scott

Oi, Why Didn’t Any Tell Me About Gavin and Stacey Until Now?

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On Christmas day M made a fantastic lunch just for the four of us. For dinner we went over to a friend down the road. They had a bunch of extended family over and had invited us for a buffet dinner. By around 7:30 the party was wrapping up. Our friends mum and along with her sisters family was heading home. They wanted to be home in time to see the Gavin and Stacey Christmas special. Up until hearing about this Christmas special I have never heard of this show before. We were told we should watch it.

M and I went home and put the kids to bed. We then proceeded to start watching the first season. By the evening of New Year’s Day we had finished the entire series including the most recent Christmas special. Since I am writting about it you must gather I really liked it. And I did.  It is now one of the top british shows I have seenn.  It is probibly one of the best shows i have seen in several years.

After watching the entire series and really liking it I wanted to know is how all of my local friends have utterly failed me. How is it that no one pointed out this show even existed until this week? It was really funny. I consider this one of the largest pop culture failures in recent history.

Now I have to wonder what else I might still be missing?

My Great Social Media Purge of 2019 (Part 1)

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In recent months i have been thinking (again) about my digital data in relation to my privacy. I have been thinking about what my objective is regarding keeping my digital data safe. From who, and why? This is topical because more and more details have been coming out about Facebook and other social media’s use and collection of data.

I have been pondering what my own personal next actions on my social media exposure was. Then I watched the Netflix Documentary The Great Hack. That movie reinforced to me that I am not able to justify keeping my some social media accounts. And the way I use others needs to change. First thing in my mind was do I keep or cancel Facebook. Even after scrubbing data off the account regularly there are just some things you cannot get rid of. I have been diligent not to post almost anything that is not already public. I just haven’t been 100% great at it all the time. The question that kept bothering me is what will I / can I do about it. That brought me to question what I was worried about? From there I started asking myself what my threat model.

I had to think for a while to figure out what is my threat model for data collected by social media companies. At first I just feel it is a bit creepy that any one company can have that much information on me. That is not a threat model. It just got me to further realise in this day and age there will be data about my life leaked to companies. What I do not want is one or a few companies having a huge collection of my life. That morphed my objective to see how can i minimise my data leakage so to speak. At the same time still getting value out of some of the services i use. That for me is the key. What am I really getting value out of? That is subjective to everyone. For me it came down to what is my social media use case? If I am going to keep hugging Twitter, Facebook, and even LinkedIn I should be clear to myself what my use case is of each of those services. Only then can I weigh the risks of what each platform collects on me. After that I can decide what I want to do about it. I use each platform and others for different reasons so each one has its own use case.

I got analyitcial and wrote up my own assesment of my use for each. As I wrote them out I realized this is more than one post. I will publish each as a post with their own summary of what i am going to do with the service. At present there are about 6 parts (this is part 1). First up on my list is Twitter.

This post is titled My Great Social Media Purge of 2019 (Part 1). I wrote it in the Fall of 2019. It is still very relevant however I only now am getting around to posting it.

The Story of The Comic Strip That Defined The Last Decade

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One day over the holiday break we took the girls to a Planetarium show and the Cutty Sark in Grenwitch. They always enjoy the Royal Museums Greenwich. We only buy a few memberships each year.  This is one of them.  It by far pays for itself more than any other. I think we got triple our moneys worth if we were to have paid full price each of the times we went to the Maritime Museum, planetarium show or Cutty Sark.

Since we went during a school break there was an arts and craft activity on at Cutty Sark. M and I grabbed some coffee while we assumed the girls would be working on a project. When I walked over to the activity area with the coffee M was the only person working on a project.

I am not sure what the original project however they had paper with three comic strip boxes. In them she drew a comic of her and I meeting, getting married, and as we were today with the girls. She is very creative and artistic unlike myself. I thought the comic strip was so awesome. It is now the banner on this site.

Reflecting On New Years Eve

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The end of the year/decade always gets you thinking back. I know everyone is doing it. It’s hard not to. So much has changed in my life from 10 years ago. I met M. We got married. Had kids. Moved to another country. I don’t think in my wildest dreams I would have been able to predict correctly I would be where I am right now 10 years ago.

