DigitalOcean gave me a $50 Amazon.com gift card for completing a survey, which is ironic because one of the few reasons to use DigitalOcean is maybe not wanting to use Amazon. (DO isn’t Better than AWS, but being smaller has to count for something and limits its capacity for evil.) And it’s a bit “free as in piano”, because you can’t spend an .com gift card on Amazon.co.uk, or donate it, or use it to buy something from the wishlist of a content creator you admire – you’ve got to find something on the .com that ships to your address, costs exactly $50 including shipping, and is worth the carbon emissions of being shipped overseas. I bought some stationery, and welcome suggestions about how to spend the remaining $2.77.

Had a bit of lurgy, after a blessedly lurgy-free winter, I think it’s tree pollen–related.

🎦 Last week I saw Sinners (2025) and forgot to mention it, so I’m mentioning it now. (You will recall the story about Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at a local road junction, and to this day meeting in a public place like that is recommended by the likes of Gumtree and Facebook Marketplace.)

To Panic Shack at the local arts centre.

My birthday. The craggy face of surveillance capitalism, the Lidl Plus app, what business has it knowing my birthday, sent me a push notification about a free doughnut.

Monday: had an excuse to try the new Flixbus 007 from Stratford to Norwich, which meant squeezing into the tube at rush hour to get to Stratford on time, only to find that it would be departing almost an hour late so the rush had been unnecessary. Fair enough, the previous journey had gotten stuck in traffic and the driver needed a break, but I wished I’d known earlier. I could have thought to use the Flixbus tracker website together with my knowledge of drivers’ hours rules and deductive skills, but also Flixbus’s advanced technology could have been clever and texted us or something.

Something I liked about the Yutong GT12 coach was the screen at the front informing us of various temperatures, humidity, seatbelts and probably the time and date, in a font that might have been SimSun – certainly it reminded me about the semiotic and aesthetic idiosyncrasies of the anonymous Latin glyphs included with CJK system fonts. (They’re monospaced, for a start, but it’s more than that.)

I left my bicycle at a train station over the weekend and a bird shat on the downtube, probably slightly damaging the paintwork. Days later, I bicycled a great distance and another bird shat a (bigger, more colourful) shit on the pannier, and most incredibly a bit went on the back of my trousers too. Any suggestion that this is a sign of “good luck” is of course horseshit, but it’s not all bad news: now I know what part of a bike frame the downtube is, and after washing the pannier and trousers they’re cleaner than ever.

(I forget who was marvelling recently at how for some people “shit” is as acceptable a past participle as “shat” or “shitted”, something irregular verb something.)

Monday: getting off the train from Folkestone to London, gazed admiringly at the French touring bicyclists with their Rapha kits and immaculate touring bicycles. I wished I was them, the preening tossers. Had some time to kill and walked around leafy London with an inflamed lower leg.

The Zedwell Hotel is rather a bit of marketing genius – it’s not just a collection of windowless cells in a former underground car park, they’re distraction-free cocoons that are actually optimised for a good night’s sleep. I didn’t know about the building’s history at the time, but come to think of it, it explains why stumbling lost along the corridors felt so much like a poorly lit version of the The Parking Garage episode of Seinfeld.

Notwithstanding the wastefulness of washing so many towels and bedsheets so often, a hotel is probably Better than a car park. But given that the fellow who owns it is a bit of an arse, I will probably never return.

Tuesday: was mildly inconvenienced by whatever they were filming in Trafalgar Square. Missed a train, and the later train got held up and eventually curtailed by signalling problems, stranding us in Stowmarket. But the shared experience engendered a sense of camaraderie and/or blitz spirit, and people started talking to each other. A pretty boring story, sorry.

Hot cross buns 2025. In a bizarre bit of wanton disorganisation, I had to go back and forth to the shop to get flour, then a lemon, then table salt. (Actually I used the salt grinder instead of going for the third time, which was fine, well the salt was quite coarse but you know what I mean.)

A long Easter weekend in the Liverpool City Region. Got sunburnt in Bootle, and stuff.

