Barry Frost

Barry Frost -

Week 197 - Elbow - 2025-06-02T14:03:59Z

• Another welcome Bank Holiday Monday. The sun was shining and so I took my youngest across the road to the park with his brother's bike to learn how to ride it. He did well, and almost got to the stage where I could let go, but he was tired by then, and we decided to try again another day.
• The rest of the week was half-term school holidays so L took the boys to her parents' in Wiltshire for a few days. Her brother was also visiting, meaning another chance for the cousins to play together and gallop around the house.
• Which also meant I had a quiet, empty house back here. Not quite a holiday for me - I was still working - but I took the opportunity to watch evening episodes of Andor and read Mickey 7 in peace.
• We hate looking for family holidays. We can never decide where to go, and even when we shortlist a hotel/destination we find reasons to talk ourselves out of it. We've been half-looking since last summer, so I'm mightily relieved/skint to be paying a deposit for a week in August on the "family side" of Ibiza.
• H is nine-years-old; I am quite a bit older. I need to remember this when playing football with him in the park. On Saturday, chasing after the ball, I slipped, broke my fall with my hand and hyperextended my elbow (twisted it back). It's now swollen, sore and I can't straighten my arm. This follows my sprained ankle in April. What a wally.
• Nurse L made a sling for my arm with a triangular bandage so that I could go to the annual youth football presentation day and see H collect his little trophy. I must have sheepishly explained what happened to local friends a dozen times, but at least I had a hand free to enjoy a pint of cider in the sunshine.

Week 196 - Glasses - 2025-05-26T08:57:22Z

• I've been enjoying a nostalgic look back through archives of the Warwick Boar – the student newspaper I worked on from 1997 while at university. I wrote a few music reviews and interviews, but my main job was production editor, responsible for design and layout using Quark XPress 3 and Photoshop on dusty old PCs. I'm still proud of some of the pages I designed, especially the music section which we usually spent more time on, listening to CDs in the crowded office with a few beers.
• I've accepted the inevitable: reading is easier on screens and print when I'm wearing glasses 😞. I'm not too vain to wear them - I quite like my pair's style - but it's annoying to have to keep them nearby. I now need to buy a few more pairs to keep around the house/office.
• L got a handyman to visit and seal and re-felt the shed roofs. Hopefully that's put an end to the leaks and rotting floors.
• I watched Arsenal Women's Champions League final on TV with my boys. Arsenal put in a brilliant performance to beat a strong-looking Barcelona 1-0. So many happy faces, and it was nice to celebrate the club winning a major trophy. The men finished second in the league again. Next year?
• Meanwhile, I won all my FPL mini-leagues: against old colleagues (back-to-back wins 🏆🏆), new colleagues, and my family. Very satisfying. Is my footballing knowledge supreme or was everyone lazy? Overall, Ludicrous Display finished in the top 71K.

Week 195 - Winners - 2025-05-19T11:32:39Z

• The last time I saw Rialto was in the nineties with Andy while we were students. We saw them again this week at Scala. Big tunes, still tight, although played with just the one drum kit these days. It was a bit quiet - the whir of the AC fans was audible - nevertheless it's nice to hear old favourites again.
• I'm trying to eat more protein for breakfast, starting with two scrambled eggs and half an avocado. I've felt more full and my energy levels seem higher mid-morning. The extra preparation and clearing up time is worth it so far.
• I've been coding/vibing again, this time on a live calendar feed to remind us to put the bins out. It would be better if the council exposed this themselves so I didn't need to scrape my data. It would also be better if they didn't keep changing their CMS each year. They're now on their third (or maybe fourth) iteration of a waste collection "portal" that now, for some reason, loads the data for each page via Ajax/XHR (or whatever we call it these days). Once I'd worked out how to source my data, I poked at Windsurf's AI agent to write the code to scrape it, make sense of the data and create an ICS.
• As I continue to noodle around with my website I've been experimenting with Datasette to create a queryable archive from my data stored around the internet. For example, I've imported my check-ins from Swarm and bookmarks on Pinboard. I currently host this data as posts on my main website itself, but I'm not sure it really belongs there.
• It was a busy weekend of activities. While mother and oldest son participated in a local Pretty Muddy 5K race, I took youngest son for cake and juice and then to Lego club in the library where the theme was monuments (C built a Colosseum).
• Then, on Sunday, H played for Codicote Lions U9s for the last time before he moves clubs next season. It was a local youth football tournament with a dozen teams - and his won! After an unbeaten group stage the Lions won both their semi-final and final on penalties. Shootouts are a brutal experience for children (and watching parents) but the euphoria of winning helped. He was so pleased to end his time with the Lions on a high. Well done, H!