For new years eve we were having another family over our house for a mini party. It was just the four adults and four children total. I had to run over to Sainsbury’s for some last-minute things I forgot to order when we put in our Waitrose order earlier in the week. As I was walking around Sainsbury’s I was thinking how I have never seen it so busy. That confuse me since I remembered when we just moved in I had to run to Sainsbury’s on New Year’s Day and it wasn’t that busy. Then I realised I was comparing New Year’s Eve to New Year’s Day.

New Year’s Eve two years ago we barely got the heat fixed in our house. Some of the furniture we ordered from Ikea had arrived and M was putting it together. We slept air mattresses. M worked till 2 or 3 AM in the morning New Year’s Day trying to get the girls bunkbed built.

Reflecting on how different life is now than it was when we first arrived confirms previous thoughts I’ve had about how adjusted we have become to living here.

The most profound takeaway I have from this experience for future Scott is don’t go to Sainsbury’s on New Year’s Eve. Going on year’s day is probably okay.

Two Years and Counting

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It took me until around 7:30 PM to realise that today was our two year anniversary of being in England. We were out one of our neighbours for drinks and appetisers for the holiday. Somehow in the conversation the topic came up on how long we have been living here. I had to think about it for a few seconds before I realised it was almost down to the hour two years.

I thought about the anniversary coming up quickly earlier in the week however today it slipped my mind with all the people doing on our holiday.

In some ways it feels like no time is pastorale. In other ways our world is entirely different than it was two years ago. What hope we love the next two years here as much as we did the last two…

NOTE: I forgot to post this on the 29th so I am posting it in early Jan with a retroactive date stamp.)

The Last remnant of My Google Presence is Finally Swept Away

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As of 9-September 2019 I have deleted my last Google account. I have not actively used Google services other than ocasuonally an android phone here or there in years. Up until now I kept my original Gmail account in case I need it. That was mainly for nostalgia reasons. I barely ever log into it. I haven’t used it actively in over a decade. After my abrupt stopping use of my Motorola G7 (see my post on that) I finally decided to take the final step in purge my entire Google presence.

Since I have deleted other accounts before the entire process was pretty easy to back up and delete everything. I have absolutely no regrets. More importantly its not even a nuisance (so far) that i don’t have an account. Every so often i want to save a YouTube video for referencing later. Pocket or Trello is great for capturing that stuff so my designer to have functionality google offers is fleeting.

Now all I need to do is nudge M a little bit to finish moving off of her Gmail account. I’m proud that on her own she asked me to set up a new domain name and email address for her somewhere else. We’ve been down this road before so we’ll see if she finishes migrating.

Jacket Firmware Upgrade

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I never thought I would talk about the fact that today I updated the firmware on my jacket. Yes you read that correctly I said my jacket had a firmware upgrade. That statement and the specific jacket in particular provides my wife endless amusement in making fun of me for having it.

Years ago I found Ministry of Supply as a kickstarter for some socks. After supporting them I started looking into the company. I noticed they had dress shirts and trowsers as well as socks. The history behind the company sounded interesting and what they offered seemed perfect for me. I bought a shirt and have been buying their stuff ever since.

In 2018 when they announced a kickstarter for a smart jacket I was intrigued. The discount on backing the project was pretty good as well. I ended up supporting the project. I got the jacket last winter. I really like it. I haven’t needed it this season yet until today. Since the girls were at a birthday party I had some time so I finally followed their instructions to update the firmware on the jacket.

What makes this jacket “smart” is it has a heating element throughout the jacket. It pairs with your phone and adjusts the temperature of the jacket depending on your temperature and activity. Initially the smart part of the jacket did not really work. It would simply heat you based on manual adjusting the app. That in and of itself is pretty cool and worked on cold commute days. This firmware upgrade should fix some connectivity problems and allow for true automatic “smart” heating.

An auto adjusting heated jacket is not really a necessity. It is pretty cool. The jacket itself is actually pretty nice. I would like to even get one without the heating stuff in it so I can travel with it. Overall a great buy for me. The firmware upgrade even went off without a hitch. Even if it was probably more complex than most people would have wanted to deal with.

