My last post here was all the way back at the end of December, and it’s now 11th May, so yet again I’ve let this blog slide, and slide, and slide. In fairness, though, the main reason is work. This year (so far) I’ve had more work since as long as I can remember – probably going all the way back to my first job, where I was a full time employee at a firm of accountants.
For most of this year so far, in fact, there are very few days that I haven’t done (at least some) client work – ranging from just a couple of hours, to over seven (such as on May 5th – a public holiday here in the UK). Of course there are some days where I didn’t work at all (for example I went on holiday in late March, and that was followed by the RISC OS North event) – but most days of this year so far have seen me do some work.
Good for my bank account, but not so good in general. I used to value my excellent work/life balance, but I don’t seem to have that any longer! However, having had a few very lean years when it came to work, my policy at the moment is to only turn down any new work without very good reason, like if it’s absolutely not possible or practical.
That’s the main reason this blog has seen a lack of updates, and a lot of other personal life stuff just hasn’t happened.
So with that in mind, it’s probably time for a brief catch up – but in reality the main thing to say is that I’ve been busy working! Well, okay, there are a few things I could write about, but I’ll save them for other posts, write a paragraph or two about them here, to serve as a reminder to myself when I have a little more time:
Eurovision
I’ll make an exception with this – the first of two. I’ll outline here, now, what I’m going to do this year.
For some years, what I’ve done is watch the Eurovision Song Contest on the Saturday night, with the Twitter website open on a computer, tweeting silly comments as the night goes on and I get more and more drunk. Sometimes, I’ve subsequently pulled down those tweets and put them on this blog.
I intend to do the same this year, but I won’t be using Twitter, which has become increasingly closed and, frankly, increasingly rubbish.
Some time back, I set up an account on an alternative platform – Bluesky. I can be found there as VinceMH – and that’s where I’ll be ‘tweeting’ from (they probably just call it posting, just as that’s what it’s now called on Twitter since it was taken over and re-branded by Musk).
There was one year when part way through the evening I found my Twitter account automatically blocked from Tweeting, because I’d exceeded a limit. I’ve tried to slow down the rate at which I put out my silly Eurovision comments since, to try to avoid that happening again – I did look at what the limits were at one point, and worked out a rough rate that would be okay (not that I can remember offhand what it was).
Although I haven’t looked extensively, I haven’t found that information for Bluesky, so there is a risk that I’ll hit a similar block this year. Should that happen, I’ll continue to make those silly comments, but they’ll be straight into a text file. If at some point after I decide to put the ‘tweets’ up here again, the contents of that text file will be included.
Probably not much else to say on that until next Saturday, when the silliness will begin! Yup, this year’s contest takes place next Saturday, 17th May. 🙂
Social media
This is also an exception – I’ll cover this here, rather than separately.
So, yeah, since Musk gained control of Twitter it has gone down hill faster than an a huge lump of rock on a steep, friction-free near-vertical slope with the assistance of one of Musk’s SpaceX rockets pointing the wrong way.
As a result, my use of it has gone down by a huge amount – whereas I used to be reading my feed frequently, now I generally just glance at the last couple of hours worth of tweets fairly infrequently. I used to tweet a lot, and now I just tweet occasionally.
I set up the aforementioned Bluesky account quite some time ago, and soon after setting it up commented (on Twitter) that I intended to make the switch from one to the other to coincide with the next Eurovision – but I’m going to revise that slightly.
Having been glancing at Bluesky, I don’t think it works as well – my feed on Twitter usually begins either where I last read it, or at some point after if I haven’t looked on it for some time. I can scroll towards the top to reach the most recent items, at which point I can bugger off to do something else. Whenever I load Bluesky, my feed starts at the most recent items, and I have to scroll down to go further back, and can continue scrolling, and scrolling… Okay, this is something I’ll just become accustomed to, but I have to say that in my opinion the Twitter approach is better.
Related to that, I’ve started glancing at my Facebook account more again. This is because while I still think Facebook is a bag of crud, it’s where some of my family etc. can be found online, so it makes sense to direct a little attention there. Facebook also feeds from the most recent (or most recently commented, etc.) posts backwards.
Facebook is also throwing quite a lot into my feed that I have absolutely no interest in, and some if it seems really arbitrary – for example posts from a Photoshop editing group, where people seem to ask others to edit their pictures. It’s also showing me posts that deserve a blog post in their own right, so watch out for that one if I get around to it!
I think that because I haven’t interacted with Facebook for so long it’s basically throwing a load of shit at me to see what sticks. I may have to do some weeding there in the hope it’ll start showing me things I am interested in. Or maybe I should leave it as is and let the service continue to assess me incorrectly? 😉
(Possibly worth noting that I don’t use the app – I will not install that on my phone, and that’s where I’ve been reading it, using the Android version of Opera. This probably limits Facebook’s reach somewhat, though I haven’t really looked in any detail to see just how much or how little it protects my privacy in this context.)
But here’s the bottom line: I used to read (and post to) Twitter a lot. I now read it a lot less, and post to it even less still – and the amount of time I’ve spent looking at Bluesky and Facebook falls a long way short of the difference between then and now. In other words, my use of social media has gone way down as a result of the way the platform I used has gone.
So don’t expect to see that much from me on Bluesky (or Facebook) in the future. I don’t feel inclined to put the time into either of those that I used to spend on Twitter.
Also, I am not going to close my Twitter account or stop using it entirely. I do have a few friends and ‘mutuals’ (in social media terms, that’s someone I follow who also follows me) on Twitter that I haven’t found elsewhere. Not that I’ve actively looked. So my plan is to trim the list of people I follow to some extent, and keep those people and a few other interesting ones. I don’t know yet how much I’ll cut it back, but it may be that if I trim it enough, what’s left may actually be enough to keep me engaged? Who knows.
Drop Rock
I last wrote about this all the way back in September. Towards the end of the post I suggested I’d try to write part 4 of the series at some point after the RISC OS London Show, which took place at the end of October. More work was done in the run up to the show, so that needs to be written about – although it will be a brief one.
Holiday
I mentioned above that I went on Holiday in late March – my first holiday since (if memory serves) 2019. It was only a short trip, and it didn’t go entirely as planned. I’ll make that a separate post as well.
Walks
Since my last walk mentioned here (on Christmas Day) – and discounting the holiday, which will be covered when I write about that – I’ve only been on one walk, visiting Avebury a couple of days ago. That also didn’t go entirely as planned, and that’ll be another post.
There will be other things as well if and when I can think of them, but those last three are the most obvious that spring to mind.
