack. It probably means I awoke at least twice. although I feel I slept poorly, my head does hurt today after lying awake a long stretch before the alarm went off.

1. The Computer Virus

This one is strange, the kids have a new animatronic toy, it's a Rube Goldberg type puzzle in a large plastic tube with wires, and a remote control. But while the kids are playing with this thing, I notice my computer saying "you have been infected" every 2 minutes, as I investigate the screen opens a million browsers, and I turn the power off.

2. The Parking Nightmare

I arrive at the same office park where I work, but on a gray Saturday afternoon, for a charity event held in the conference facilities, only to find the entire parking lot covered in a heavy plastic sheeting. Bizarre. So I park on the street and as I walk I notice the sheeting has been moved to make space for a retired friends car, because he is a blue badge holder I think, and has to get a wheelchair for his wife.

3. The Fire

This one starts with a shit, literally. I open the bathroom door and it's obvious the loo has backed up. I start recriminating myself for not paying attention to the warning signs of this event and open the front door to go and verify with the neighbours, only to find what looks like someone's chimney producing loads of smoke. It's coming from near my friend's house, so I walk briskly down the block , where the smoke is not so thick it's hard to see. Then I notice that it looks like it has been snowing. Which is actually fire supressing foam, not snow, and that a large fire has destroyed businesses and homes on the opposite side of the road, to top it off, the road has collapsed really scarily. Fire crews are in attendance. As I cautiously jog back home thinking "hey I can grab my phone and take some cool photos of all this", I might go viral! Then I see a white SUV, and 2 guys one of them is going door to door asking for donations, while the homeowner tries to fob the beggar off. I approach valiantly and try intervene because there are bigger things going on than collecting for charity today.

That last one was weird, I had to work out what to say to the beggar, something like "If you are not helping here now, you are part of the problem". I did say my dreams are detailed, what do I make of this? Well I really would like to be able to be helpful in getting rid of unwanted door-knocker types. But that desire to take photos of the disaster, has me reconsidering my motives.

I have had trouble parking at that office park a few times, but what the significance of my friend in the parking dream is, is unclear, because his wife is not disabled, but it was definitely him and his green/aqua coloured Suzuki car, and he is a really capital fellow.

The computer Virus is definitely the angry side of me. We see computer viruses everywhere today, and in many different forms, I've not had virus problems to speak of, so it's definitely about my anger and trying to point fingers as to who allowed the computer to get infected this dream.

True, the dreams mean nothing, but it's nice to imagine that they do. It's far more fun than doomscrolling for half an hour with a cup of tea in one hand.

Discipline=Freedom

" Discipline equals freedom" Jocko Willink.

Last year I started a course to learn strategies and tools for coping with ADHD tendencies. The previous Christmases had been very unhappy times, and I wanted to break, which I did. I have no ADHD diagnosis, I just find the tools help me deal with imposter syndrome, and seasonal depression. I mapped my highs and lows in detail for 2 months last year. I uncovered symptoms which are, as far I can work out, caused by anxieties. Like the FOMO (Fear of missing out) from my last post https://zaphodikusrealm.blogspot.com/2025/01/gently-curious.html .

Anyway, one of the typical ADHD'er tendencies is a desire to optimise everything, and free up "CPU cycles" and so when someone says discipline equals freedom , everybody's brain just melts. That just sounds like a juxtaposition, not a truth. But my next two weeks are about routine establishment. By having routines, you can take guesswork out of small tasks that waste the cognitive and risk assessing part of the brain. We execute about 10 mini risk assessments every single day without knowing, what if you could roll just some of those into a practised routine? What if we could batch chores up, and do it in a way that ensures we don't forget any of them, in itself , that's a stress source. As someone with very little routine, because I am constantly guarding against my OCD tendency, I think I'm achieving a goal. Yes there will be a blog post about goals, I'm working through some of the course material backwards, Can you tell I'm a rebel?

Gently Curious

  If you are a bit ADHD, you will find yourself often getting into trouble with people. I say often and I mean often but for differing reasons, one of them is when a thing someone does just grinds you because it's just inefficient to do it that way.

