I'm all over the place today. Yesterday I had the final session in a course of counselling that I've been taking which was provided by the GL11 Community Hub, working in collaboration with the NHS. It's been quite a journey; I learned a lot about myself that was surprising, and some of it was even a little bit shocking. I think it's been helpful, because the scores I got from filling out the same forms that I did back in March were nowhere near as alarming as they had been. I'm going to miss these sessions, as the counsellor was lovely and it's been very freeing to be able to open up to someone who is not only non-judgmental about what I went through but who can also bring out the positive side of all of those experiences in a way that's supportive and encouraging. This course is what inspired me to write about my neurodivergent journey elsewhere on this site (and I updated that page this week to include some of the discoveries I've made since it began).

Each session stirs up a LOT of emotions, though. I know that after each one I will find it very difficult to sleep for a few days, because my neurodivergent brain will be obsessively chewing through everything that was discussed and scripting ways in which I can use each revelation to change my approach to life for something a little bit better, a little bit more outgoing, and (hopefully) a little bit more socially adept. For me, that's a tough order; I end up mulling over what it all means until the small hours of the morning on several days each week, but at this point I've stopped stressing out about it happening and accepted that it's actually an essential part of the process. As my counsellor said this week, there's also a considerable amount of grieving involved, because I've had to let go of the image that I'd built up of myself as being someone who normally has their act together, but who is going through a bit of a bad patch at the moment. I have never had my act together, because the way that my brain is wired and the trauma that I've gone through over the years make that impossible. My goal now is just to be the best version of myself that is possible; he's a much more limited, much less able person than I used to think he was, and finding that out has not been pleasant—but I'm not going to consign him to life's scrap heap just yet.

After yesterday's counselling session finished, I drove over to Wotton to get the follow-up jab to the shingles inoculation I had back in October. I'd been stressing about not getting the booster in time, but apparently you can leave up to twelve months between shots and it will still give you effective protection. Rob and Ruth's Uncle Boris got shingles last year, and he will readily tell you exactly how much better it is to be vaccinated against it than actually get the disease. These days I don't have any problems with having injections; I've had so many of them over the years that I actually find myself rating the experience of each one out of five (this was a four) and thanks to advances in manufacturing and materials technology, needle design these days is way better than it was back when I was a kid. I was expecting to be sore afterwards and I was, but it wasn't just from the jab.

Some friends of mine reported being clobbered by the second shot; others sailed through it without feeling any side effects at all. I think after last night I'm going to place myself in the first category, because I've had an absolutely dreadful night. I felt hot, my bones ached, I couldn't settle, and my heart was hammering away quite alarmingly. According to my watch, my overnight average resting heart rate was a ridiculously fast 86 bpm (it's normally in the low to mid fifties). My mind spent the night doing doughnuts; I couldn't switch off at all even after doing my grounding exercises and I was still awake when the dawn chorus started at around half-past four. I feel absolutely exhausted. I was very glad of my espresso machine when I dragged myself out of bed and stumbled down the stairs to make my breakfast. I'm still very sore right now, and I've just taken a couple of painkillers to try and take the edge off things, which I almost never do during the daytime.

This afternoon I start a new programme of therapy. I'm not sure what this one will be like, but it takes place over a videoconferencing link so I don't need to leave the house. That gets rid of one of my biggest stress drivers but all the same, I'm mentally battening down the hatches for another night of racing thoughts tonight.

At least at this point in the game, I know it will be worth it.

I got to Wotton early, so I decided I'd pay a visit to The Cotswold Book Room and see if they had any nice books for me. They did, of course; I came away with a bag full and a nice treat: they had a table full of lucky dip books wrapped in brown paper—all ARCs, or Advance Review Copies of forthcoming titles—and any customer buying one or more books was entitled to pick one out for free. So I did!

I'm sure I'll end up reviewing each title on my What I'm Reading page, so be sure to keep an eye on my progress there. Since 2023 I've set myself the challenge of reading and reviewing at least sixty books each year. This year I've already reviewed thirty-five titles (and I'm well into numbers 36 and 37 as I type this) and we're not even half-way through the year yet, so I think it's going to be a bumper year for me this year.