Week 194 - Flowers - 2025-05-12T16:26:33Z

• Yet another welcome bank holiday Monday to start the week. Ignoring the boys' protests, we dragged them away from their devices out to Hitch Wood for a stomp around. The bluebells are out in force meaning that our children were forced to pose next to pretty flowers for photos. Will their torture never end?
• New gadget: I've bought a 5-in-1 Anker USB-C hub to plug into one of the ports in my Studio Display to provide Ethernet and USB-A ports. I had maxed out the display's miserly three ports and so this little hub works nicely to free up two.
• I've been kicking the tyres of 11ty and Astro as I ponder what to do with the ~10K posts on my website. A build time of two minutes each change would be too frustrating which is why I went down the dynamic route last time, however I want to use a git-based workflow for writing longer posts. More experimenting to do.
• Arsenal sadly exited the Champions League to PSG who were the more effective team over the semi-final tie. Expensive new signings are needed this summer.
• Much like the pros on Wednesday, I was knackered after a Saturday afternoon of football over the park with H and his friend and his friend's dad. Two hours of 2 vs 2 is a bit much for us old men.!
• We wrapped up the week with lunch to celebrate L's mum's birthday at The Greyhound pub near Tring. Our boys are susceptible to car sickness and despite taking travel tablets, just half an hour in to the journey poor C needed me to stop in a lay-by on the A41 so he could barf (thankfully outside my car). Apparently my driving was to blame. With his tummy empty he was ready to tuck into his lunch.
• We then stretched our legs around another wood - nearby Wendover Woods - which promised the reward of ice creams at the end.

No title - 2025-05-06T21:09:51Z

OpenAI buys Windsurf for $3B. Not bad for "just" a VSCode fork. As an early Windsurf paying customer, I'm curious but wary of what comes next.

Week 193 - Repair - 2025-05-04T21:01:51Z

• It's been shorts weather. Lovely.
• I decided to invest in our backup setup at home. Although our Macs and photos are backed up to a 2TB iCloud+ account, I wanted local backups with Time Machine. So I've set up a Synology DS223J NAS with two Seagate IronWolf 4TB drives in RAID 1. ChatGPT wanted me to go for a beefier Synology model, but this is perfectly adequate.
• We had our annual call with our financial advisor, seeing where we are financially for the future. Thankfully, despite the markets tanking recently, all looks fine. While in my head I'm barely an adult, it surprises me to see how we're ever closer to retirement.
• The flush buttons on the downstairs integrated toilet were suddenly ineffective. Fearing an expensive plumber call-out and wall damage I had a go, removing the faceplate and panel inside, then gently pushing down the float which had become stuck with limescale. For once my amateur DIY worked.
• I normally spend Saturday mornings watching my oldest son's football; this time it was his brother's turn, playing in a little tournament for his club's under-7s. The coaches charitably paired him with the four strongest boys but let's just say he didn't quite match them for skill - or effort! His team won, but he was more concerned about getting home to play Minecraft.
• Returning home from the football I wheeled out the barbecue for burgers and sausages in the sunshine. As is the way, we cooked and ate far too much, and after clearing up we had a well-deserved snooze on the sofa.
• I've been watching a fair amount of the snooker. As I write this I have one eye on the final. While I'd love Mark Williams to win it, Zhao Xintong is playing beautifully and deserves his (current) 11-6 lead.

