It was a dull week this week and I fear I won’t have so much to say, perhaps I’ll add some filler somewhere. Victoria went back to Twickenham early as it was too cold to do much outside.

Bridge with Alan was very much up and down, 57.67% and 2nd East-West with a full house on Monday in Barnstaple. A miserable 40.26% online on Tuesday evening, we started really badly and fortunately crept up through the 20% and 30% marks. This is embarrassing, I really don’t want to be as low as this. Must do better. But how come, good one day and then terrible 24 hours later?

I had some good news work wise, but I can’t talk about it here until a contract is closed. It is something that I have been wanting to happen for a while, whether I will feel the same after 6 months, time will tell. One thing I can say is that all the hard work I’ve put into Maximo Secrets for years looks as if it will start to pay off, and it will keep me employed this year and hopefully another year after that.

I made it into the Hugh Gurney room (living room) again on Wednesday, lit the fire, started the heating a bit earlier than normal to drive out the chill, and settled down to proofreading the articles for ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’ website.

The week has been dominated by trying to get the posts finished and loaded to the new website and I have been burning the hours to do so. Finally on Sunday morning thediaryofadigitalnobody.com went live. A new domain was purchased, I think the Personal plan was £3 a month, not much anyway, and 6GB disk space, so it won’t rob the bank for someone looking to create a digital scrapbook.

I’ve opted for the Twenty TwentyTwo (blue) theme which is using the new Full Site Editing (FSE) feature that provides blocks to change every aspect of your website design. At the weekend I was grappling with the Templates and Template Parts, and I confess to not entirely understanding them. I was making a last finishing touch before going live on the website, when I thought better just check my other pages, Oh NO!! Where has all my content gone?

I had been trying to convert the Home page to a static page as I have another page for Latest Posts. I was removing the Query Loop Block from the Home Page and it removed all the posts from the other pages, leaving them basically with just a banner. That’s when I realised that the Home page is not based on the Home Page Template but the Page Template and I must have been editing the template rather than just the home page.

I don’t think I could recommend to a new blogger on WordPress starting with any theme based on FSE, probably easier to start with one of the themes that is not FSE. There looks to be three modules of training for FSE on WordPress https://learn.wordpress.org. Looks as if all the training under the Learn tab is free. I’ll have to do the FSE training, if I can find the time, which perhaps I’ll be able to, now that the new website is launched.

I haven’t been reading anything this year, 150 pages of a John le Carré novel, which I’ll probably need to restart when I do resume it. The title of my new website is loosely based on the title of a book written by George and Weedon Grossmith called ‘The Diary of a Nobody’. I thought I can’t possibly go live with the website until I’ve read the book. Victoria brought it back with her last weekend and I read it over a few nights, and thoroughly enjoyed it, a 4.3 on my 0-5 scale, and rarely have I been above 4 lately, which is probably why I’ve been reading less.

And now for a bit of filler. My readers (or listeners if I do launch the podcast) won’t know this, but I cut my teeth on blogging not with Maximo Secrets but with a website hosted by Google called Paperback Secrets. For decades I hardly read a book apart from the occasional work related textbook. I think there was a period when I was travelling a lot on the train and I went through the works of Agatha Christie, and Stan Barstow (A Kind of Loving), who probably remains one of my favourite authors, and Mary Wesley, of The Camomile Lawn fame. That is not much of an exploration of literature over perhaps 30 or 35 years, meanwhile Victoria reads a book a week, and we have more than a thousand books to read at home.

Why did I start blogging and why Paperback Secrets? It was November 2013 and at IBM Global Business Services, the industry team I worked in had a group away day meeting. I remember it well, for two reasons. The first because of a discussion on how to retain our Indian colleagues who we worked with on projects where the attrition rate was poor. There were the obvious comments about pay them more, but then I piped up and said that you needed to pay particular attention to the ladies and the conditions during maternity, because they are far less likely to leave after they start a family. Several people turned around at me and wondered what the hell I was talking about. But it was the experience I had had, the guys in my teams kept on being poached by the other global system integrators and going off on contracts, particularly to Australia, until I think I only had ladies in my team, apart from the excellent Arul, who really wanted to come to the UK. The ladies were more content to remain in a stable job, and not risk moving on. It was only my experience and cannot be considered a sweeping statement.

