Raisa Bruner, writing for Time:

Hugh Grant is one of our most iconic rom-com leads, often playing a dashing — but hapless — British suitor.

In perennial favorite Love Actually, he achieved perhaps the pinnacle of the form, even going so far as to very winningly dance through the halls of his residence at 10 Downing Street (also known as the prime minister’s home) to the tune of the Pointer Sisters’ “Jump (For My Love).” The spring in his step is all due to love, of course.

But it turns out that the actor wasn’t actually very keen to get his groove on.

I certainly read some strange articles. But at leat for myself, this was pretty interesting. I’m not embarrassed at all to say that I’ve watched Love Actually quite a lot of times, and this dance is my favourite scene.

It was a slightly productive day at work today. I was pairing with someone while writing some tests in Java, and a I also helped infrastructure/api developers move one of our apis into AWS. It was certainly not as straightforward as it was suggested.

After I got home, I cooked barbecue chicken and potato wedges for dinner. My girlfriend would have cooked, however it appears she’s coming down with a flu. So that was my job.

She did make me a cheesecake though! A very nice one made with malteasers. It’s going to last for quite some time as well.

After we ate, we watched the film Lucy, as it was on television. It’s still absolutely weird. Fascinating though.

My girlfriend is now tired from being ill, and I’m just generally tired. So I’m writing this and then I’ll be going to bed.

Nothing special about my work day today, but after work I went to Vegan Nights!

That of course, means I had vegan food for dinner. I had barbecue ribs and chips. The ribs were basically slabs of seitan in a barbecue sauce. Sadly I’d only rate it 6/10. However I did have a blueberry cheesecake, which was very nice!

The train home was another huge chunk of the day. So I spent that reading Twitter, Micro.blog, News, and even played around with my phone in greyscale mode. I was pretty bored.

Now I’ve had a shower and I was just about to get my laptop out. But my girlfriend helpfully reminded me that it’s nearly 12, so it’s basically bedtime!

I ended up working from home today. It sounds good, but the internet connection at work has been having issues recently, so any kind of video call is a pain.

Luckily it meant I could be home as soon as I finished working. I spent the next few hours playing a relatively new character on World of Warcraft.

I then “popped out” for some food shopping with my girlfriend, and about an hour and £120 later, we’re done. That should be us fully stocked for a while!

We’ve since had pizza for dinner and been watching some YouTube videos.

My plan for tonight was to stay awake, and then take part in the World of Warcraft Classic beta event. However, in my local time it’s 12 am to 2 am, so it would not be the best decision. And it’s just about 11 pm and I’m getting tired. I guess I won’t be able to make it.

Who would have guessed, it was time for another coffee tonight. I’m getting to a stage where they know my order, and occasionally remember my name. Maybe I need to go a tiny bit more often for them to remember. Clearly 2 or 3 times a week isn’t enough.

I did manage to get in about an hour of World of Warcraft as well tonight, which is honestly getting a bit boring. I tried to combat this by playing on a low-level character, going through old content. But there’s only so much of this you can play in one go.

Finally, I activated my Micro.blog hosted micro blog. I wrote about it on the blog, and of course you can find my blog over at chrishannah.micro.blog. I should have a cleaner redirect available from micro.chrishannah.me, but that’s pending on the SSL activation, as my domain is HTTPS only.

It was a relatively quiet day at work today. A few people were on holiday, and we had some meetings scattered throughout. Not a hugely productive day for anyone.

After work, me and my girlfriend went out for date night. We went to a local Indian restaurant which was very nice!

Now we’re going to bed, and about to watch A Bugs Life. All because I told her that the caterpillar is called Heimlich and she didn’t believe me.

After getting in at about 3/3:30 am, I woke up with a rather sore back. I have no idea how I caused it, but I bet it was while I was in a drunken state last night.

Between the morning and early evening, we were mainly playing computer games, and entertaining the cat!

