Barry Frost

Barry Frost -

Week 142 - Rosé - 2024-05-12T19:50:05Z

• Lots of furniture deliveries this week. We now have a second sofa (dark green, big, a bit upright), an armchair (darker red than we thought), a side table (perfect) and two lamps (yet to be set up). The living room is almost complete but we're experiencing a little post-purchase dissonance. I've been sitting on my old sofa since 2008 so I guess it'll take time to adjust.
• So much packaging has been accumulated: mostly cardboard which is easy to recycle but also packing foam which is a pain to dispose of.
• New iPads were unveiled this week. Pass. My 2017 iPad Pro is fine for the iPadding I do: YouTube, RSS feeds and a few magazines on Apple News+.
• The temperature soared to a summery 23C at the weekend. We ate dinner outside on Saturday and then L and I shared a bottle of rosé in the garden when the boys were in bed. Very pleasant.
• On Sunday the boys remembered they had a packet of 100 water balloons so we took them into the garden for a water fight. The balloons were soon gone. I ended the driest. When the boys then reached for their super soakers I wisely headed inside.
• Arsenal won their penultimate league match 1-0 away at Manchester United. It felt a bit anti-climactic. In any other season this result would have been lustily celebrated but it will all be for naught if Manchester City win their final two matches. On Tuesday I will wince and cheer on Spurs to do Arsenal an unlikely but possible favour.
• I'm off to Amsterdam tomorrow for a short work trip.

Week 141 - Voted - 2024-05-06T11:27:30Z

• As part of my new role I've got some work travel coming up later this month. First, a few days in Amsterdam for a customer visit, then to San Diego to meet up with West Coast US colleagues at our HQ. I've had a couple of 8pm meetings this week; it's much easier to find sensible, mutual meeting times when you're in the main office.
• The weather flits between encouraging sunshine and depressing drizzle. I often need a waterproof or umbrella for the steps between the house and my garden office so I've bought myself a smart freestanding coat stand to hang up my jacket.
• I voted in the local council and police commissioner elections, my first requiring a photo ID. We had a reasonable turnout but, in stark contrast to the rest of the country who sent a clear message to the inept government, both seats went to the Tories. It's that kind of area.
• We drove over to Oxfordshire for Sunday lunch with Tim, Debbie and their son. The boys all played well together and ate their roast chicken. Tim cooks a mean roast, with the addition of beetroot which I will have to try. We brought cakes: a lemon-and-lime drizzle by me and a wheat-free, dairy-free chocolate cake by L. Both were enjoyed although I was particularly proud of my sponge.

Week 140 - Chairs - 2024-04-28T20:51:14Z

• We now have six new colourful kitchen chairs: in yellow, green, light green, grey, black and white.
• My wife, queen of Facebook Marketplace, quickly disposed of our old unwanted chairs, picked up by a couple who arrived in a taxi. She remembered to first upend the boys' chairs to shake out the grated cheese and bits of spaghetti caught in the gaps. Yuck.
• We ordered a Chinese on Saturday - far, far too much food as always - and the phone call reminded me of the "and then?" scene from "Dude, Where's My Car?". I made the mistake of playing the clip to the boys who loved it and now respond to any question with "...and then?" 🤦
• The Arsenal are back on form, thumping Chelsea 5-0 on Tuesday and then holding on for a 3-2 away to Spurs in the derby today. H couldn't handle the tension, lying on the floor behind the sofa, groaning. Both boys were wearing their Arsenal kits "for luck".
• L and I have our 10th wedding anniversary coming up this summer so we've just booked a little trip to Nice. It'll just be the two of us: the boys will be staying with their grandparents. Nice.