One of the biggest contributing factors to the amount of reading I'm getting done this year is the completion of my new bathroom. Last year I only beat my target by ten books, because I couldn't take a bath for nearly half the year; I will happily soak in the bath for a whole hour if I have an interesting book to read while I'm doing so, and over the course of twelve months all that reading time mounts up. Last night I felt so out of sorts that I skipped having a bath, and by three o'clock in the morning I was really regretting doing so. A bath always soothes and relaxes me (it's very definitely a sensory processing thing as much as it is a way to ease the tension in my muscles) and I last night I should have realised that I needed one even more than I normally do. Lesson learned; I won't be making that mistake tonight!

I've been on Mastodon since 2017. I really like it as a social media platform. Why? Because it's federated, which means that it's not under the control of some sociopathic man-baby with more money than sense. Because it doesn't use an algorithm to decide what it's going to show you when you scroll through people's posts there (which are referred to as "toots", incidentally). Instead, you decide what it is you want to see by following specific people, or by following hastags which folk are usually very good at adding to their toots to identify the subject matter they contain. And because the sort of thing that gets the most traction in my Mastodon feed as a result of all this is almost always wholesome and lovely and the fact that Odin has become a Mastodon celebrity to the extent that he gets recognised in public is a perfect example of this.

I love the unexpected connections with people that can happen. Last night I ended up exchanging toots about West Wickham Library because someone I follow had tooted a photo of the remains of the stocks tree which are preserved there and I ended up discovering that the reputation of my former watering hole The Swan doesn't seem to have gotten any better in the intervening four decades.

For the most part, my Mastodon feed is dickhead-free. Some instances can be incredibly sniffy about gatekeeping, sure—but they seldom have anything interesting to say so I just ignore them (Mastodon has some nicely effective mute and filtering functions). But I've noticed in the past couple of years that some people think they can "game the algorithm" (which doesn't exist, remember) by conscripting popular hashtags for their own irrelevant purposes. The most common way that I see people doing this is by adding the #Monsterdon tag to whatever they're shilling (I've blogged about Monsterdon before; on Sunday nights people gather together online and all watch a really bad monster movie together whilst making very snarky—and usually very funny—comments about it) because by Monday morning, #Monsterdon has temporarily become the number one most-used hashtag across the whole federated shebang. My response when people do this is very simple: instead of engaging with them I automatically block them, regardless of what they're tooting about. I end up blocking several idiots like this every week. This week, DJ something-or-other had helped himself to not just one, but three of the day's most-used hashtags in order to spam Mastodon with his irrelevant little toot. Before I blocked him, I read the resulting thread where he was getting increasingly annoyed by multiple replies all politely asking him why he'd used those hashtags instead of doing what I'd have done, and simply called him out for being a dickhead. It was really funny, because after the third or fourth of these inquiries he'd become nearly apoplectic with rage. I guess those responses didn't fit in with DJ Twat's grandiose, alpha-influencer image of himself. That's not the Mastodon way.

Too bad. He's been blocked, and he'll stay blocked as long as I stay on Mastodon. Because life's too short.

I'm still recharging my social batteries after draining them dry at the local pub on Friday night. At least nowadays I can recognise when I get overwhelmed (and that was certainly the case when the landlord had to face down a belligerent customer at the back of the room who was making it very clear that he was not happy about something or other). It's hard enough having to focus on getting the band's sound right for several hours under ideal circumstances; you can't let your attention wander for a second. The band are great, and I love making them sound as good as I possibly can. But when there are not just fights threatening to break out but also several small children who are jumping up and down next to you so energetically that the table you're sitting at is shaking and they're staring enviously at the tablet you're using to control the mixer remotely and they're all trying very hard to make eye contact (which is not just off-putting but absolute hell for someone like me), it all gets incredibly taxing. And not very much fun at all.

By yesterday afternoon, I felt like I'd been hit by a truck.

So I made myself a gin and tonic (using York Gin's lovely chocolate and orange gin, garnished with a slice of orange) and then got myself some fish and chips and mushy peas from the van which drives around the village on Saturday afternoons. I ate this (and there was a lot of it) sitting at the dining table, contentedly stuffing my face while watching videos on YouTube that had been made by Autistic people and then finding out how Adam Neely had put together an affordable (and flyable) in-ear monitor system for his band. Once I'd done that, I still felt like I had been hit by a truck, but now I was pleasantly full and also more than a little bit sleepy so I had a nap for an hour. I didn't get anything done for the rest of the day other than reading books, and I'm totally fine with that.

I don't think I'm going to get much done today, either. Instead, I'm just going to slow down and concentrate on recharging my batteries. It's taken me until the age of sixty-five to realise that actually, it's perfectly okay to just do that and not feel guilty about it. My father would be outraged. Too bad; I don't care any more.

