Trimmings

Living in this house and usually not seeing anyone surrounded mostly by pixels and reminders of my lack of energy in the form of things that need to be done at some point has got me thinking. I will always tell people how ignorant I am when it comes to politics and current affairs, but so often I read things I think are wrong, or things I think are right but I’m in the minority it seems for thinking so, and I am always on news websites. Seeing how the war is going, seeing how close the Tories are to leaving office, hoping they’ll have a disaster, hoping something will push them out, or that Putin’s had his downfall. It’s not very healthy.

People often talk about opening your mind. Broadening your horizons. There was a time when this was easier for me with more energy. At the moment it feels impossible, but today I’ve noticed improvements in that respect. I’ve been told to take things very slowly; contrary to what many people have told me, going on long walks isn’t going to help. Working up to them is the key or I could end up paying for it for quite some time and needing to rest for a long time after. So this writing is supposed to be positive. A look to the future and a future with more energy than I have now. And one thing that isn’t contrary to the contribution of others is the healthy diet, that’s good for everyone, but in changing my diet, it’s genuinely changing the habits of a lifetime and I’m just not good at it. I like tea but never drink it. It’s like a diversion from the safety of the known.

What are the plans for the future? Do you plan for the future? I’ve been doing it since before I’d left university. I had this huge delusion that I’d get a job and be really well off. Hire a limo. I don’t know why, obviously when I was young I thought I was a big shot. Except I didn’t. I think it was about realising I was more than I believed. About proving something to myself more than anything else and limos and alcohol are fun. Well. Maybe neither of them are. Maybe they’re the kinds of things that you’d expect from some kind of tart from Essex and I’m certainly not that. A tart I mean. I am from Essex.

I did achieve a couple of things today. I deployed an iOS app. I’ve made a change with SendGrid to use the radio station’s own email address to be the sender to improve delivery rates. Actually my Mac is too old to be used to build any apps now if they’re going onto the store. There are a load more updates I’m supposed to be doing but I can’t now. I managed to build what I’d done up to now, though, using MacInCloud. I kind of recommend it and I don’t; it did the job, I think I got it for free as it was a trial, so that was useful, but it’s just too slow to use as a proper machine. Plus I’m not paying out for an app that hardly brings in any cash. I did also try Scaleway…Scaleaway…one or the other. That looked like it might be better but they were out of stock, in their words. Use TeamViewer for that a man told me on YouTube so I thought I’d pass it on. So a new iMac is on the shopping list. Along with a new desktop and a Switch. Which brings me on to the future.

I need to work. I want part time remote work, particularly if it pays well enough to get me out of benefits. Part time or floppy hours. I’ve gone over the kinds of things I want to do so many times, so I won’t do that again, but I will try to find work soon if the energy levels rise much more. It’s just so hard to get people to understand that it isn’t that I’m not trying to listen it’s that I’m thick. Brain freeze. Cogs stop. So definitely working alone if possible.

Whilst, however, I do want to work alone I also want to meet more people. I think most of my life’s been believing that people are just parasites and whilst at its core, and of course I don’t exclude myself from that, it’s true, I’ve also found that because of this belief, when you do meet good people, and there are more than I thought, they’re pure magic. Not only that they can be energising, inspiring and I get all of that because, as I say, I don’t exclude myself and I am indeed a parasite. The only bugger I find is empathy when it comes to having friends. Real friends are people, I think, for whom you share tears, though of course that’s not to belittle what they go through at times or to big me up to say that I feel their problems just as they do, but people you really give a damn about, for me personally, I too cry at times where they will be.

That’s a tangent. Plans. I do plan to visit Brighton. I just really need some money. My support worker didn’t seem to think it was a good idea. And who knows, maybe he’s right. I don’t know if he felt that way because when he asked if it was because I thought I might be targeted I said yes. Of course I do, that was my reality regardless of where it sat within global reality. It was my local reality and I’m still not sure if I’m just trying to convince myself it was all in my head of it actually was. But that’s the plan. And I don’t mind telling you, I have done some brave things. One was going back to Bournemouth and one was coming back here. I have balls when I need them, just not in any kind of fight.

That’s all I can do really. I just need to build up money and energy for anything.

I also wrote about a slider I was building. There is one glaring issue with it unfortunately. I mean I’m pleased with how I’ve got it working. There’s a version of it where you put your slides inside of it in the HTML. You can tell it how many slides you want to show at any one time, and even tell it how many slides you want to display at certain screen sizes. The issue is in the method I’ve used to do it.

If you are showing just one slide on the screen at a time, it’s no problem. And I suppose in theory you could just stick the HTML for three of them in one, though then your instructions for being responsive wouldn’t work. But if you have one slide at a time, then it will prepare the next set and the last set, I say set there’s only one in this instance, by placing them to the left and to the right of the slider. However, if you tell it that you want to show three slides at a time, but you only have four in all, then it can’t put three slides to the left and right of the container because there aren’t enough. I’m a bit bored of it now, but I think there’ll be a solution in injecting more slides somehow. I’ll have to take a look tomorrow, maybe.

What are the scenarios? Well if you want to display four slides, and show two at one time, then you’d need to inject another two. If you have three, but only have four, you’d need to inject another…actually. I think I should make it so that the number of slides in total can fit the number you want to show on screen at one time perfectly. As in if you want two on the screen, you must either only have two, or you can have four or six.

So in my case I want five, but only three on the screen at a time. I suppose that’s another thing; you might have three, but only want to shift one slide at a time. Oh my God I should have just used an existing slider shouldn’t I. Fuck. If you just want a slider for images with text on top it’s fine. I think what I might do is try to make this last scenario work using a shift count and then I should be fine to use it as it is. I can build on it if the need arises and to be honest I’d use a ready made one for client work. I’ll keep it though.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll try and put together a CV together for contracting alone. I just need a cash injection for now and it’ll help with the credit cards. Tomorrow is a metaphor. It never comes. But I do need work. I also need to visit the family soon. And a Switch. Let’s see what happens tomorrow. Food shop. Change.

Also! Next week at the latest I’m back on the learning. The WordPress stuff is coming along and if I can finish this section before plugin development I’ll be happy. Then maybe do the rest the following week.

And, though pixels etc., I may look at a new game for the Steam Deck. And take a look at trains to Brighton; I’m a bit nervous I’ll fuck up my travel if I go there and then get back only to realise there aren’t any buses. I could always taxi it I suppose. Oddly, for someone so antisocial, I very often want to party. I suppose it’s because you can hide in a tunnel of alcohol whilst still communicating with people. It’s easier somehow.

And! I need to find a song to play on the guitar. The scales I’ve been doing are so boring I lose interest. Or just a part of one, I’ve got enough tab.

Self-indulgent writing. But I write this for me, not you. It’s not my fault you got this far.

Okay. I will go to sleep now. I’ve changed the slider so that it only switches one slide at a time but you can still display as many as you want on the screen provided there’s enough to have a slide either side. So if you want three slides on the screen at one time, you need five slides. This is just a flaw in the way I’ve avoided issues with the animation and I think I can live with it. It’ll be usable for what I want it for now anyway. I might change the shift to be a variable and then it’ll be up to the user of the slider to make sure there are enough slides.

Phew…