Big triggers of grumpiness (anxiety) like lack of sleep, stress, technology that glitches, over-loading or even a food change are more general ones that we have some amount of control of. But some you have no control over. Like when a friend takes 20 minutes to eat lunch and you know it takes you 10-15 minutes and the train will be arriving exactly then. It grinds you, if the train runs early, you want to be on it early too dammit! I have always had FOMO (fear of missing out) which means I love to arrive early to every meeting. My FOMO however had started to drive my wife mad. I needed to teach myself to be less anxious about time itself. Last week I twice managed to actually run a few minutes late getting somewhere and a miracle happened, I did not end up driving faster. And I missed out on nothing at all.

Gently Curious

What grinds me, is not just people who eat slowly. I had to realise that my FOMO and wanting to get to every single meeting 5 minutes early was also stressing other people. This works two ways a lot, much more than I had realised. And just like my totally irrational desire to never miss things was not understood by my family, I often don't understand their quirks too. I very often fail to accommodate others, I mean why can't they just do things my way, the better way? Well, that's because everyone has different goals and different things they get out of the habits they might have. So how do I satisfy my unhappiness with the choices of others to do things wrong?

I used to just tell any person straight out, that that is not the best way! And when you turn it in it's head, and instead ask, what they are doing first, then ask why they do it that way, but without asking the why question, ask the how does this activity meet a need, for example how often do we all do "X" in a day for example? Almost in a reflective way, as if you are asking yourself, and then even though you will then learn why they do it the wrong way, and you will not be able to change them, you will understand the person better. Ever since I started being more gently, I have been building my own list of annoying things that I do, which I now work on, to minimise. It goes two ways.

2017

Dec 2017 : This year I tried to fix everything. Everything. I bought a house. Found 2 boys. Found a handbag. Lost my job. Prayed. Found a job. Made fire... a lot. Got sick and wobbly just before Xmas. (twitter.com)

Stop reading now if introspections offend you.
Everything?
I probably set out thinking anything can be fixed, the physical or built things that break often that-is. I mean in the old days they made stuff to last. I still recall the old SONY set my mum had, it looked a lot like this one, and lasted for years and years, just like her refrigerator. 

So why does so much break, and what can I do about it? Fix it faster than it breaks? Just get on top of it, it requires loads of tools today, just to be able to work on stuff, but why all the throwaway stuff? Youtube is great for teardowns on almost anything you want fixed, and guides to fix it. So give google a try first. Anyway, my solution is superglue, the good superglue. Get it here http://softcircuitry.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/how-to-repair-stuff.html

Bought a House
This was the painful part.
I at one point started making a mental list of things to fix, while we were in the buying process (which was drawn out and clearly shows also that property law in the UK needs fixing.) Basic things we knew, like the roof neede re-tiling, and the kitchen floor, the kitchen splash-backs, and the bathroom,... anyway the list went ape.  I stopped after hitting about 30. New things kept on coming up. however once we got moved in, I had already learned to put in a floor. Thanks to Peder Peterson (a Belgian who plies me with great imported beers) and his reciprocating saw, I got trained up in chipboard flooring. 3 slow days, one room, many plasters and scrapes.

The house buying was something I prayed about a lot to be sure, it was a long drawn out process, the owners were not divorcing themselves of each other and the house very well. At one point I was about to walk away. In retrospect, I should have put in an offer 5K lower, possibly 10. This is the part about life where I wonder if I have short-changed myself. l always assume that if I am good to someone, that they will return the favor, not this time. I am probably too trusting.

Found 2 boys
It is easier than you think to loose contact with teenagers, they go through a stage where day is no longer cool, and that will hurt, trust me it will happen. 
http://zaphodikusrealm.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/proud-of-my-son.html . More on this, as we go along.

Found a handbag
I found a handbag, belonging to M it turns out, it was really strange, I got home one afternoon, early for some reason, and just a few yards from the front door, on a pretty quiet high street was a holdall. It is on an A road, but that just means that more cars use it than makes sense. I left a message at the post office, and left it at a nearby respite center and at and the next day, we got a thank you note. Samaritans +1

Lost my Job
I'm not allowed to talk about this, but despite the process being painless, it was stressful to me. I got demotivated during the process, despite telling myself over and over, that it's not my fault.