The second reason for remembering the meeting from 9 years ago is because there was a talk from Andrew Grill who had recently been hired by IBM. He is now on the speaking circuit and has his own podcast ‘The Actionable Futurist’ https://actionablefuturist.com. His talk was about how the marketing world was changing to digital channels and you all needed to get onto LinkedIn and start promoting your skills, through blogs, or other mediums. I think that evening I updated my LinkedIn profile that I had set up on my wife’s birthday 2 years previously and hadn’t touched since. That was when I started to look at LinkedIn daily and started connecting as I still do today.

On the Saturday of that week, I launched my first blog post on Paperback Secrets, a review of ‘Every Contact Leaves A Trace’ by Elanor Dymott. I thought I would need to work on being a blogger before starting one to do with Maximo. The reason it was a blog on paperbacks was because as soon as I have read a book I can’t remember a thing about it, often not even the title or the author. Why’s that then? I think of my brain like a hard disk it only has a certain capacity, and it will throw out things it doesn’t need to remember, mine is stuffed full of Maximo things I need to remember leaving little room for much else. I sometimes wonder when I finally retire whether I will feel lightheaded or whether I’ll feel my much reduced brain size rattling around in its skull. Nonsense of course, but these are thoughts that have passed my mind, and perhaps, therefore, this is why I am obsessed about obsessions, you might call them hobbies, so that I have something to fill the void when Maximo is no longer part of my life.

This delve into history has just made me look up when I started to write about Maximo, and I have just found my first article written on 12th August 2009. Unfortunately, over the next six years I spread the articles over lots of different file folders rather than keeping them all in one place, and after I got fed up constantly searching for something I knew I had written I decided to put them into a blog. At first Maximo Secrets was on Google, with the first post or 12th April 2015 I then moved the articles to WordPress at the end of 2016.

I think I’ve deviated far enough from this week’s diary, but the reason for mentioning Paperback Secrets is that I will move over the 26 reviews I wrote in 2013/2104 to ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’ and I aim to continue with the reviews as I read additional books in the future. Hopefully this will stop me from reading books that I’ve read previously only a few years earlier, which I’ve done at least once in each of the last three years. Each time, I’ve read the whole book with the occasional nagging feeling that I’ve read a book with similar passages, only to find that when I enter the book on the MyReadBooks spreadsheet that I’ve already read it.

On Saturday I was on my own, Victoria and Reggie were seeing friends in Swanage. It was a sunny morning, and I continued the hand weeding around the patio. By the afternoon it was gusting 40 mph and I shut the greenhouse doors early. No walk, Fitbit is showing poor performance for the week, but I’ll boost it tomorrow when I play golf. One of the builders came with a scaffolder to review the stable block where scaffolding will be needed for a new roof. Hopefully I’ll get the quote early next week, they promised mid-week, Tuesday I said hopefully, we’ll see.

In the afternoon I spoke to my brother Paul, Irina is staying with him but will be going back to Russia and the end of the month, she came over to the UK just before the troubles started. Irina must now go back via Istanbul where there are still flights. They are both worried that future travel will become very limited as sanctions make it difficult getting maintenance parts for the fleet of Boeing and Airbus. Paul reckons that progressively through the year the number of flights especially international ones will diminish. Irina lives in Irkutsk, Siberia which is 3 days and 11 hours by train from Moscow – ouch!

Golf on Sunday with Peter was windy although it calmed towards the end of the round, but it was so slow following behind the Open 3 Ball event, which is the first main competition of the season. Disaster first half, hardly anything better than a double-bogey, and the ball I had had for 4 rounds was lost. Just when I thought I had forgotten how to play, I did have a much better second half of 43 including a birdie and a triple-bogey on the last after a great drive.

Never mind, perhaps next week will be a better one all round.