The W Sisters And The Story of The Coaster Hostages

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There has been a constant hostage situation unfolding in our house since we moved in. It has involving one or more of our bar coasters. The girls would steal them and hoard them. Then one would get free or be found. Only for us to have another go missing. I am not really sure where they would go all the time. We had limited evidence to conflict any single child. We know they would take them, and then they would turn up. Problem was all of them would never turn up at the same time.

About a week or so ago i thought like they were all finally turning up and then one would be missing. Today I was cleaning out under the couch and found one. When putting them all together I realised that we finally had the complete aet.

The band was finally back together. Just in time. We have house guests coming next week. I think I need to put police protection on these to make sure they stay together for the next week.

The Great No Wallet Experiment

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One of the minor advantages to living in England versus the US is the ubiquity of tap to pay. Pretty much anywhere that takes a credit card allows you to use the NFC chip on your credit card or Google/apple pay. The catch has been you can only use it up to £30. After that you need to use the chip and pin. That meant for most day-to-day transactions I was able to use Apple pay on my watch. I kept my belroy slim wallet (pictured) with three credit cards and ID in it along with 20 pounds just in case I needed to spend more than £30.

In late August I read a newsgroup thread talking about how merchant terminals were no longer limiting Apple pay to £30 per transaction. That made sense to me since I bought stuff in the Apple Store for way more than £30 and they didn’t seem to have a limit. What I didn’t realize immediately was I was reading about a change to the banking laws that was coming into effect in mid-September so the terminals were changing their requirements

After September 17 or so there’s no longer a hard limit on how much you can spend with tap to pay. Apple and Google Pay offer 2nd factor authentication already. It’s my face or fingerprint on my phone so there in theory is no additional validation or limit on using my phone or watch to make purchases.

Using a physical card with a NFC chip need to reauthorize with the PIN every hundred pounds or so. This change in theory makes it possible for me to not have to carry a wallet. It also means in theory that using Apple pay is more convenient/better than using an actual physical card.

At the time of writing this it’s been at least two months since this came into effect. Since then i only once had to use a physical card at one merchant. Since this is still an experiment I leave my wallet with an emergency card or two in my bag hidden away. It still also has an emergency £20 note. You know for that rare time I need cash. So far the experiment has been fantastic. Even the one case that i did need my physical card i think the terminal was having issues. Even with the physical card the system had to try twice to make the transaction go through.

Here is to hoping I don’t need to carry a wallet ever again. Well at least in the UK.

The Full English vs Full Irish Breakfast

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This post is topical since I have friends visiting for Thanksgiving and we had this discussion about breakfast. Their feedback was simply its all a lot of food.

Previously I have written about my picky eating habits. Specifically my lack of trying new foods until relatively recently.  I wrote “If The 12 Year Old Version of Me Could See Me Now” back in 2012. In that post I talked about how breakfast was transformed from me after I started eating eggs. Since then I have enjoyed going with M for diner breakfast.

When we moved to London we were no longer able to experience a good old-fashioned American diner. Thankfully there were lots of other options for us. I started ordering the full English breakfast. Mainly because it was an option available on most menus when we would go out for breakfast. I enjoyed it. My challenge was there were parts of it and I just didn’t like and would not eat. Mainly the baked beans, tomatoes, or mushrooms. If given the chance I would simply order eggs and some sides. The full English was typically enough if it was the only option.

We went to Ireland for a holiday in May. I was intrigued between the differences of the full English versus the full Irish breakfast. I was surprised to realize there were some distinct differences between them. Our first morning in Ireland I tried out my first full Irish. Instead of beans, tomatoes, mushrooms they added black pudding, white pudding and bacon. Since coming to England I have tried and liked the black pudding. I had never tried the white pudding,  however I give it a go. It turned out to be pretty good.

In the end the substitutions between the full English and the full Irish made it so I would eat the entire meal of a full Irish breakfast. I am going to say that is a good thing. Depending on how you look at it it could be a bad thing since probably not healthy for you. Every day of our trip I had one. Like the perfect lobster roll or piece of chocolate cake I am now on a mission to find the perfect full Irish breakfast. The catch is always even if I have the best one I’ve ever had a better one could still be out there so I have to keep trying…

I will still eat the full English. It just pales in comparison (for me) to its Irish cousin.