Week 192 - Smell - 2025-04-27T20:11:54Z

• Poppy the cat had a couple of accidents this week. First, she wee'd on my pants left in a washing pile in our bedroom. The smell was too unpleasant (I promise, it was cat wee!) and I had to throw them away. She followed that up with vomiting in the doorway of H's bedroom. The stain has thankfully mostly gone after several rounds of wet-vacuuming. Poppy is now firmly banned from upstairs.
• I've started a new project at work which includes colleagues in Asia and the US. Unfortunately this means there is no time where our working days overlap. I joined an 11pm 😳 meeting with our CEO this week, but I'll need to stagger future calls or ruin my sleep.
• I had my first lunchtime walk since twisting my ankle. I'd missed getting outside and getting some exercise in the fresh air. After enjoying a few Easter eggs I need to get back to a healthier routine.
• My parents visited on Saturday for lunch and to watch H's football team win 5-3. This was his last league match of the season and also his last match for his team: he's been accepted at another nearby club in a higher division. It was down to his mum and me to deliver the awkward news to his coaches.
• Sunday was a wash the car and kick around a football in the sunshine kind of day. Apparently Liverpool secured the Premier League title? I wasn't watching.

Week 191 - Egg - 2025-04-22T11:07:03Z

• It was the second week of the Easter holidays for our boys, and thanks to Good Friday, it was also a shorter working week for me.
• H played in an under-9s football tournament in Hemel Hempstead. His team moved on from the tough league stage into the Silver Cup draw which they went on to win. He scored in the final and was a very happy boy, posing with the trophy.
• For the Easter weekend we stayed at my in-laws' house in Wiltshire. L's brother and his family were also visiting, so it was a rare opportunity for the cousins - all boys - to play together. They made full use of the garden and countryside to play cricket, football, build Lego, ride bikes and gallop around the house like a herd of elephants.
• L organised an unprecedented three Easter egg hunts for us all. First she hid plastic eggs around the garden for the children to find, then everyone had to find their boxed eggs, and then teams of three looked for their team's coloured eggs.
• In between Creme Eggs (my favourite) I've been enjoying some stunning first round matches of the World Championship snooker. It's perfect to watch gently and (so I'm told) have a snooze on the sofa.
• The extra bank holidays and our trip to France have meant I'm barely able to remember what it is I do in my job. The mental whiplash of being back to work is real.

Week 190 - France - 2025-04-15T11:27:30Z

• We came back on Monday from a week's holiday in France, which is why these weeknotes are a little late. Sorry about that.
• We stayed at a Center Parcs, this time Le Lac d'Ailette near Laon. This park was much bigger than their De Haan site we've visited the last couple of years, but it's just as well-suited to our two energetic sons. It was busier at the weekend but never overwhelming.
• Our cottage was by the lake, with a big deck facing the water. We watched swans, geese and many ducks splash around in the glorious sunshine. It was a beautiful location for a holiday and that's without the big water park and other facilities nearby. We all swam/slid every day and also used the climbing structure, mini-golf, indoor football and cycle hire.
• Correction: I didn't cycle; my ankle was (and is) sore from my footballing mishap last week. I should have spent more time resting it but I was determined not to miss out on the other activities.
• I managed to practise my French skills which, 28 years after my A-Level, are still just about passable in conversations about broken lighting and meals. I was pleased that locals didn't switch to English and humoured me. My family were even very mildly impressed.
• On our only day-trip away from the park we visited nearby Laon. It wasn't worth the effort. We drove to the top of the hill, walked around the cathedral, wandered the streets, found a playground and then drove back.
• I brought my Apple TV box on which I'd pre-installed NordVPN for watching region-locked TV when the boys were in bed. Actually there was one very big reason: Arsenal v Real Madrid on Tuesday. The coverage mostly worked - the connection to Amazon Prime Video kept timing out - but the result (3-0!) massively compensated for any frustrations.
• And it should be noted that it's effortless and cheap driving an EV on fairly long journeys (~300 miles) from the UK into France. We topped-up using Tesla Superchargers at Folkestone and Saint-Quentin while using the toilets and having a coffee. Easy.