Week 139 - Home - 2024-04-21T20:26:00Z

• The boys (and their mum) are back at school so the house is quiet again during the week. Even though I work from an office at the end of our garden I like popping in to the house to get a coffee and see them all.
• I spent lots of time with youngest son, C, this week. He ably assisted me in assembling new surround speaker stands, I popped in to school to watch his assembly (space and flying themed), and then we spent Saturday morning together at his first football tournament.
• He had his first proper matches, playing against children with clearly much more experience from bigger towns. It was brutal. 0-26 was the aggregate score across the four matches. I kept his spirits up with a burger and bribes of snacks but after the final match he was in tears. Back home he was much happier, spending a quiet afternoon watching Bluey on his iPad.
• The home furnishing changes continue: we swapped the sofa from my office with the armchair in our kitchen to give us more seating. And after a Sunday trip to John Lewis to try out kitchen/dining chairs we ordered six new chairs, arriving next week. Meanwhile the boys' toys have been relocated from the living room to their bedrooms. Much better.

Week 138 - Typewriter - 2024-04-14T20:03:27Z

• Back from holiday I officially started a new role at work leading Enterprise Engineering. I spent my first week joining calls, meeting new colleagues and planning.
• The boys are in their second week of Easter holidays. They had a day at football camp / Willy Wonka workshop respectively and then L took them to her parents' in Wiltshire for a couple of days. They discovered Granny's old typewriter and were absorbed typing letters, poems and quizzes. Who needs iPads?
• The first of our two new sofas was delivered. It's dark blue, very comfy and thankfully fits well in our living room.
• My bi-annual lunch with ex-colleagues has grown to five of us. I booked Friday off and travelled in to London. As always we ate at Smith's and then drank far too much red wine.
• The sun came out at the weekend. The boys and I played cricket in the garden - I couldn't stop myself hitting a ball over the fence - and then they teamed up to take on their Daddy at football and rugby. I ended with muddy knees and needed a shower.
• Liverpool lost but so did Arsenal. Frustrating.

No title - 2024-04-13T11:46:11Z

I've been at Altium almost a year leading our R&D teams in Cambridge and I'm now starting a new role. I'll be working with our enterprise sales teams, R&D and customers as VP Enterprise Engineering.

It's a new concept for me and I've got much to learn but I'm feeling positive about using my experience in delivery and planning and trying something new.

No title - 2024-04-09T21:47:45Z

Val Town raises seed round.

I love the idea behind Val Town: it hosts serverless functions for simple APIs or scheduled tasks. I use it to scrape my local council’s waste collection page and return an ICS file that I can subscribe to from my calendar app so that I know which colour bin is being collected on which day.

I need to think up other little uses for it.

Week 137 - Cycling - 2024-04-08T17:31:45Z

• This week we revisited Center Parcs in Belgium for an Easter holiday. De Haan ticks the boxes for our family: lots of walkable facilities for two energetic boys in a stress-free package that's easy to reach from the UK.
• We enjoyed bowling, mini-golf, lots of swimming/sliding, the onsite farm and the climbing wall. But one of the highlights (for me) is the huge soft play area in which there is a bar to buy and drink strong Belgian beers while remaining responsible for your children. We made full use of this. I also enjoyed the sauna in our lodge, escaping for relaxing half-hours yet still within ear-shot of the TV.
• I paid for a month's NordVPN access, mainly for us to watch football through our Apple TV box. We watched Arsenal's wins against Luton and Brighton on Sky and TNT Sports without any issues on the lodge's wifi. Also, we're top of the league!
• The park is a short walk from a big sandy beach on the Belgian coast. It was pretty empty and we could enjoy a kick-about, notable for Daddy's supremacy and a reverse nutmeg of H.
• We drove to nearby Blankenberge where the boys spent a half-hour on the go-karts before we walked along the promenade eating churros.
• Belgium loves cycling and has the infrastructure to prove it. We hired four bikes and cycled out of the park along the safely-enclosed bike lanes. I hadn't been on a bike for years and told myself I needed to do it more. As a family we were much more successful when we'd swapped C to a cargo bike so he could be carried by his mother without tears.
• We're now home via smooth Belgian and French roads and bumpy English tarmac. While the rest of the family have their second week of holidays, I'm back to work.