For dinner, we were invited round to my girlfriends parents house for a Sunday roast. And after that we stayed for a few extra hours while we talked about gardening, and what I can do with our new garden.

Today was a housework day. My girlfriend was coming home in the late afternoon, so I got the house cleaned and tidy. I also did the usual laundry type chores.

After I was done cleaning my own house, I went to my parents house to get their house ready as well. As we were having a barbecue for my brothers 21st birthday. It was a pretty good night, with a lot of alcohol being drunk. And according to my girlfriend I was actually drunk for once!

In the day time I did manage to publish two things to the blog:

• They’re Features, Not Bugs
• 3 Stooges Syndrome

World of Warcraft Classic now has a release date, and it has also entered into a beta testing phase. Which means some players are now getting the chance to either remember what World of Warcraft was in the early days, or in some cases I imagine they are seeing it for the first time, depending on when they started.

If you want to read more about WoW Classic, I would recommend checking out the website. But the short version, is that after 15 years, WoW has grown to be quite a different game than it once was. The sense of community has gradually disappeared, with more tools being added to the game, that simply add you to a random group to do a certain task, and then you leave. Before it was more organic. Another major difference is the difficulty, WoW was full of challenges, and although everything was a lot slower, you felt like you really earned any reward you got.

Just for the record, I’m going to play this game like mad.

So, while beta testing has been going on, there are clearly some people that either have clouded memories of the past, or just had completely different expectations. So much so, that Blizzard has had to write a post on the forums titled “WoW Classic “Not A Bug” List“. To inform beta testers that the bugs they are reporting, are actually art of the game. And most likely were there for some time.

They introduced the post in the most polite way I could think of:

As we’ve discussed before, the nature of WoW Classic sometimes invokes different memories for different players, and this leads to certain misconceptions for some about what is or isn’t working as intended.

I find it funny thinking about all of the reported bugs, and how many of these are actually features that people have forgotten about. It appears some people are going to have a bad time when they first play WoW Classic.

Read the full post on the WoW forums

 

Since the start of this year, I’ve been writing a daily journal on a separate part of this blog.

After I started writing the entries, I realised I didn’t want the boring task of creating the file in a specific directory, and creating the same title/header over and over again. So I added a tiny bit of automation.

Things Task

The first thing I did was to set up a task in Things, that repeated every day, simply to tell me to write my journal. After a while, I noticed that I would sometimes get very close to 12 before remembering about it. So I added a reminder for 11 pm, which gives me a bit of time to delay and still get it done in time.

Journal Template Shortcut

To take the hassle out of creating the initial file, I created a relatively small shortcut that creates the template and opens it in iA Writer.

I have a specific directory for my journal entries, and this keeps them all in one place.

It also uses the current date to create the filename and the heading for the post.

From there, it opens iA Writer, so I can jot down what I did in that day. And it’s ready to be published

You can download my “Journal Template” shortcut for reference.

Linking the Shortcut to the Things Task

While Things is useful enough to help me remember I need to write my entry, and the shortcut helps to create the initial file, I also linked these together.

I did that by adding a custom URL into the body of the Things task, so whenever it notified me, I could tap on the task and then on the link. It would then launch the shortcut, and lets me immediately start writing.

It also allows me to not starting right away, as sometimes I’m not in the best place to do it, or I just want to put it off a bit longer.

The url is quite simple, and is in the following format:

shortcuts://run-shortcut?name={name}

{name} is the name of the Shortcut, but URL encoded. You may be able to work this out yourself, but my app Text Case can also do this for you.

More Automation

After I finish writing my journal entry for the day, I then publish it to my blog. I use the built-in “New Draft on WordPress” share extension, which then opens the draft in Safari where I can add the category, and publish.

It’s a reasonably quick task, but something else I plan on automating. So in the near future, I will be creating another shortcut, that can take the latest journal entry and publish it to my blog using the specific category and time I like.