Week 189 - Injury - 2025-04-06T19:49:12Z

• We had another leak from our bathroom into the server/fusebox cupboard below, caused again by the bath's shower wand dribbling into its housing and through the floor. Thankfully, unlike last time, no electronics were damaged. I'd like to disconnect the damn wand entirely but it looks like that would require ripping out the bath.
• Next door have started building their own garden room level with mine. So far their builders have been reasonably quiet while they laid the foundations. I'm just hoping there's no subsidence to my room caused by digging so close.
• I watched the Nintendo Switch 2 announcement. Of course I want one. There's not much fun in the world right now; thank goodness for Nintendo.
• While on a work Zoom call I had a missed call from my elderly neighbour. I assumed he wanted to talk about our hedge or the bins. And then the window cleaner arrived so I needed to go down the side to unlock the gate. It was then that I heard my neighbour call over the fence that he'd had a fall. It had only been ten minutes since his phone call, but I did feel guilty, lifting him back up onto his feet. Thankfully, just a small cut and no real harm done.
• And then it was my turn for an injury. Playing football in the sunny park with H, I twisted my ankle in a crater in the goalmouth. I heard a crunch and feared the worst but I was able to hobble home across the road. I've been following the RICE method: Resting, Icing it, wearing a Compression sock and Elevating it. The swelling has reduced but I'm still limping. Annoying.

Week 188 - Mother - 2025-03-31T08:43:33Z

• I had holiday to use up before the end of March so I took Friday off.
• L and I drove into town for some shopping before a disappointing Full English brunch. The thick-cut bacon was burnt, they used refried instead of baked beans, the poached eggs were watery, there was not enough toast but way too many garlic mushrooms. Of course I paid and thanked them.
• Much better was having a couple of pub-garden pints back in the village. We moved inside when the sun disappeared, but it still counts as our first outside drinks of spring.
• Everybody has new trainers. These are mine.
• We wrapped up watching some TV series: the end of Breeders, then Reacher, and then I remembered I'd not seen the last two episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I enjoyed the fond farewell with the flashbacks/guest appearances in the courtroom, and the heavy nod towards the last Seinfeld episode. Let me not be the first to say it was pretty, pretty good.
• The clocks went forward, losing L an hour of her Mother's Day lie-in. I made excellent bacon sandwiches. The boys gave her the presents they had made at school, and then the presents that I had bought for them to give to her. When H was back from a friend's birthday party we all went for a no-coats, sunny walk across the fields to Spokes for coffee and massive flapjacks.

Week 187 - Singing - 2025-03-24T12:28:50Z

• The interviews have been better after last week's fake-candidate fiasco, in that we have real people turning up.
• I treated myself to a Stream Deck for my desk. I don't stream, but I do like the convenience of having 15 programmable buttons at my fingertips when I'm on one of many, many Zoom calls. I'm still experimenting. Most handy are actions to toggle the Zoom microphone and camera and controls for my AC via Shortcuts.
• It was C's turn for a school assembly, the focus of which was his class singing catchy loops of Jambo Bwana accompanied by a dozen glockenspiels and clapping. Very cute, but I've had an ear-worm ever since.
• We've started researching local secondary schools for H. It's begun.
• I firmly thought I'd seen their last gig together in 2004, but I'm so happy to see that Gene are reforming this October for at least one night together.
• This weekend I've shared the house with a sick son and sick wife. C has been (physically) sick a couple of times, while his mother has a major cold. They've both had to cancel fun plans and activities and so are a bit miserable. There has been a lot of screen-time.
• To escape the Sunday funk I drove my healthy son to Smyths Toys. He spent his saved-up pocket money on a Lego Lamborghini and Kirby and the Forgotten Land. We also returned home with medicinal chocolate bars for the invalids.

