Ben Curthoys / is on Nostr

Founder, Monad Ticketing.
Trustee, The Maltings Berwick.
Committee Chair, The Red Balloon Preschool Group.
T1 Diabetes.
He/him. Berwick-upon-Tweed.

https://justmytoots.com/@[email protected]
https://justmytoots.com/@[email protected]

Last Notes

2024-06-15 07:49:58

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@npub1200…aqy2 Four no trumps? That's Blackwood! My partner must be hoping for a Grand Slam!

2024-06-08 19:58:48

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@npub19lt…qfjk I've been eyeing up one of those.

2024-06-05 17:11:47

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@npub1psd…9sr7 There are PEOPLE on board? Christ.

2024-06-05 10:02:45

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@npub19lt…qfjk I think Usenet failed because it was a decentralised federated protocol based social network that didn't have a plan for moderation or dealing with spam and porn.

2024-05-17 12:30:50

The line that infuriates me the most is "The crew, made up of 20 Indians and a Sri Lankan national, has been unable to disembark because of visa restrictions, a lack of required shore passes".
Give them fucking visas then! Give them shore passes! Bullshit paperwork requirements that you have imposed are not insoluble problems, the solution is that you just have to recognize when your bureaucratic system has failed, and just fucking ignore it or circumvent it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-69011124

2024-05-15 11:49:53

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@npub19lt…qfjk Square don't charge a per-transaction fee; it's just 1.75%
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/444/478/951/344/180/original/adfa825ff76745aa.png

2024-05-07 21:20:07

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@npub1200…aqy2 But surely cleaning is peak podcast listening time?

2024-04-25 16:15:22

Alnwick gardens from the air looks much more like a diagram of female reproductive organs than I had expected. #northumberland
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/332/273/339/654/475/original/e4a6cab68697f8e0.png

2024-04-23 10:08:28

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@npub19lt…qfjk Shared blocklists and RBL the only way.

2024-04-06 16:12:46

#mosstodon
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/224/636/299/442/216/original/734633626740c9b1.jpg

2024-04-06 16:00:12

#mosstodon

2024-02-25 14:45:32

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@npub1xjt…9ml2
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/992/419/348/153/712/original/894e487f32b6d686.jpeg

2024-02-15 16:34:37

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@npub1jc0…sldg My knee-jerk response of "they sound a bit silly" is easily dealt with by reminding myself that "Bakerloo" and "Piccadilly" would both sound fucking ridiculous if I hadn't grown up with them .

2023-12-19 11:11:09

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@npub19lt…qfjk Interesting. I feel a reply coming on, but this margin is too small to contain it.

2023-09-19 14:34:12

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@npub1vty…u3uz I've started writing an answer to this, but there's quite a lot of it. Is that ok? Obviously you don't know me from Adam and I don't want to go off on a multi-page rant on a stranger's timeline.

2023-09-19 12:58:18

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@npub1vty…u3uz Counterpoint: Brand's actions may well have been perfectly legal, but he's still a shit.
Ostracism within your community and being subject to a boycott is entirely the appropriate response to someone who's an utter bastard but hasn't broken any actual laws.
Despicable behaviour being "not illegal" doesn't make it ok; the Venn diagram of things that are morally acceptable and legally permissible is not a circle and can't be made into one.

2023-08-19 21:48:58

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@npub19lt…qfjk FWIW there was a phase about 10 years ago when Blizzard's WoW Armoury website served pure XML with a stylesheet to render it. It was like the API endpoint /was/ the website. Only major site I've ever seen that actually used the technology.
Hey did anyone invent XSL for JSON yet? I bet that would go down a storm.

2023-08-19 20:22:24

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@npub19lt…qfjk My software makes heavy use of XSL - generating reports and emails.
If you use a FOR XML query you can get complicated, nested data out of a SQL server database in a single query. And then an XSL Transform and some libraries can turn that into a spreadsheet, pdf, html, JSON feed, etc.
So I frequently have occasion to curse the fact that Microsoft never got round to supporting XSLT 2. Bastards.