Week 136 - Easter - 2024-03-31T20:36:09Z

• I'm in the middle of a lovely long Easter weekend. After a busy four-day work week including two office visits, an All-Hands that I ran and many calls, it was very nice to set my Slack status to away.
• My parents visited for lunch on Friday. L doesn't like lamb so I swapped the traditional roast for chicken. The boys are now at an age where they will sit at the dinner table throughout and eat with us all without (much) grizzling. I then had a walk around the village with my mum before apple pie and custard. A big lunch.
• Because it's Easter there are inevitably furniture shop sales so we resumed our sofa shopping. With some deep discounts on offer at Furniture Village and after much sitting down we ordered a dark blue three-seater and a teal four-seater. The boys are growing fast so two big sofas seemed sensible.
• Arsenal raised our stress levels in their goalless draw with Man City on Sunday but the title bid is very much still on. Still such a long way to go.
• I have an Easter egg!

Week 135 - Science - 2024-03-25T20:58:45Z

• I got out of the house a bit this week.
• First I saw Frankie Boyle's Lap of Shame at the Leicester Square Theatre with Andy. I enjoyed Frankie's excellent dark humour about the state of society, the country and the world, but especially his unique descriptions of our terrible politicians. He's not short of material right now.
• I then had food and drinks in Welwyn with the "Other Halves": the husbands of my wife's village friends. A nice bunch of middle-aged men all with children at the same school, and yet we somehow managed to avoid talk of our wives and children.
• At the weekend I drove our family down to Bracknell Forest to meet up with Andy's family from Brighton and Tim and son from Oxfordshire. It was reasonably equidistant. We had tickets to the Look Out Centre, a science-based discovery centre to stretch our inquisitive children's minds, plus a big playground to tire out their legs.
• We watched Poor Things which I loved and L didn't. The new TV made it even better.
• We had a call with our financial advisor to talk money and old age. Retirement somehow seems both a long way off and also quite soon.

Week 134 - Yawn - 2024-03-17T19:58:45Z

• After several evenings spent reading/watching TV reviews, I've pushed the button on a Samsung S90C, plus a half-price surround sound package. Our last set needed two repairs under warranty so I decided to buy from Richer Sounds for their 6-year guarantee. The new telly arrives sometime next week and I'm already planning the HDR10+ and Dolby Atmos content with which to put it through its paces.
• My garden office has started to sink at one corner and there's now a sense of the floor not being level when I walk around inside. The builder who visited this week frowned and took away lots of measurements. I'm preparing myself for expensive work.
• Arsenal squeaked through on penalties to the Champions League quarter-finals and are still top of the Premier League going into the international break. It could all change of course, but it's lots of fun.
• Saturday night's sleep was very disturbed. We had a vomiting child to look after in the early hours and, separately, I've picked up a cold. Our plan to do more sofa-trying in the morning was quickly cancelled in favour of a quiet day at home. I'm very tired.
• Friends of ours are having a baby so we've donated our unneeded cot. Both our children slept in it when they were infants so it was a little sad to bring it down from the loft and wave it goodbye. Looking at our two big growing boys it's clear that the baby stage in our lives is over 🥺

Week 133 - SIM - 2024-03-10T19:37:59Z

• The week started with an alarming text message from O2 saying that my SIM is on its way and I should confirm a SIM swap. I'm not a customer of O2, nor do I wish to swap my SIM, so this was clearly a scam. A phone call to my actual operator established that no port or swap was in progress. Phew. Three calls to O2 to make sure, however, were inconclusive because "the system is down". Unnecessary stress but I think I'm safe.
• I set an alarm for a 1am work group meeting mid-week. It was worthwhile to show my (Zoom) face but it was pretty jarring to my sleep patterns, so I'm reassured that it's a one-off.
• It turns out our blue-tinted telly is borked. John Lewis engineers can't repair it so offered us £450 in credit. Not bad for a four-year-old box. But now the temptation is to spend much more than that on something fancier. Do we need OLED and Dolby Vision? Do we need a Dolby Atmos soundbar? I've been poring over reviews and convincing myself that the answer to these questions is no but also yes.
• For Mother's Day, the boys (me) bought their mummy a box of nice cupcakes, a rose plant and a mug with their grinning faces on it. I drove us all to Ikea in Wembley to look at sofas and bric-a-brac (her choice) and eat meatballs (my choice) while our bored children grizzled their way around the store.
• And Arsenal are top of the league again! Could it be our year? 🤞