No title - 2025-03-20T18:27:01Z

My favourite band, Gene, are reuniting for their first gig in 21 years 🎉 I was at their last one in... 2004. See you in Hammersmith 🤩

Week 186 - Fake - 2025-03-17T17:56:11Z

• I've started interviewing again at work this week. We're hiring software engineers to work remotely in the UK. However, it's been a bumpy start. One candidate was clearly using a GenAI tool to answer our questions, but more concerning was a fake candidate claiming to be at home in Stoke who I strongly suspected was joining the video interview from a cubicle farm in the Far East. Scammers gonna scam.
• I tried baking a rye loaf in the new bread-maker this week. It was very dense and didn't rise like other bread, but it did go nicely with some peanut butter. The day after I did my normal white loaf to satisfy younger tastes.
• We spent three evenings gripped/terrified by Adolescence on Netflix. The series follows a teenage boy who is accused of murdering a girl and who we discover is submerged in incel culture. The stunning acting and one-take cinematography are impressive, but it's the storyline that hits home as a father of two boys. It's bleak, but watch it.
• L had a well-deserved day out at a spa with friends on Sunday, so I had a quiet day with two slightly sickly sons. We played some original Super Mario Kart, watched football on TV and went for a short stomp around the village to buy treats from the shop.

Week 185 - Pancakes - 2025-03-10T17:09:56Z

• L was working every day this week so I walked the boys to school before returning to WFH. Plenty of extra steps 💪
• This also meant I took the boys in on World Book Day. JK Rowling's bank manager must (continue to) be a happy person: in the playground, by far the most popular costume choice for the boys and girls was characters from Harry Potter. C was the evil wizard boy, H went as The Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
• On Pancake Day, the boys ate pancakes at school and then L cooked more at home. My paltry 1½ pancakes were at least traditional, drowned in lemon juice and sugar as is proper; theirs were spread with Nutella.
• The boys came home asking what they should give up for Lent. I told them not be daft. I understand the lesson and agree that religion should be taught, but there's no need to concern impressionable young minds.
• While L was out one evening I found 24 Hour Party People on my watchlist. The film charts Tony Wilson's story through Joy Division and Happy Mondays, two bands whose music I like very much. But it was sadly all a bit flat, even with Steve Coogan starring.
• I bought tickets for Andy and I to see The Beta Band in October, one of four gigs I've got upcoming this year from bands that split up years ago and presumably now have tax bills to pay.
• There were weekend draws in the unseasonal sunshine for both the Lions U9s and Arsenal. After, H and I took his football across the road to the park where his nippy, technical skills were matched by my speed (longer legs) and strength (bulk).
• While the sun shone I gave my dirty, salty car its first hand-wash and vacuum of the year. Satisfying and physically challenging work. It now looks new again and my back hurts.

Week 184 - Cat - 2025-03-02T20:58:43Z

• Poppy, our elderly tabby cat, has been poorly this week. She seemed her usual self during the day but we found morning puddles of sick by her bed in our utility room. There were red spots in one so I feared the worst, but the vet wasn't alarmed when I took her in for a check-up. She recommended less fibrous food to settle Poppy's stomach and so far it seems to have done the trick.
• The conversation about death with the boys will happen eventually but I'm glad it's not this week.
• Meanwhile, the Ofsted school inspectors arrived this week, meaning L was called in for supply work every day. The pressure on teachers is intense and seems unfair, even if they knew it was coming eventually. Whatever the outcome, the boys love their school and we're happy to send them there.
• The clouds parted and the sun shone this week. You can sense that spring is on its way. Being able to walk around in the sunshine without a big coat and gloves makes all the difference to my mood. And I had my first Creme Egg and hot cross bun of the year 😋
• It was a rare home game for H's under-nines this Saturday. Even better, it was an 11:15am kick-off which meant for once I wasn't up at an ungodly hour driving him to his match. The Lions won 3-2 and he scored a tidy goal he made for himself.
• I then spent a surprisingly satisfying afternoon with L clearing out cupboards and rearranging the utility room to make space for a dryer and replacement washing machine. The delivery men from AO took away our kaput washer and connected up the new Bosches which are now quietly humming away.