I was back at my semi-regular gig doing front of house sound for my pals in Function246 again yesterday...

Running sound from a tablet at the back of the room. With a pint of Moretti to ensure I stay hydrated.

The band had a good night. The band's second set was about the best I've ever seen them deliver, and much dancing occurred. I didn't have very much to do at all—at least I didn't once I'd figured out that the reason I couldn't hear anything at the soundcheck other than the drums and Robin's bass amp was that nobody had bothered to plug in the PA. D'oh!

Will be to draw your attention to this news item. I don't think you could come up with anything which is likely to encapsulate the England squad's whole World Cup experience more succinctly. (Apparently they did eventually get their boots back.)

I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of Tuesday night (look, I'm old, okay?) and I noticed that the temperature display for the heated floor was showing a bright red icon which I'd not seen before: no Internet. (Yes, I have a thing that is controlled by an app on my phone and prefers to be connected to the web, allegedly so it can figure out how cold the weather is going to be and manage its energy usage more effectively. I'm not proud of that; the device was selected by the bathroom installers, and it's going to remain the sole exception to my "no Internet-enabled domestic devices in this house" policy if I can possibly avoid it). When I checked, my WiFi network was fine, but further investigation led me to discover that my Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) connection had dropped. Rebooting everything had no effect, so I concluded there was nothing else I could do about it, and went back to bed.

On Wednesday morning I found out that all of my neighbours on Openreach were having the same problem, because there was a "serious network fault" at the local exchange and the estimated time to repair was 72 hours (in the end, everything came back this morning after a little more than half that time). That meant no Internet, no streaming TV, and no landline calls (the writing is on the wall for old-style phones as they'll all stop working at the end of the year when BT rips out all of its venerable old copper cabling—no doubt making a tidy profit from selling it as scrap in the process—I switched to a VOIP setup a while ago to beat the rush).

So yesterday I spent the day almost completely offline (I did use my mobile phone once or twice). I haven't done that for ages. I was going to focus on cleaning up the mix of my latest recordings, but when I fired up my studio PC I discovered that as I'd set the iLok software which runs Digital Rights Management (DRM, a.k.a. copy protection) on some of my most commonly-used plugins to its "cloud" setting, it refuses to let them work unless it's connected to the internet, so they disappeared from the projects I wanted to work on. And of course without an Internet connection available, I couldn't change this to allow offline working...

So instead I ended up playing the Sire bass for most of the afternoon. I wasn't being productive, but I had lots of fun.

I've written elsewhere about how in the past, my neurodivergence left me open to unscrupulous people who saw me as an easy target and realised that they could take advantage of me. I'd go along with things that made me really uncomfortable because I didn't want to appear rude and more than once, that ended up with me taking on social or financial commitments which I would have been much better off without. Masking drives a tendency towards people pleasing, and salesmen love people who do that.

I found out yesterday that those days are, apparently, over.

In the middle of the afternoon I answered the doorbell to be confronted by an irritatingly perky cold-caller from Scottish Power. He literally waved jazz hands at me and said, "Before we start, can you just do this for me?" No, I most definitely could not. What is this, fucking pantomime season? Do I look like I'm four years old? (No, I do not.) Rather than telling him exactly where he could take his jazz hands (and believe me, I came very close to doing that, but unfortunately that innate wish to appear polite hasn't entirely left me) I managed a terse "Not interested" and slammed the door in his face. Because life is too short to waste any of it engaging with door-to-door salesmen.

And you know what? It felt really good doing that.

A couple of weeks ago it was 35°C (95°F) outside. So far this morning the temperature in the back garden has only just managed to crawl to 12°C (54°F). It's pouring with rain and I have just retrieved a fleece from upstairs and gone round closing the windows before I start shivering.

It'll be the summer solstice in ten days.

You may have seen a post on social media that's been kicking around recently from the data scientist Christopher Penn which beautifully skewers the beliefs of anti-vax wingnuts and reads,

"Just remember that given the abundance of neurodivergent people in science, it's far more likely that autism causes vaccines."

I've been thinking about that comment a lot. And because I'm me, that really means a lot. I've been doing so because lately I've been asking myself what the point of my existence might be. I've been kicking around on this planet for nearly sixty-six years now and the question of whether that has been a benefit to anyone else or not is always at the front of my mind. Why am I here? What did the Universe have in mind for me when I arrived on the scene? Have I crashed and burned, or have I lived up to its expectations?