Prayed
Well, not me, I want to send out thank you to Esther and Rosemary. It was always going to be a worry, a worry that nobody wants to hire you, or that you get hired by the wrong crowd for any reason. But having someone on your case with the Big Guy is just a guarantee that it's going to work out if not to my own plan, at least to a better plan.

Found a Job
This required a bit of examtime cramming to start off.

(post updated in Dec '24)

new job started, new bathroom

updated Dec '24

New job started at arm

That's with a small "a", something all the hip tech companies are doing. But that's not all that is new once you start working for one of the most invisible yet totally huge tech companies in the world. Apart from being very cool to work at a place that had almost invisible products everywhere, is the "in" jokes around 3 letters, a r m . I'll not spoil it, you have to work here to hear them all, and even understand them all. It's a very creative and hard working crowd.

New bathroom

Almost done , it looks brilliant, but some small things I did not expect.
- the grout colour gray needed to be a little bit lighter gray
- the towel rail radiator starts quite near the ground, which means it's less of a towel rail, but it should be fine
- the towel rail is bigger than thought, so the basin kinda lines up or does not centre well in the remaining space
The missus is wondering about where to put the toilet roll, so I'll have to sort that out pretty pronto myself. I had fun getting downlighters onto a string of lights this weekend, just hope I can get holes into the ceiling without cutting anything by mistake under the flat roof. Limited space and other cables in there too.

Boiler instruction manuals http://www.greenbrook.co.uk/eshop/files/files/T205-Ins-June-18.pdf

Updated - that job lasted a whole year, I think I struggled a lot with the traveling and being a bit lonely.

Singing rehearsal pieces

Nobody will know:

A note I made back in April of '23, long before I had to start takign singing seriously, but this is jsut a note, so here goes.

A Gaelic Blessing Deep Peace to You - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lF56VahTa0gn2JqLnJcUiK4lU2R-5Z6g/view?usp=sharing

Bridge over Troubled Water - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e0D6ul5nZ_wsfvUDGI8D005DxnZcOlGs/view?usp=sharing

BQQ recipe update

A note for future me (I write this in summer of 2023, and it's almost 2025 now)

I have said this before, I hate recipe websites. So I like to write up my version of a recipe and stow it someplace. I suppose that's a bit old fashioned. Almost like a circular technology shift.

Anyway, going to do a repeat of the BBQ with fish soon. I'm going to be adding aubergine and plantain.

A History linkup

(Wrote this during the great shutdown - but never published this at the time, so the date is wrong, but it needs sharing now.)

I'll have to find an old picture or two of us. This is a history lesson, it's not long in terms of years, but it's long in terms of miles. I'm sitting here writing this today, crying. My good friend Marinus has lost his best friend this week.

Marinus van Zyl

Marinus actually has many middle-names, he once recited them for us, there is a family tradition of giving each son and daughter in the family, successive names from the fathers middle names. A way of holding your family names which curiously would mean that sometimes your grandfather would have the same name as you. Marinus son, Manie holds this privilege, I hold the benefit of having met both of them. But let's start at the beginning. A bit of this is my history, just in my writing.

1991

Johannesburg city center. I'm pretty sure it was raining as I queued up to register for a programming course. I was a bit self-taught at programming at that time, but since I'm not university material, a practical course run by a certain company called "Van Zyl and Pritchard" was my way into the industry. It was a Cobol Programming Foundation certificate and going to be my ticket into programming. One of the training company directors was, Marinus father. A short course, co-incidentally also attended by one of his children, Marinus. I made one other friendship in that course in between lectures on a large yet packed second floor room. Craig Austin now lives in London. After lectures we would walk across town, run really most often to catch a train back home, and after that, a bus.

Nobody reads these

It occurred to me, that some people blog as a self-branding or portfolio building activity.