Week 183 - Loud - 2025-02-23T21:10:51Z

• It's been half-term holidays for the boys. It's been nice having them around while I've been working from home the end of the garden.
• I went into London on Thursday to see Mogwai at Brixton Academy with Andy. I'd seen them twice before so came well-prepared with earplugs. It was loud. My Apple Watch was furious throughout the gig at their 95dB wall of sound that it told me was causing permanent hearing loss. My ears were protected but the music was sadly a bit too muffled.
• They finished later than expected after a three-song encore so I had to hotfoot it across town to catch the last train home. Swapping lines from a delayed Victoria train to the Piccadilly line at Green Park was smart and I made it with minutes to spare. Sometimes I miss living a bit closer.
• Two bits of AI-assisted coding this week using Windsurf and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. First I wanted to export my Last.fm gigs into a Yaml file. After the agent incorrectly used a deprecated API method it switched to scraping the data. A bit of coaxing was needed to separate headliners from support bands, but I was happy with the results after about 10 minutes of prompting. Next I asked it to help me add dark mode to Micropublish. This took a bit longer. Once I had pointed out the areas it had missed (dialogs, panels and the tokenfield), I had a passable dark theme in a fraction of the time it would have taken me.
• My parents visited for lunch on Sunday. They came with presents for the birthday two (see last week), we ate chicken pie and talked about new laptops (them) and washing machines (us).
• Dad helped me attach a mud flap to the driver's side of my car. The original one had detached itself reasonably cleanly after a misjudged turn over a kerb, but the replacement still required expert Dad Skills to apply the right level of force to pop in its securing pins. Success.

Week 182 - Celebrate - 2025-02-17T17:37:54Z

• So much birthday-celebrating this week.
• First, C had his early birthday party at DJ's Jungle, starting with soft play, then party food, Happy Birthdays, and finally, laser tag in the dark on the soft play equipment. The last 15 minutes the parents were also given laser guns for an (outnumbered) parents vs kids match. The grown-ups lost. The most fun I've had at a children's party.
• On Valentine's Day we joined Andy and Emma at The Lamb & Flag for drinks on the way to Wyndham's Theatre for Inside No.9 Stage/Fright. Reece and Steve were excellent, as was guest star Phil Daniels who was kidnapped by mistake. There were a few moments that made you jump along with clever writing and comedy. It was so good. I'm very pleased to have booked our tickets a while back.
• Thought: I must have seen more Phil Daniels live cameos than any other celebrity. I've seen him several times with Blur doing his Parklife bit and then this week in the first half of the play. He seems to be enjoying life. Sitting in our row in the audience for the second half he was cackling away.
• The day after was C's birthday so L quickly put up decorations and arranged his presents when we got back. He's still obsessed with Harry Potter and Lego which made present-buying straightforward. He went to bed very happy and exhausted after a trip to the cinema and McDonalds.
• Thanks to L's parents staying another night to babysit we went out to celebrate her own birthday early. We ate dinner at a busy Cowshed in nearby Tewinbury.
• I got her jumpers, books, framed photos of the boys and a big print to go on our bedroom wall. Art is so subjective so I asked her for a few choices from a selection so it was a semi-surprise. I even hung it on the wall.
• We finished things off with a Sunday roast at The Lytton Arms and then a family walk I'd found around Old Knebworth. She then spent a happy evening on her phone with a glass of Prosecco pretending to watch TV.

Week 181 - Eggs - 2025-02-09T20:31:14Z

• I caught the early train into London on Wednesday for a breakfast meet-up. Joel had kindly invited a group of people he's coached to Dishoom in King's Cross for networking and spicy eggs. It's reassuring to talk to peers, swap war stories and remember everyone has similar challenges in their jobs.
• The early start wasn't actually too bad: I caught one of the recently-rescheduled non-stop trains from Welwyn North at 8am and was at the restaurant just half an hour later. London's not so far away when the fast trains run.
• H's Lions narrowly won their under-9s football match 1-0 against St Albans with a very late winner. I may have had a little jump in the air in celebration.
• Saturday brought a rarity: both boys were at play dates at the same time which meant pub time! We had two lovely hours in The Goat before picking up a Thai takeaway on the way home to watch Children of Men.
• I did some Sunday hacking, adding support to Micropublish for IndieAuth Server Metadata. I just about remembered enough Ruby to write the code and tests. It felt good to build again.

No title - 2025-02-09T14:42:03Z

I've released a new minor version of #micropublish that supports the new2022 IndieAuth spec change to support Server Metadata for endpoint discovery as an alternative to the existing (legacy) headers/body methods.