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.

Work was a real mix today. I spent the morning figuring out issues we were having with provisioning profiles and certificates with our iOS apps. Then I was testing some APIs that are being migrated. And we were also discussing some micro services that myself and my team are going to be building soon, so that’s interesting.

During my commutes, and while I was eating dinner, I did catch up on Game of Thrones. Which means I’ve watched 5 episodes since the start of yesterday. Woops.

I haven’t been that active on my blog recently, but I did link to a great article by Jordan Merric, where he shared some tips on how you can manage Instagram Hashtag sets.

Right now, I’m just getting sorted, and I’m planning to have an early night. I’m not sure how it’s going to turn out though.

Jordan Merrick shared some great tips on how you can manage Hashtags for Instagram:

My iPhone photography workflow includes sharing some of the photos I’ve taken to Instagram. I usually include relevant hashtags to increase discoverability and have a collection of frequently used hashtag sets—different hashtags for the same topic—that I can choose from. I also include a five-dot prefix (each dot on a separate line) to separate the photo’s caption text and hashtags. This is a commonly used method for hiding hashtags “below the fold” so they’re only visible when tapping the more button.

I’ve used specific groups of hashtags before on Instagram, and used a Shortcut to populate the clipboard with them, however these tips are much better than that.

Work slightly as usual today. I’m still working on the same non-mobile project, so I was doing some web/server development. However, I was tasked with a small mobile task, so that was slightly more fun!

After work, I’ve been mainly watching Game of Thrones. I decided earlier that I would try to catch up with the current episodes, and as I remembered, I last watched the first few episodes of season 7. Turns out, either my memory is bad, or I really underestimated the number of episodes in that season. As I’d watched all but about 15 minutes of the last episode.

That means I’m now on season 8, and about to watch the super long third episode!

It wasn’t all laying in front of an iPad though, I did pop out for a quick coffee as usual.

One last thing. Thanks to Federico Viticci‘s and Ryan Crystoffel’s new podcast, Adapt, I now have the plan for the next update to Text Case! Listen to the first episode if you want a clue.

My girlfriend left for Spain this afternoon, so this morning was the last time I saw her. It now means I’m living by myself for the rest of the week.

I don’t think I’ll notice it too much, as it’s only the work week, so most of my time is spent on the commute and at work anyway. However, it still will be a bit weird. And very quiet! Sometimes that can be a good thing, but we’ll see.

As I’m on my own, I had to make myself dinner, which was spaghetti bolognese. That will also automatically become my lunch for tomorrow at work, so that’s very handy.

In the evening, I’ve basically just been watching YouTube. It’s been a random assortment of TED talks, stoicism, journalling, general productivity, and writing videos. There’s a lot to learn on YouTube.