Jimmy's Thoughts

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  • Institutional Memory
  • Motorway drainage...
  • In Memoriam
  • Quick Test
  • Contributing to society

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Archive of 2025

July 2024

  • Motorway drainage...

    Well, what a popular one this'll be... I work for a company as one of their "field service technicians", meaning I get a van and drive to our customers to resolve issues they're having with something we sold / installed for them. This can range from a small pub sound system, through office meeting room conference systems, churches (old and new) and onto large public address and voice alarm systems in stadiums and the like. I've been driving quite a bit more recently now the service team is settling into it's stride and the sales folks are actually passing support requests onto the right team, and I've noticed something interesting. Over the past 15-20 years the motorway system has been moving from having grass and a "disposable" metal barrier in the middle to a more solid concrete barrier. This makes it much harder to cross to the opposing carriageway and cause even more damage should you lose control of your vehicle. All well and good you might think, but with no…

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May 2024

  • In Memoriam

    Time passes. I know this as I see and talk about the girls growing up. Lara has just been doing her GCSE exams, Sophie is a teenager and Rebecca is about to start her extra transition days to high school. My body aches at the thought. And yet, one person will not grow old. That person is our first born Joshua, who was still born on the 25th May 2006. Today should be his 18th birthday. A day where I should take him to the pub so he can buy me his first (legal) pint. Instead, I'll go to a nice "old man" pub in town and buy one on his behalf and consider what could have been.

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  • Quick Test

    Testing Something, scheduled posts. Should go live at 3pm, 21st May....

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April 2024

  • Contributing to…

    By which I mean, I found an add-on for Home Assistant that shows which bin to put out, and when to put it out. I know to put out the bins on a Wednesday night (or Thursday morning), but I'm forever having to load up the council site to find out which one to put out (sometimes it's obvious as it's the one that's REALLY full), but it didn't include Bradford council. Thankfully it's on GitHub so I was able to pull the code, find a similar council and write a scraper for it. It's currently being reviewed, and looks like it'll be in the next release, and I've learnt a bit of Python which is nice to add to the list of things I've tinkered with. I will however say that the CRM that the council uses to create it's pages is an abomination. Took me forever with a few tabs open with the pages, inspectors and page sources to find the bits I needed. It's a horrible rats nest of DIVs and heavily nested tables, so much so that what looks like a single inconspicuous table for 'your next bin day' is…

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March 2024

  • Well hello again!

    It's been a while, but I thought it might be worth having a blog again, possibly just for me to brain dump onto, or have a record of how I did something that others might find useful (assuming the various search engines glance this way). But yeah, it's been a while, let's see how this works out! JG

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