Fifty Three and Holding

Wow - so we come to the end of my day (I know - it's 2am) and WHAT A DAY ! It's been non-stop. So, firstly, last night - 24 hours ago I was busy writing a Cribbage game (oh yes, we play a lot of Crib - more on that another day) with Dart that I plan to make into an app at some point and I got a bit carried away so finished at 3am.  Of course, I'm up at 6am for an hour to spend half an hour with the missus and see her off to work and then feed, water and let the chickens out (oh yes, we have 6 chickens - more on that another day) - then I fell asleep until 9.30. Then it's fire-fighting time at Microchip. I wrote a DJango API last year that makes it really easy  for project managers/requirements manager etc. to query Polarion because the Polarion REST API is appalling to use. I then wrote a dashboard called FrostByte (see what I did there? Polar - Frost? never mind) with Python/Django that uses that API. Some report widgets aren't very easy (to say the least) to d...

I mean. I AM on Facebook, sometimes. I could do this on different other platforms though couldn't I? The problem is that I think every single social media platform has changed for the worse. Facebook ? Brilliant idea, fantastic story. It was the real pioneer of social network, and the Daddy of them all (MySpace was the Granddaddy). It was a place you could find out what your friends and family were up to and post your business and your friends and family would find it. Those years have gone. Your post is lost in the sponsored content and endless, mindless short-form scrolling. You'd be lucky for any of your friends to find any of your posts now - 'the algorithm' will not deem them 'important' or 'worthy' enough. Facebook has morphed from what was a perfect ideal, into a platform to be outraged and outrageous on. What was a perfect social media platform has become an stinking cauldron of get-rich-quick schemes, influencers and scammers tapping into the mi...

No. Not my place in the world, just my spot in the blogosphere (is that a word?). I'm one in over 8  BILLION (and growing), so how the hell do I stand out from the other 7,999,999,999? (Interestingly, the US and the UK have different ideas about what 1 billion means. The US uses 10 figures - 8,000,000,000 or eight thousand million. Some of the the UK still uses a longer form 13 figures - 8,000,000,000,000 or eight million million. Most people, including most people - but not all - in the UK, the UN and World Bank now use US notation.) A ccording to ChatGPT... about 600-700 BILLION blog posts exist today (September 2025), and hundreds of millions are added every year. That's obscene. So, why the hell do we need yet another blog? Do people even read blogs any more? I want this to be for potential employers to find out what really makes me tick - because that insipid CV you saw was tailored just for you to try and get an interview? That's not me. That's just the bit of m...