At this point I need to say that this hasn't been driven by anything as pompous as considering what my "legacy" might be. Rather, it's fallout from discovering how neurodivergent I am (apparently it's a lot) and the insights that learning about complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or cPTSD have given me about how my mind works. Not being normal can cut both ways; did that hold me back, causing me to fail in so many of my ambitions—or was it what enabled me to do the extraordinary things that I have managed to do? So I've been (obsessively) reading about all these conditions lately (although sadly there doesn't seem to be much literature on how autism, ADHD and cPTSD can interact) and it's been unsettling to recognise just how many of my thoughts simply stem from the way the Autistic brain is wired and from how the mind has evolved to deal with bad things happening to its owner. Imagine seeing your innermost thoughts written down in a medical textbook and realising that not only are they not original, they're common enough and consistent enough to be a predictable result in anyone who has had similar experiences. To be honest, that feels a lot like somebody telling you that you're living in a computer simulation rather than reality and then informing you that, actually, you're not even one of the protagonists. Instead, you're one of the Non-Player Characters (NPCs) and you don't get to choose between Morpheus's red or blue pills; you're just part of the background action. Your code isn't bespoke; instead, you just got the minimum amount of boilerplate necessary to pass for human in a limited number of circumstances.

What little there is left of my ego and sense of self-worth took quite a hit from that. So for the past couple of months I've been casting around for things that are—for want of a better term—what we might call Autistic affirmations. Penn's hypothesis is a good place to start, but I wanted to find things that have a little more heft than the standard "Autistic superpowers" clichés that drove the plot of Rain Man, though. Possessing lightning-fast pattern recognition skills, having mercilessly logical thinking patterns or perfect pitch can all be a curse rather than a blessing. What if there was a real point to being Autistic? Something a bit more fundamental than a fascination with maths and mental arithmetic or being strongly attracted to science subjects at school? How might that manifest? What's the evolutionary value proposition?

I recently read a post by Raphaël Pinson which concluded a fascinating series of essays about autism awareness that he had written for Autism Awareness Month. In it, Raphaël hypothesises that the reason that Autistic traits haven't died out (and let's face it, they don't do us any favours when it comes to romance) is that people with such traits provide additional protection against failure modes and cognitive biases which often affect social groups as well as individuals; the most obvious example of this is groupthink. When I read Daniel Kahneman's epic work Thinking, Fast and Slow I realised that humans are nowhere near as rational as they think they are (if you're unfamiliar with his work, I highly recommend the book. Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on the subject—carried out together with the late Amos Tversky—which it summarizes). More recent research, such as this paper by Gerd Gigarenzer, has tried to categorize the different ways in which neurotypical brains turn out not to be quite as smart as they think they are, but I was surprised to see that even though Gigarenzer discusses a bias called the Do-what-the-majority-do heuristic, which is what underpins the tendency of organizations and societies to lapse into groupthink, none of his categories considers the social dimension of such thinking. And that's where I think Raphaël is on to something.

Pinson's hypothesis is that Autistic members of groups have minds which are wired sufficiently differently that they will call out logical errors and they often do so regardless of personal cost. The part of our brain that is driven by getting the right answer fires first, and the part of our mental system that is supposed to weigh the potential personal benefits or penalties for speaking up and challenging consensus fires later (or not at all). This behaviour, he argues convincingly (IMHO) has significant survival value for the group as a whole.

Just not necessarily the individual. And yeah, that tracks for me, particularly (as I said last month) once HR get involved. But I find myself wondering: with the amount of groupthink and in-group versus out-group bigotry going on right now (as extending empathy to people outside their personal in-group is another very common Autistic trait, one that can get allistic people really upset), perhaps now is our time to shine?

As you can see from that post, I'm still far from regaining equilibrium this week. I don't drink a lot any more but I ended up self-medicating yesterday with a number of mojitos (which are even nicer when you can make them with fresh mint picked from your garden) followed by a couple of glasses of Malbec, because by late afternoon I was feeling absolutely wretched. I'd completely run out of steam and I was feeling very sorry for myself.

I figured that I'm allowed to do that every once in a while, because it allows me to damp down all the stuff going on in my skull for a few hours and drown all of the feels that are overwhelming me, replacing them with detached numbness. At times like this I think I can see why my father ended up an alcoholic, because not feeling all the emotions that make me who I am is an extremely addictive proposition, but I have no intention of going down the same self-destructive path that he did.