Week 132 - TV - 2024-03-03T20:01:48Z

• Repairmen have taken away our increasingly blue TV. I'm glad we bought it through John Lewis: it's four years through its five-year warranty and they arranged a pick-up without any fuss. While it's being fixed we're left with a big, sad space on the wall that I keep looking at.
• Luckily we have a smaller TV in the familykids' room. When the boys are in bed we first have to clear a space on their sofa before settling down. We've been watching Noel Fielding's Completely Made-up Adventures of Dick Turpin. It's very silly and a welcome change from the gritty murder series we keep watching.
• It's rained all week. The boys had Christmas money burning a hole in their pockets and so asked to visit Smyths Toys to spend their pounds on something they could enjoy inside. C was very happy with his Harry Potter Lego castle. H chose football cards and Mario Maker 2 for the Switch. He's been building me some truly evil Mario levels and then being annoyed when I find a loophole and complete them - it still counts.
• We've been sofa shopping as part of a living room revamp. I do not enjoy this activity. I've sat on many, many sofas this weekend and each seems to have a flaw. Too high, too low, too squidgy, too old-fashioned, too deep, etc. And all are too expensive. We also have colour swatches. This is now my life.

Week 131 - Towers - 2024-02-25T21:17:18Z

• It was the children's half-term holidays this week. I decided to take Monday off work so that we could all travel in to London together for some sightseeing.
• C's current obsession is monuments and Big Ben (or more correctly the Elizabeth Tower) is a favourite. We stepped out of Westminster station and there it was, looming over him across the street. He was a very happy boy.
• Next was Tower Bridge. We walked down Embankment for a while and finished the journey on the tube. We climbed up the stairs, listened to the history talk and walked across and down to the engine rooms. Less impressive for the boys from the inside but I enjoyed it.
• While in town I also met up with Kate, an ex-colleague from my Gumtree days and now a VC at a fund in London. We drank goji tea while we chatted about startups, learning to network and career journeys. It was fun to catch up.
• We're really enjoying the Mr and Mrs Smith series on Amazon.
• This weekend we went on a long walk, the boys willingly helped me scrape moss from the garden paving and then I put on my football boots for a kick-around in the park with H. He tired out his old dad, claiming three (dubious) nutmegs.

Week 130 - Pancakes - 2024-02-18T20:19:35Z

• This week each year is always busy in our family: we have two birthdays, Valentine's Day and (this year) Pancake Day to contend with.
• First up was youngest son C's birthday party at Gravity, a big warehouse full of trampolines, bouncy castles and soft play equipment. It's a well-run operation. After the bouncing the tired children were seated and supplied with pizzas, hot dogs and ice creams.
• L's parents arrived in the latter half of the week to stay for a few nights. We went for a family dinner at a nearby Greek restaurant because of, "the best humous in the world," according to birthday-boy C. And then they babysat on L's birthday so that we could go for dinner on our own.
• The boys scoffed their pancakes. I didn't have any, sadly, but I made a pretty decent lemon drizzle cake (note to self: don't start baking at 9pm) for L and selected some well-received presents for her birthday.
• Our boys have discovered Gladiators on Saturday night TV. Apart from football this is about the only "live" TV they watch. Of course they want to recreate the events against me. I am proudly undefeated in the living room Gauntlet run.
• We've finished The Bear. One of the very best programmes we've seen. Richie's character arc was beautifully done.
• The colour temperature on our living room TV is getting bluer. I've tried to counteract the coldness by shifting the control all the way to the warm end of the spectrum, but it's still disappointingly blue. I need to try a factory reset.
• By this weekend we were all very tired. After L's parents departed we had a very quiet Saturday and only left the house on Sunday for a slow walk in the sunshine.
• The snowdrops and daffodils are coming out. Spring is just around the corner.

