No Named Hero

An insightful conundrum of life's problems, interspersed with dashes of techno-jargon. My Life + Technology + Gaming + Science + Dancing = This

[no-named-hero]

Another day, and other attempt at blood donation.

They were running behind by quite a lot, so I got some time to read a couple of chapters of my book which was nice. Then when I got called in, they did the droplet test… and my heart sank.

Because the droplet didn’t. It hovered for a bit, then started rising back UP the tube. 🤦‍♂️ 😭 So they did the test where it measures your levels using the machine. It needed to be 185-180 for me. Last time it was 134 so I wasn’t allowed. This time…. 137.

So yes, thankfully I could donate (aid been waiting 45 minutes so at least I hadn’t wasted my time) but still I’m confused why the hell my iron is so low again. 😞 It’s not time, because I left it an extra month for my body to generate more haemoglobin but that didn’t seem to help. Maybe my body is just slowing down iron production? I think next time I’m going to book the normal 4month appointment, but the whole week before eat as much of a high-iron diet that I can.

Really don’t want to stop giving blood if I can avoid it. 🤞🏻

[no-named-hero]

Man, where do I begin about this weekend…

It was my stag do, and I wanted something fairly low-key and simple. So we rented a place in Scarborough near the seafront. We did fry ups, board games, escape rooms, burritos, DnD and mini golf.

Everyone got along so well, and there was constant laughter amongst us. My best mate was amazing at getting everything organised and keeping on top of getting stuff sorted etc. he bought a load of pre-made stuff for burritos, snacks, drinks and everything. I was so happy.

I felt like I could just relax and let someone else do the planning and worrying for once.

The DnD session was fantastic. My old housemate was amazing at being DM, and had really gone to town on it. We all were a bit gutted we didn’t finish it, so we want to try and all meet again to finish it off! 😁

I am a bit shattered today, but absolutely worth it. I couldn’t have asked for a better stag do. 😊

[no-named-hero]

Had a small scare yesterday as I had to take L to A&E.

She said she was feeling numbness and tingling sensation down one arm and her face. She was told to go to A&E so I whizzed over and took her. She was told it could have potentially been a stroke or heart attack, but best to go and check at the hospital.

She seemed fine, had full movement, wasn’t slurring words or anything, so fairly sure it wasn’t anything serious.

We were there for about 5 hours, they did some tests, took bloods and she had a CT scan, but they couldn’t determine what had happened. She’s getting a follow up call in a few days but we’re just hoping it was some sort of trapped nerve or something. 🤞🏻

Not particularly the scare I wanted this week!

[no-named-hero]

Thank god!!

With the help of FIL we were able to pull away the cables enough to reach the control unit. I grabbed some crimp on connectors from Screwfix, and we managed to connect the cables.

Plugged it all back in, held our breath and turned the power on. 🤞🏻

And success!!! 😅 Thank god.

Total cost:

Replacement Pump - £20

Crimp on connectors - £3.69

Crimping tool (which I forgot I already had) - £11

I love being able to fix stuff! 😊

[no-named-hero]

Ughhhh….

This is annoying. The dishwasher started making a lovely burning smell, and then stopped draining water. After an initial diagnosis that it was the draining pump (£20, but hopefully refundable) it turns out it was a bit worse and the connection board is kaput. 🙄

It’s going to be around £50-£90 for a new one, but then I’ll need to get hold of the little connector bit, because that’s actually part of the wiring loom. It’s annoying because I know what to do to fix it, but it’s just on the verge of being more cost efficient to replace it. (In terms of money and time)

I spent most of last night getting it out, which was a MASSIVE pain. The plastic is so fragile I’m concerned it’s just going to snap if I pull it slightly too hard. 😒 I get annoyed when it’s something I could technically fix, but it’s not feasible too, so I’m hoping that it doesn’t come to that. 🤞🏻

[no-named-hero]

Had a small tear in my eye when I opened this card on Friday. She’d made me a card and put shark things in it because she knows it’s my favourite. 😝

For some reason she’s started calling me “Big Shark” and her and her sister are to be called small shark and micro shark. 😂 (I asked about Mummy who is apparently to be known as “Medium Shark” 🤣)

[no-named-hero]

We had a good weekend with the girls, despite a few tumultuous moments between them. They lost their chance to play Minecraft because of the arguing, but they did want to play the next adventure of StarPort with me.

It was my first foray in to creating an adventure myself rather than using a pre-made story. Whilst I’m fairly creative(ish) I did struggle to come up with something suitable for them, and ended up taking a few ideas from other adventures and tweaked them.

They had to decide a letter, defeat some alien bugs, rescue a trapped wanderer from some jewelled beetles, and they also decided to try eating some glowing blue mushrooms. (Because as I’ve learnt, if I make a suggestion in the right tone, they’ll do it 😂) They really enjoyed it, and despite worrying I’d made it too short, I’d probably actually made it too long. However I’d made it just about the right difficulty. 😅

I quite enjoy running an adventure for them, and they seem to enjoy it too. I think the next one I’m going to use a pre-made one to give myself a bit of a break.