Not only that, but I can confirm that getting drunk never really solves anything. I was still awake at three o'clock this morning and still feeling miserable.

"Write more music instead," Helen said. And I will focus on doing just that, because she is wise.

I was very sorry to hear that Anthony Head passed away from complications of pneumonia this week. He was only 72. From the tributes paid to him by co-stars he'd worked with over the years, he was clearly much loved.

This week I also found out that one of my greatest cartoonist heroes, the creator of Ogri Paul Sample died in January. His work had as profound an influence on my drawing style as Jean "Moebius" Giraud or Hergé and even though I never had a motorcycle of my own, I would avidly read every issue of Bike Magazine just so I could savour each of Paul's full-page comics there (and such was the level of detail, with countless Easter egg gags worked into the background of every frame, that each strip took him a week to draw).

The RSPB has suspended its sale of peanuts and bird seed until Ocober 12th. This is intended to limit the spread of a highly contagious disease that affects birds that is called trichomonosis. The UK population of Greenfinches and Chaffinches in particular have been affected by it; Greenfinch numbers have dropped by 65% over the last three decades.

The RSPB recommends offering small amounts of suet pellets and fat balls instead, and not leaving food on flat surfaces like bird tables. So that is what I have been doing, and the local corvid population strongly approve.

Today I learned that the character Karen Plankton first appeared in Spongebob Squarepants in episode 3b of the show's first season, with actress Jill Talley recording her dialogue in September 1998 and the completed episode first airing in May 1999. (Incidentally, Jill's husband is Tom Kenny, who plays the show's eponymous hero.)

Why did I bother finding out this breathtakingly obscure item of data?

Because I was wondering whether Karen was the origin of the racist, over-entitled white woman Karen meme (which first appeared on Reddit in 2014). The Business Insider article in that link suggests that the meme might have originated from Amanda Seyfried's character in the the 2004 movie Mean Girls, or—and they consider this more likely—from this routine by Dane Cook from 2005 (and quite frankly the screaming audience in that clip epitomises everything I loathe about American stand-up).

I think they might be wrong.

Reading my very first blog entry with the enhanced perspective that I have on my life these days, it's clear that I was aware of being neurodivergent at some level or other back then. The paragraph including the observation "I'm terrible when things like this happen. What would be a simple task becomes stretched over hours of tinkering and fiddling" stands out in particular, as it's as good a description of Autistic hyperfocus as you could wish for. And it's totally accurate, too; since I installed my first Linux OS (and I've installed several since, on a number of different machines) I have barely left the house, at least when the option not to was available.

The last few days have been hard work. I had another counselling session on Tuesday and it stirred up a lot of feelings and strong emotions that have taken a few days to process. I spent most of Wednesday in a highly dissociated state: staring into space, completely shut down. I couldn't form much in the way of coherent thoughts, and to be honest I don't remember doing much of anything apart from listening to CDs and watching Jerry Rothwell's unsettling but life-affirming 2020 film of Naoki Higashida's book The Reason I Jump. Yesterday was a bit better; I felt a bit more with it (the coffee always helps) and I was able to make some progress on the music I'm working on at the moment. Making music always manages to ground me in a way that nothing else that's available to me ever does. Being able to drop into that hyperfocus mode I mentioned just now not only helps to stop the whirring tumult of ADHD and suspend time for a few hours so that I can get to see what it's like to simply live in the moment, it also provides me with a much-needed hit of self-actualization and god knows I need as much of that as I can get right now.

I'm reading a book about recovery from complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (cPTSD) at the moment and that has been helping me to see that healing is possible and that there is potentially a way out of the mess I'm in, but it has also contributed to my current disturbed state. As I tried to relate to the book's content by thinking of experiences from my own life, I found I had stopped reading. Not just because of all the memories that were triggered, but also because several times I found myself becoming aware that I was staring at the page with absolutely no idea of what had happened in the last quarter of an hour. I was relating to the book all right—way too much. I was overwhelmed, and if I'm honest, I still am. I don't have any spare spoons at the moment.

I know that these days I'm incredibly lucky to be able to do the things (like making music) which stave off the feelings of worthlessness that my trauma has left me with. And I know that if I was living a normal life, it's highly unlikely that I would have had any of the incredible experiences which I've had over the past few years. But there are times—and there have been many this week—when I find myself thinking it would be lovely to have a taste of normality every once in a while.

Is that really too much to ask?

