James Koole

Sometimes it’s the little things. We’re relocating our outside hose tap tomorrow from an inconvenient location on one side of our house to a far more convenient location on the other side. This is Toronto, so I’m thinking it’ll lead to a $30k increase in property value.

I had the desk, got the chair in the spring of 2020. Frosted the window and added the 27" 4K monitor in the summer of 2020. The personal MacBook came for Christmas in 2020.

Then a Synology came along last summer and I scrounged up the little Samsung monitor (with an Amazon FireTV stick) for YouTube slow tv background visuals and noise.

The storage units to the right are brand new this week and really helped declutter the space visually. Oh, and the LED light for some fake sunshine was an early 2020 purchase as well.

If you asked me in March, 2020, how long I thought it would be until we returned to the office at least part-time, I would have said by the fall. Here we are 27 months later and the answer to that question is now “never”.

I need to paint still but after more than two years working remote, I’m finally making progress in my home office environment.

I did a big desk cleanup last week, and yesterday I put together a pair of storage units from IKEA to further remove clutter and make my office a bit more calming. For the first time in its life, my printer isn’t sitting on a box on the floor.

Speaking as a someone with 15 years in the business of domains and DNS, don’t use DNSSEC unless you have a really good reason why you need to use it AND also understand how it works (and how you can really break things badly). news.ycombinator.com/item

Sure sign that summer is not far away in Toronto: the roof is open for tonight’s Blue Jays game vs. the Mariners. First game under open skies this season.

Successful personal day. Got some expired IDs and such sorted for myself and the kid. Dealt with some banking tasks (old accounts cleaned up, etc.). Assembled some IKEA storage and tidied the clutter in my home office. Much better.

Instagram has a new app icon. I’ll reserve judgment until the rest of the internet tells me whether I should love it or hate it.

Contrast with the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) here in my city which, for whatever reason, seems intent on linking accessibility with handicap or disability. That goes all the way down to using the wheelchair icon on the link to their Accessibility page. Removing barriers to transit usage is more than accommodating disabled riders. Step-free describes the removal of physical barriers beautifully and I wish the TTC used that term here.

Accessibility should be inclusive of all barriers, both physical and non-physical. That could include things like financial barriers, language, wayfinding, safety and even where transit is provided in the city to ensure that all residents have equitable access to move around their city.

Also kudos to Transport for London (TfL) for the work being done to provide step-free access on more and more of the network. tfl.gov.uk/travel-in…

The British term “step-free” when describing fully-accessible stations on the transit network is so nice. It’s a brilliant description of exactly what the stations are without ascribing a specific use case or type of user. From the street to the train, there are no steps.

Finding myself rooting for the Penguins tonight, mostly because of Crosby. But I have the Rangers in my bracket so…

(what a goal that was!)

Wow. Another epic first round collapse. Gotta love the consistency from the Leafs!

Leafs fans get a Game 7 vs. Tampa Bay on Saturday that absolutely none of them want.

Mayor John Tory proving he’s both out of touch, and also no fun. City Council in Toronto voted today to adopt his motion to NOT allow consumption of alcohol in Toronto public parks. Want to smoke weed in the park? Sure…no problem. Sip on some wine or have a beer? CALL THE COPS!!

Switched my Garmin over to an “analog” watch face from a digital one. Inspired by a section in this post from Douglas Adams in which he suggested that digital time was less meaningful than the analog (hands) representation. I’m giving it a try for a bit.

I used WordPress for a long time but over the last few of years, they’ve lost me. Seems the rest of the world is starting to agree. It’s not good for building a site in the ways that site builders like Squarespace and Wix are. joost.blog/wordpress…

Hmmm. Got half way there…I can get it to fill the username and password now (the UX to link an app isn’t all that intuitive). But we use an OTP as well and it won’t fill that at the same time. It tries to do it in two steps.

1Password 8 for Mac is awesome (been using it since the initial betas). One thing I can’t figure out is how to get it to fill Cisco Anyconnect VPN app. I suspect it’s something the Cisco app is doing and not 1Password? Ideas?

Highlight of my day at work? An anticlimactic deployment to production without a CR, Ops or anything. For years, we dreamed of this and now…here we are. Merge the pull request, deploy to PTE and all the tests run in Github actions and a little bit later it’s live on production.

Enjoyable Miami Grand Prix. Pity it was just a 10 lap race as the first 40 or so were a complete snoozefest. Thank goodness for a safety car near the end to make for some excitement to the finish.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there.

Well…that went okay? Took way longer because network (it’s always network). But we’re back up and running.