Rick Aspden

Aww man. I finished watching House, finally, after a full rewatch and realised I'd missed several series. Now watching the lovely post-production episode. But man, I'm gonna miss wathcing that, and I'm glad I finally got around to finishing it off. 13 years after its final episode. Standard.

I think I finally figured out why the old Microsoft minutes had such a reputation for being wildly fluctuating and rarely accurate.

They've _got_ to have been designed by someone with ADHD.

Urgh. Monday. Shoo. Nobody likes you.

Oh good lord. Gonna see 27ºC tomorrow. And it's not going to cool down for lunch either. I may be covering the windows with tin foil tomorrow. Good time to get some washing done though. With how much I expect to sweat in my bedsheets the next couple of evenings, this can only be a good thing. 😰

Saw Nine Inch Nails yesterday at the Coop Live in Manchester. Absolutely cracking gig, felt like a proper show rather than just a band performing, I've not seen something that good since Rob Zombie. Think I'll see them again when the opportunity comes up. Need more live music in my life.

Got a weird craving for Romanian Papanasi. No idea what the closest I'd get over here is, short of making it myself.

Shed quite a few tears over the last few days realising that the band is being full on shredded at work. The place was made magical by the people, and there's such good people there, both in talent and personality. This feels worse than realising I was about to break up with my girlfriend in my 20s.

"We need a copy of your Summary Health Record for your ADHD pre-assessment."
*forces himself to ring GP surgery to ask for it*
*drags his arse down town to pick it up*
*scans it and assembles into a neat PDF*
"We only accept JPG and PNG uploads"
... really? 🙄
*breaks down PDF into PNGs and mutters*

Been a good while since I've been out for after-work drinks with the good folk at work, albeit under less than ideal circumstances.

Without downloading any new pics, where are you at mentally?

There's something very satisfying about taking a malfunctioning device apart, doing a bit of soldering, fixing it, and seeing it all function again. Today's rescue was a pair of Ember mug coasters, after the pogo pins lost their spring and wouldn't charge the mug any more. Now they do. *mic drop*

It'd be really nice if I could automatically create a modleration list for BlueSky based on a user's bio/description. At some point I'll write a little program to do it, no doubt, but it requires me carving out mental space to do it, space I don't currently really have.

Also, yay, that special kind of brain fog where your limbs and body in general attempt to sabotage you at every opportunity, making a mess everywhere while trying to prepare food, pinging forks at your face instead of being able to grab them, and generally getting in the way. Not my best afternoon.

The Relationship Anarchy Smorgasbord Have you heard of the Relationship Anarchy Smorgasbord? It's a graphic/worksheet that you can download here, for talking about some of the more common options you might want to implement in relationsh...

Ooh. Just saw this which be a really useful tool, or at least the beginning of some sort of building blocks for me. Whether I ever have the energy to implement it in reality is another matter, but it's certainly giving me some good ideas.

This absolutely resonates with me. My relationships just have varying components, including intimacy, how close we are as friends, what we have in common etc, but it always clashed with societal norms and others' expectations of me. It just always seemed to make sense in my head. Still does.

It's weird, I've got far more grumpy about ReCaptcha being used to train AI models than I used to be. Maybe it's because I'm well aware I'm being used as a mechanical turk. Yet I used to be perfectly happy to "help" in such a manner. Maybe it's just the commercialisation of it now. 🤷

Playing GTA V on battery power on the laptop (for an Octopus saving session) is oddly reminiscent of playing Carmageddon or Quarantine on a 486 DX2-66 with the 17fps. Or 23 if I turn off raytracing. 😂

Admittedly I am running at 5760x1080, bit higher than the old 800x600...

How this billion-dollar London startup backed by Microsoft made 700 engineers sitting in India pose as AI | - The Times of India Builder.ai, once valued at $1.5 billion, has filed for bankruptcy after being exposed for misleading investors about its AI capabilities. The company,

timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/t... - amazing. When AI stands for All Indians - 700 developers being masqueraded as an AI service. Impressive chutzpah, and maybe the thought was to bootstrap it with humans and develop the service later, but that's a hell of a fraudulent presentation.

That awkward moment you accidentally type in tweetdeck.twitter.com into your address bar out of old habits, instead of hitting here. Thankfully the "subscribe now" button saved me from the cesspool.

Looking good mate!

Welp, guess I'm on 5 and a half hours sleep today. I foresee a lunchtime nap on the cards.

Of course I wanted to wake up with a jump this morning at 7am from some random external noise with a yelp. That was excellent. Especially the part where I slammed my jaw together and promptly kicked my toothache back off. Just super. 😏

Awkward: I'd failed to write my "about me" presentation for about 3 sprints in a row because I've been busy fixing other things, so I got put on the spot to chat about myself to the team for half an hour at the end of sprint planning with 15 mins notice.

Still, came out okay, got some laughs. 😁

I suspect I'd mind less if it was intentional.

I must admit it likely does little for my stress and anxiety levels. I did quit caffeine for the most part after lunchtime already. But I'm also trying to compenate for being unmedicated with ADHD. Rock and hard place.

Accidentally drinking decaf coffee all day will do strange things to a sysadmin. Ow, my head.

This humidity needs to bugger off now. I really dislike this irritating little island's climate. Amongst many other things.

Re-watching Top Gear from the 2002 era. Interesting to see the evolution of cars and features, and some very pretty old sports cars. The conversation between the presenters, on the other hand, is toxic and fucking offensive at times looking at it from a 2025 point of view. Impressively jarring.

🤦🏻‍♂️

I love feeling hungover for no particularly good reason. Done nothing to deserve this. Other than forget to take an antihistamine first thing maybe I guess? Could also just be the whole "step off the merry-go-round, immediately feel ill" thing. Who knows.

Agreed. The only thing I really felt a bit guilty about was the lack of notice I gave my manager about it, but what I did was entirely necessary, and he agreed. I was going to implode and be off work for a whole lot longer, as well as likely nuke my interpersonal relationships for a good while.