As you can see from the banner, this month marks the twenty-third anniversary of me deciding that I'd like to try my hand at blogging for a few months so I could keep Rob and Ruth up to date with what I was doing and share anything interesting I'd found on the Internet. I had no idea back then that I'd still be doing that all these years later. But here we are. Rob and Ruth are both grown up, living with partners, and having interesting adventures of their own. I still code every page by hand using Netbeans, and I know a darn sight more about CSS these days than I did back then when I thought that using a table in HTML was the height of high-tech web savvy.

The blog has gotten way more introspective over the years. In the early days I was more interested in writing about daft social phenomena like flash mobs than I was in examining my thoughts and feelings. But as I got older, I became much more open about the poor state of my mental health, and I've shared more than one phase of severe depression on these pages. I didn't really have a choice about it, because at one point things got so bad that I was forced to take a protracted leave of absence from the blog which lasted for seven weeks, and believe me, that was no fun at all. It's only in the last year that I've begun to figure out what's been the root cause of all of my difficulties all along, and last month was the first time that I've written in detail here about my experiences. The feedback I've received about that piece showed me that other people valued what I'd written considerably more than I expected them to. It was the right thing to do.

I guess the blog has always been a means of self-actualisation for me. To my knowledge, it doesn't have a particularly large readership (even if I do get occasional spam emails asking me if I'd ever consider carrying sponsored posts here and I would rather gouge my own eyes out than do that) but it lets the world know I still exist, and that has to be enough. I often think about friends I'm no longer in contact with, and I find myself wondering if any of them have ever stumbled across these pages and discovered what happened to that weird bloke they used to know, back in the day. It would be nice to hear from them.

After ten years of blogging I started posting links to the music I'd made public on Bandcamp and has it really been that long since I started doing that? My musical activities have remained a constant here ever since, and those humble beginnings have taken me further than I ever dreamed possible. These days I am comfortable identifying myself as a musician and a composer, and it's incredibly satisfying to be able to do that.

And so the blog continues. I've given up trying to figure out what lies in the future for me (or indeed for anyone else) because my life gets more and more crazily unpredictable with each passing year but whatever happens, you're likely to find me blathering on about it here. Don't forget that there's an RSS feed you can subscribe to which will let you know whenever the blog gets updated with a one-sentence summary.

Yesterday afternoon, after spending a happy couple of hours in my home studio working on a new piece of music, chatting with my brother in New York on WhatsApp, and having a meeting on Zoom with a muso pal to plan what our next collaboration sessions should focus on, I shut all of the gear down and came downstairs to chill out for a while.

But without consciously thinking about it, I suddenly realised that I had decided to tidy the living room up a bit. So more sorting, filing, binning and shredding ensued and a couple of hours later, several piles of books and Blu-Rays which had been living either on the floor or on the coffee table in the living room had been cleared away to the shelves where they should have been kept in the first place. There's another big pile of cardboard in the kitchen, waiting to be recycled. And the dining room table is completely free of clutter, which is extraordinary and lovely and incredibly satisfying.

This is the second time in a week that I've found myself tidying up. The first time I had a course of therapy back in 2015 it had the same result but it's still most unusual behaviour for me. I'm not sure how long this feeling will continue to win out over my ADHD but I think it's a good sign, as is the fact that once again last night my watch gave me a sleep score of 100.

This "feeliing okay" lark is weird. I'm not used to it at all. But I'd like it to continue, please.

After the blog had been running for twenty years I found myself writing about how my Internet presence had gone from a 14,400 baud dial-up modem to an always on, Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) connection that was giving me speeds of 70 Mbps down and 18 up. Since then, I've upgraded to Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) and the speeds I'm getting these days are ridiculous. I ran a speed test this week and quite honestly the results I get now are more than I could ever manage to max out: 870 Mbps down and 109 up. Latency is 17 ms, which is nuts.

I noticed as I wrote today's post that back in June 2023 I'd blogged about getting an Aeron chair and I can report that it's still going strong and still as comfortable as ever. I'm sitting in it right now, in fact. And the Mirra 2 in my studio is even more comfortable!

And no, Herman Miller didn't pay me to post that.

Seriously, though—the amount of advertising on UK television these days is sickening. Worse, most of the channels synchronise their ad breaks, so you can't escape by switching to a different station. And dear God, if I ever meet the person responsible for those credit card adverts that are "sponsoring" showings of Star Trek and Stargate SG1 on weekdays at the moment, I swear I will not be held responsible for my actions. They are disturbing the balance of my mind.