2026-06

For the first time in ages I went for lunch and came out feeling well-fed and not ripped off. So many places seem to be cutting quality and putting prices up. Kami in Kentish Town served up a big bowl of rice, lots of crispy tempura, a tasty sesame salad and miso soup for an entirely-reasonable-for-2026 £15.

We then took the kids to the Tate Modern and spent a good couple of hours in the Uniqlo Tate Play. Essentially this was a big table with paper and paints, but we really enjoyed it. N- drew the Sutton Hoo helmet which he’s been learning about at school. We talked about how drawing helps you see things in more detail and sometimes that’s worth more than the end result. I then showed him how to draw things using 1-point perspective and some different shading techniques with a soft pencil. He really enjoyed coming up with scenes (a street at night, a desert road) and drawing them using the same techniques. “When I get home I’m going to do loads more of these instead of playing Stardew Valley!”.

When we got home he played Stardew Valley.

I met up with a few of the “dads” from our school on Thursday night - stayed nattering until last orders. It was good to get out of the house and we might make a thing of it. We went to the uninspiring Garden Gate because the much better Magdala had an unspecified technical fault.

The Brooklyn Brewery Special Effects Hoppy Lager is nothing like a lager, but is one of the best AF beers I’ve had so far. I also really enjoyed a bottle of Adnam’s Ghost Ship.

On Friday I spent longer than planned making some tweaks and improvements to the CoTech website. I’m taking some pride in trying to make the site as light-weight as possible, and have been experimenting again with different CSS approaches. I’m still not comfortable deciding how to split code between utility and component classes - I certainly couldn’t explain my logic to anyone else. I suspect by the time I have this figured out it’ll all be for nought.

I’m getting very tired of dealing with mountains of AI slop and the lazy non-thinkers who produce it.