I probably should have started writing more of these personal signposts a bit more regularly, since there are very few landmarks here, marks I'm leaving for future me, almost like a diary, because nobody reads these, but almost like a personal wiki or a self-help guide. I tried making my own wikimedia wiki once to store all the info I had about transistors and odd electronics I collected, it was a lot more work to write up than I originally hoped. But it did teach me to be super comfortable with writing markdown. glad that this blog does not require markdown.

Interestingly the saying goes, that "our future is written in our past". And that's largely true, as knowing what you did before, lets you know more about what you will do next, but. Big but, when truly looking for change, honest change we might too often use the past to beat ourselves into a kind of submission to all of our past wrongs. 2 years ago, as parto f a change I wanted to drive, I started a bit of a writing exercise. Now this blog was always an inspiration outlet, but I was writing about computer games, and the audience and context did not fit, but the goal, was to start writing more clearly and purposefully. So I wrote my creative pieces as game reviews on Steam, and grew to 99 followers over a year, and am now at 150 followers. I wanted to learn to "Write-like-you-are-paid-to-write". And so now I am hoping that my writing style becomes more deliberate, because next up is a bit of blogging with more purpose than usual. So do stay tuned.

Let's see if this becomes another one of those new year resolutions.

Ringing Association web changes

1.  find all dead links
2.  find all and add missing images
3.  update any blurry images
4.  make page headings more consistent (banner redesign)
5.  get people to send updated content in
6.  get events data from someone?
7.  make homepage more inviting and cleaner
8.  catalogue all embedded pdf and google docs (use pdf)
9.  write up some guidance : this document

Guidance

• Spelling is to be English UK, not US.
  Examples: colour, centre
• Note any change when you make it so people can be included and review after.
• Decide on a font style and sizes : TODO
• Decide on consistent image sizes to make things look more pleasing : TODO

(1) Dead Links

The Huntingdon website is moving/moved - find best new page, then fix any links : TODO

The quick links page on EDA page and on the Ely EDA page differ un-necessarily (somehow I cannot find both pages now.)

elyda.org.uk "A" record needs to point to ely.elyda.org.uk someone with the mythicbeasts DNS record hosting needs to do that bit. : TODO

Telegraph lines to our Past

 A few summers ago, I heard a chiming, a ringing, and a connection started to form faintly. Faintly because the great lockdown of 2020 hit us. So it was not until the first lifting occurred and a lot of people connecting and messaging happened that I got started.

Ringing bells that is. And it has taken some time to get schooled in the art. but we are finally guild members the missus and I. My interest has been about history and the old buildings, and as a hobby ringing lets you touch a lot of those bases in a very tactile way.

Anyway. It's Sunday and I have a lot to do, so . Yes loads to do. I'll use this space for notes I think.

StPeters Wilburton : Part of a quarter-peal attempt.

2 minutes

Ringing down at St Peters Wilburton
Ringing Down

Where did you run to in Lockdown

so i quit all my normal clubs

For me, the digital world has often inhabited a subliminal space around the real world. That's because it's a construct of what is essentially our physical world but with vastly different constraints. Constraints that are easy to ignore and are often ignored and grotesquely twisted by users of our digital worlds. So when lockdown pretty much jailed everyone who did not open the door into the digital, I could always see the "construct" of the digital space for what it is, a lie. But everyone was online now, to communicate, to share, and to work and to socialise, you have to open that door into the slightly twisted, but the only world that remains.

It started with the uncanny valley of zoom meetings. People compose books on the shelves behind them on camera and aim the camera just so. People use backgrounds and then the camera portrays the other party up close, really close, just 50 cm away from you. That inside your comfort zone visually, and the mind boggles. So we all try different online meeting solutions and mix up the online meeting screen with backgrounds and so on, to try and make it feel less personal-space invasion-like, less home privacy invasion-like and try get on with it. But apart from the way the camera lens lies and the fact that only 2 people in the meeting can speak at a time, (which is a really dumb problem.) There is the drift into doing everything digitally, which is of course meaningless. You cannot feed someone digitally, or even less check that they really have taken their daily meds. You cannot help them get to the bathroom (there is a famous discussion on how the simple stranger entering a place asking for directions to the bathroom is in fact a bigger introduction to deeper communication, but that's part of the pain.) Yes, lacking physical touch, but for me, digital has always been fake.