No title - 2024-02-15T16:06:14Z

Big work news: Altium has accepted a $5.9bn offer from Renesas https://finance.yahoo.com/news/japan-renesas-buy-software-firm-233644945.html

Week 129 - Indian - 2024-02-11T21:13:24Z

• My team at work are mostly based near our office in Cambridge, but we also have a few people dotted around the UK and several east and west coast Americans. To kick off the new year we assembled everyone together in one place for workshops and face-to-face time.
• Their visit was also an excellent excuse for a work dinner. By popular request I booked us in at Navadhanya, a smart Indian restaurant in the centre of Cambridge. Apart from the cardamom cake it was all very tasty and a hit with our visitors. Recommended.
• We drove into leafy west London on Saturday evening for L's aunt's 80th birthday party, joining many of her cousins and extended family. I'm not particularly fond of noisy parties, but her relatives are all friendly and talkative. I hadn't seen most since our wedding almost 10 years ago, but remarkably I remembered names and enjoyed myself.
• Football was good this week. H's team won 7-5 (he scored two) and then Arsenal smashed West Ham 6-0 away.
• I know we're late to discovering it, but we're working our way through The Bear on Disney+. So so good.

No title - 2024-02-05T21:05:44Z

"Threads is a gripping, miserable experience". @verge@mastodon.social on Threads (not that one), the post-apocalyptic 1984 British film, still the most harrowing thing I've watched. I own it on DVD. I must watch it again.

Week 128 - Sofa - 2024-02-04T20:43:30Z

• We've booked a holiday at Easter. We're returning to the nice Center Parcs in Belgium we stayed in a year ago. Like last time I insisted we hire a lodge with a sauna so I can pretend to be Scandinavian.
• Dry January is over. I hadn't missed the booze that much, but I also hadn't really noticed a sudden jump in my health that some experience. Maybe I'm just fine with the odd beer or glass of wine.
• A nice surprise: HMRC owe me money for overpayment of tax. Unsurprisingly, it's far slower and more onerous to get money out of them than if it was the other way around. Still, nice to have money coming back.
• L caught me looking at cars online so she swiftly diverted me to planning a refurbishment of our living room. I fired up Excalidraw to sketch a new layout with new built-in cabinets. This could be expensive. It looks like I'll be buying a sofa, not a Tesla.
• H's under-8s football team beat St Albans 7-5, including a double hat-trick from one of his teammates. That's four wins in a row. I realised I've now watched his team more times than I've been to watch Arsenal. Somehow I don't think it would be appropriate if I turned up in a replica shirt.

Week 127 - Comedy - 2024-01-28T21:00:14Z

• I met up with Andy on Monday in London to see some live comedy: Richard Herring's RHLSTP recording with Bob Mortimer and Urooj Ashfaq. Bob kept apologising for being a late replacement for Bill Bailey, but the audience thoroughly loved his rambling hour. He's a national treasure. The theatre thinned out a bit for Urooj in the second half, but I also really enjoyed her section.
• I must do more comedy nights. London's not too far away when the trains are actually running.
• The gastroenterologist was happy with my CT scan and blood test results, and so the gluten-free, low-FODMAP diet is over. Just as I'd stocked up on £3-a-loaf fake bread! It's reassuring to know the organs in my abdomen are all fine and that there's nothing sinister at work.
• Instead I now have a safe-sounding drug to take nightly. It can help with sleep as a positive side effect, so I've been sleeping well this week and without stomach cramps. Bonus.
• I've begun meeting with an engineering leadership coach over Zoom. I've wanted to work with one for a very long time, so I'm delighted to have started a programme with the excellent Joel Chippindale. He's already helping me to explore themes and identify areas to improve. So far so good.
• For the very first time I'm due a tax rebate from my Self Assessment. It's because of overpayment when I started my new job, but I'm not complaining.