[no-named-hero]

I’m taking the girls to their climbing lesson today, which meant I was going to be hanging around for an hour for them. I decided to crack on with my next book, and brought along some strawbs to snack on.

This book is good so far. A bit different to my usual book choice, but really funny. 😁

Just enjoying the relaxing as opposed to the awakening this morning from a child who urgently needed to ask me “what’s Panda in Portuguese?” Like it’s not 8am, go away!

[no-named-hero]

As per my previous post I’m unfortunately being forced told to use A.I. by our customer, and this was literally the interaction I had yesterday.

Me: “Ok A.I. please convert this HAL to an APEX, following this template.”

A.I.: ….thinks and computes for (no joke) nearly 10mins.

A.I.: “Ok done, but it won’t compile.”

Me: “Please try and fix why it won’t compile.”

A.I.: Thinks for a few moments. “Ok, I’ve changed the security rules on the platform”

Me: “WTF?! Don’t change the rules, fix the APEX to adhere to the rules.”

A.I.: …thinks again for nearly 10mins. Then proceeds to delete everything it’s just created, so I’m back to where I was 20 minutes ago.

A.I.: “Finished.”

Can I just do it myself please?

[no-named-hero]

Had a great time today going to see Games In Concert! It was like the PlayStation one we saw last year, but this orchestra was definitely better!

My favourite piece I’d not heard before was the Baulder’s Gate theme, whilst I most enjoyed the final piece from Cuphead. I forgot what good soundtrack that game had!

We were supposed to be doing sausage casserole for dinner tonight, but driving back we were both absolutely starving, so we dropped in to our local Chinese takeaway and watched some Ted Lasso. Such a good day!

[no-named-hero]

All good habits start from somewhere! 👍🏻

Me and L are trying to learn Japanese 🇯🇵 for when we go to Japan (hopefully) next year. It’s been ages since I was learning a new language, and Duolingo seems to be pretty good at it so far. We’re also looking to get some text books to work through once a week too. 🙂

[no-named-hero]

Summer is definitely upon us.

[no-named-hero]

This weekend gone was so awesome! I took Friday off and met my friends in York, because they were over from Sweden! I realised we hadn’t seen each other in 12 years!! 😬

But it was great to catch up and hang out. We went to the Railway Museum, and then back to my Mother In Law’s house as she said she would host us all. Then L finished work and met us, and we all had a nice evening.

Saturday we took a trip to Bolton Abbey and had a lovely stroll round, before treating them to Billy Bobs (still haven’t made the magic 100 visits yet!) for a big lunch! 🍔 We played a load of board games in the evening, and had some amazing drawings in Scrawl. 😂

It was so lovely to see them again, and I’m going to make sure I come over there in under 6 years next time. 😂

[no-named-hero]

We’ve lost one of the guys on our team at work because the customer is doing a head count reduction. That sort of thing happens, and it’s not that uncommon, but we’re frustrated at how they decided it was him.

They are basically ranking us purely by how much code we commit. Not only that, but they use an AI to assess the “complexity” of our changes and gives us a score.

Thats generally a shit way to measure our work, but even more so for us because we’re a platform team, so the majority of our work is fixing bugs or platform maintenance. Neither of which generally involve much code to be committed.

For example, I spend 3 days investigating an issue, and after a lot of iteration cycles, I finally figure out that there’s 2 settings I needed to change. Thats a super simple change, so I’ll get marked low, but it doesn’t take in to account the 3 days of work I did to figure that out. Or, I realise the issue is with another vendor. I raise an issue on them, they take a week to get back a simple patch for us. I apply it, and get marked on a low complexity score again, and it took 7 days.

The whole scoring thing is just shit and I hate it.

The sooner this crap AI bubble bursts the better.

[no-named-hero]

Definitely one of the more stressful Eurovisions I’ve seen. 🙄 Thank god for Bulgaria, coming from nowhere to steal it.

[no-named-hero]

This weekend has been super chill just me and L getting to spend some time together. We took a trip out yesterday to East Riddlesden Hall for a wander around, and saw this amazing sight! The plant had grown up around the tree! It was incredible. 😊

We also stopped off near my work and grabbed some pizza as she’d always wanted to go there but the only she went was on a work night out and people were just drinking.

The pizzas were awesome still. 🍕

We also played board games, which we enjoyed, but the game was REALLY hard to win, so we’ve decided to make it easier next time.

We also watched Rental Family, which was nice, but fairly predictable. It was good to see Brendan Fraiser in something again though. 😊

Been so nice to have one of those weekends together. ❤️

[no-named-hero]

How I got my reputation at Swing Revolution…

Teacher: So it’s going to be based on our contact points, which we will be…. I’m so sorry but I’m distracted by this gentleman’s socks. Are they shark socks?

Me: Oh, ha ha, yes they look like they’re eating my legs. (Makes omnomnom noise as I pull them up a bit)

Stranger 1: Hey, weren’t you the guy who wore the shark top yesterday?

Stranger 2: Never mind yesterday, he’s wearing a shark top today!

Whole Class: Chuckles 🤭