Digital will always be fake, it conveys very low trust, and is unable to transport any goods or provide really useful services, and still cannot make tea. And for those who could not work remotely the "imposter" and fake of my cushy life made me trip out on guilt early on. I had a security of my little personal zone, a luxury, which very few had, many were jobless. For someone who abhors luxury, this was very hard to process.

So I ran away.

Why?

Well because it's a complete waste of time and effort. Mental effort which has now been frustrated for some people who don't normally hold it together anyway. There was no point in going to online club meetings; meetings where you cannot give someone a lift back home afterwards; meetings where you cannot have a side conversation and meet for coffee afterwards (some exceptions exist). Meetings devoid of cookies, and meeting with no beer involved. Nobody seemed to care that this was a problem, which for me further eroded trust in the people meeting because everyone else was happy to forego one of the things I really felt was key to me. I have always felt I trusted the smart people I admire who built the communities and ran meetings. Lockdown undermined that trust. All the clever people had no answers. I quit a number of clubs, some clubs I quit frivolously, others more out of general overload. Generally nobody cares about the "person" in a digital club.

Overload

An Olympic athlete pulled out of one of her events this last week, she was not confident she could focus and complete the slightly dangerous techniques. Too much at once, in fact some clubs I abandoned were abandoned just because my bandwidth dried up. Not only do I not pay attention to postal paper mail anymore, I don't pay attention to spammers like YouTube who spam me with totally pointless content, making me feel even more isolated by the "actor" on a soap box with a fake smile that their "algorithm" forces into the foreground. Just let me be quiet, let me go back to basics, and let me do physical things, things that really do matter. This lockdown reset has prompted a lot of us to take up hobbies in cooking, crafting, gardening and more. It has even forced a lot of us to start cycling more, walking more, and make some better life choices. some of these good habits which I hope people decide to keep after this all blows over, and blow over it will. Lockdown has cut down air travel, which might be good for the re-calibration of our waste culture too.

I read this week about a few people recalling vivid dreams they have which are like the Truman Show, being in a fake world where everyone else is really a robot, and you are the only human left alive. A feeling of being continuously observed, but not in a move star kind of way observed. Guinea pig kind of observed. I used to have these thoughts once, and lockdown has triggered them again, but making me feel liked a trapped or jailed mouse. I often wonder if pets feel like they are jailed. I'm a cat lover myself, so sometimes I just wish I was a cat. Okay, forget that cat reincarnation idea, it's not that appealing unless you are a cat in a good home anyway.

Casualty

The casualties are many, and I'm not yet ready to take responsibility for ones I've created, sorry, just, sorry if this is you, find someone who is responsible to blame please.

Blame

As someone who struggles to follow even a basic math formula, I was never going to be the one who solves this blame thing. However my faith in smart people to make good choice dissolved in early 2019. A lack of honesty and even a desire to have prevented this are my foremost reasons for miss-trust of the system and of my betters. I can see how some anti-vaxers use this same line of argument against the establishment of medical professionals. It's however blindingly clear, just how weak willed politicians are, to address the real causes by minimising encroachment on wildlife and minimising climate change which is the leading cause of the encroachment problem. I'm sure that's not the only thing we would do if we could wind back time to November 2019, but now that it seems a lifetime away, it's too late. The fact that clever people give up too easily worries me. That weakness underlies a lot of anti-vax argument, which sadly is illogical.

Return

So, sadly I'll not be coming back soon. I'll come back when I'm allowed to sing and dance indoors without a mask, when I'm allowed to grab cookies from the same jar as everyone else, and without individual wrappers on foods. I'll be back when I can do physical things that make a difference, like buying you a beer, or giving you a lift. I'll be back when the people have dispensed with the bullshit and have stopped playing. Playing is fine, but just not when it's at someone else expense.

I know that nobody will ever read this, but that's fine, it's digital, so it's fake anyway.