Fun

Back at the start of 2019, when the NHS App had just launched, it had something of a discoverability problem. The kind of problem where people would type “NHS App” into the App Store search bar and be presented with results including Microsoft Outlook, WhatsApp, Candy Crush and in fact pretty much anything but the NHS App. Not ideal for a flagship digital health intervention. I was contracting as part of the Kainos team helping NHS Digital deliver the App, alongside partners from BJSS. We’d toiled long and hard during 2018 to build a thing that could handle login, appointments, repeat prescriptions, medical record, and more. But what good is your lovingly crafted digital gateway to the NHS if nobody can find it? ...

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Betweening When you’re in between contracts, it’s easy to feel like you’re stuck in limbo. Professionally adrift, spiritually buffering, half-dressed in last Thursday’s joggers. You refresh LinkedIn. You reword your bio again. You stare into the fridge like it’s about to make you an offer. Somewhere around day four, with no stand-ups to attend, no Jira tickets to nurture, and a growing sense that time had lost its formatting, I decided that the only rational move was to make a list of things to do. ...

There’s no television in our shared family living areas any more. The imposing screen that once sat at the heart of the home, the altar of sofas and the focus of countless evenings, has been repurposed. It now lives in Matthew’s playroom, where it serves primarily as a large Xbox monitor. And you know what? I don’t miss it. Jocelyn and I just don’t seem to watch television these days. It’s not a moral stance or a lifestyle trend, it’s been more of a drift. A quiet migration away from passive consumption toward something else. ...

Back in 2022, in a bid to outwit my mother in our daily Wordle battles, I wrote some C# code to explore optimal starting guesses. You can read about that experiment here. Fast forward two years, and my Wordle addiction is alive and well. The daily challenge remains as compelling as ever, but it’s the family WhatsApp group – where scores are shared, victories boasted, and failures commiserated – that adds an extra layer of fun. ...

Like (it would seem) most of the rest of humanity, the start of my 2022 has been immeasurably enhanced by starting each day playing Josh Wardle’s charming word game Wordle. Which got me wondering – what are the best starter words to play in the opening lines at Wordle? I have been habitually using “ADIEU” as my starter word, reasoning that it contains a large number of vowels. But is D a particularly common consonant? And should I be trying to get O in there rather than the less frequently used U? I decided to do some computer-aided analysis to find the answer. ...

A couple of weeks ago, early one morning, my friend and fellow coder Scott asked a curious question: “Do you think that programming computers for a living gives you a negative outlook on life?” Now, Scott is unfortunately responsible for administering occasional TLC to a codebase that I cut as long ago as 2004, so I assumed he was referring to this and was about to raise some complaints about my hand-rolled query object criteria framework or other coding horror. I steeled myself to defend my work as he continued to explain: ...

Oh, the irony!

Benny George, our precocious two-year-old, is quite the fan of Mister Maker, and enjoys spending time doing arty crafty stuff with his mum. Now, the great thing about the BBC is that they tend to suggest projects which can be created using bits and bobs that you’re likely to have around the home – old cereal boxes and the like. But occasionally some specialist resources have to be procured in the name of Ben’s art, and so it was that Joce today spent £1.99 on a pack of the “googly eyes” so beloved of Maker. ...

I promised you some photos of my new office a while back, didn’t I? OK, here you go…

So, base rates are now down to 1.0%, and the Zero Interest Bug is not just conjecture. From The Times: “About 1,500 customers who took out a tracker mortgages pegged at 1.01 points below the base rate with Cheltenham & Gloucester (C&G), owned by Lloyds Banking Group, will be paying no interest at all on their home loans from next month. It is the first time that a mortgage lender has been forced to reduce the interest on their home loans to zero. Lloyds Banking Group, now 43 per cent owned by the taxpayer and also the owner of C&G, said that there was a zero floor to the deal and that because its computer systems could not cope with zero, it would be temporarily charging 0.001 per cent, or 8p a month for a borrower with a £100,000 mortgage. However, that money will be refunded.” ...

My good buddy John just published a typically navel-gazing post detailing the contents of his wallet, and went on to invite readers to divulge details of their own billfolds in what I can only presume is some cunning and evil plan for mass identity-theft 🙂 Well, as I said in the comments to John’s post, I was surprised at the quantity of sentimental knick-knacks and memorabilia he has in there, compared to the rather prosaic and functional contents of my own wallet. ...

Ten years of professional software development have given me a healthy awareness of edge cases – I’m always trying to code defensively, validate input, catch exceptions, use assertions, and of course pick holes in sloppy specifications (“ah, but what if…”). I must learn that these skills should not always be applied to my personal life though, as exemplified by a conversation with The Wife yesterday: _Jocelyn (excitedly): “We’re going to have a ‘Secret Santa’ for all the babies in our antenatal group!” Me: “Huh. How does that work then?” Jocelyn: “Well, we each buy a gift for under £10, put them into a bag, and each pick one.” Me: “What happens if you pick out the gift you bought?” Jocelyn (less excitedly): “Well, you put it back and pick another.” Me: “So, you have an even number of babies in the group?” Jocelyn (testily): “There are seven.” Me: “Then what happens if the last person picks their own gift?” Jocelyn (deflated): “Ian…! OK, so we won’t open any gifts until they’re all selected – happy now?” ...

Wikipedia cracks me up sometimes. I’m sat here at my desk, trying to knock together some C# code to quickly validate an entered string as being a UK postcode. Naturally I turned to this Wikipedia article for assistance, where I find this quip: “Automatic validation of postcodes on the basis of pattern feasibility is therefore almost impossible to design, and the system contains no self-validating feature such as a check digit. Completely accurate validation is only possible by attempting to deliver mail to the address, and verifying with the recipient.” ...

Fifty-three years since Darrell Huff published the seminal How to Lie with Statistics, and still we have newspapers as august as The Times pulling the oldest trick in the book: At first glance it all looks very impressive, but closer inspection of the comparison with sales of the Torygraph reveal a mere 8.7% sales lead, not more than double as suggested by the graphic.Not fooled. Another favourite book of mine that covers the still-relevant topic of graphical integrity is Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. It’s one of those timeless works that I look forward to sharing with the next generation. ...

I keep intending, and forgetting to post a couple of videos from our US holiday last April. I suppose I was hoping to get round to writing up my paper notes from the holiday, but it’s becoming apparent that won’t happen anytime soon, so let’s skip forward to the funny bits: We spent a couple of nights at the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas, which is the tallest observation tower in the United States. Atop the tower are three “thrill rides”, and I foolishly tried all of them whilst Jocelyn videoed proceedings from a safe distance. ...