One of the best things about the bubble of AI bollocks is the aggressiveness of the crawlers they use to steal content to “train” their models, and yet some of us have the temerity to complain about them generously load-testing our websites for free.

For a while I was using robots.txt to discourage these creeps from scraping my things, but it dawned on me that a more effective sabotage is actually to let them crawl as much of my useless rubbish as they like, and it’s arrogant to think otherwise.

A long weekend in Folkestone. Lovely, but maybe the splendid weather is skewing my judgment.

Somewhat illogically, caught the number 10 bus from Ashford, a slow meander that I warmly recommend. (Embarrassingly, I asked for a ticket to “folk stone”, even though everyone knows it rhymes with Hindolveston, Fulmodeston, Gorleston etc. No one appeared to notice the boob, but I will carry the shame for a while.)

The hotel. There’s a sea view! I didn’t pay for a sea view, so I can’t complain that it’s a sea view obscured by bird shit and blown double glazing. They serve breakfast cereal out of hoppers, so it can’t be a Top Class Hotel. At least some of the money they’ve saved by not updating the decor for 40 years has been passed on to the consumer in the form of lower prices.

Joan as Police Woman (Folkestone Quarterhouse). Not quite worth going to Folkestone for, but Folkestone was worth going to Folkestone for.

Happy Django 5.2, the latest and greatest version of the web framework I chose on a whim ten years ago. Among the sweet improvements there’s a bug I found, which was an engrossing nerd-snipe, and I’m kicking myself for not bothering to engage with the pre-release (alpha, beta and release candidate) versions so I’d’ve noticed the bug earlier, but never mind.

My body clock has fallen impractically out of whack again. I think if I travelled to Brazil it would be great and I wouldn’t experience any jet lag, but… I’ll snap out of it, I’m sure.

To Rachel Fairburn’s show at the arts centre, a good decision. She walks on to She’s Electric, the first ten seconds of which, incidentally, became a slight I-wouldn’t-say-obsession recently and might be the best thing ever invented in Manchester, forget graphene.

So much wisdom in this conversation with Sam “Cambo” Campbell. “When you go for a ride with a cowboy, you might fall off the horse, but don’t forget the sunsets you saw along the way.”

Watched the two thirds of the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy I hadn’t seen before. Obtaining and eating the corresponding flavours of Cornetto ice cream cone dessert (raspberry, classic) is probably a thing people do, but as previously discussed that’s hard.

I might try adding some meaning to my humdrum life by trying every supermarket gooseberry fool.

Gave myself a haircut, and gave the (bustimes.org) website a sort of one too. The urge sneaks up on you and the lead time for appointment-only hairdressers is too long, although yes I know plenty of barbershops allow walk-ins – one I saw had illustrated this with a picture of Christopher Walken, but I can’t remember if the text beneath read “Walkens welcome” or “no Walkens”.

In the following days, I found and snipped some wisps of hair that had escaped the buzz of the electric clippers, and similarly there were bits of website that needed further attention to look right depending on the size of the viewport and the content.

Roll on April: not only is it the start of a new financial year, but it’s permission to turn the page on the calendar on the wall. So is every month, but this month I tried to erase something I’d pencilled in and the rubber made a terrible smear over the middle of month, and I’m looking forward to not having to look at it any more. (I just peeked at April and, troublingly, the picture – it’s the Buses magazine calendar, so it’s a picture of a Duple Dominant II–bodied 1982 Leyland Tiger – has acted as a sort of carbon paper, leaving a faint carbon copy of the month before’s appointments – mainly where I’ve ticked off each sans cans day of Lent.)

My e-reader wasn’t connecting to the internet, so I put the “worry free guarantee (two-year limited warranty)” to the test, and the next morning a gleaming “new old stock” Kindle was at the door – sickeningly efficient. But the replacement wouldn’t connect either, and I realised that I – or rather the quirkiness of my Wi-Fi router – was in fact at fault. In the end it was a boring but ultimately soluble problem, which I’d made more complicated by dicking about with a Pi-hole a while ago, so really it serves me right for such ad-blocking hypocrisy.

I feel bad about the e-wastefulness of it all. I slightly wish the Amazon people had been a bit less customer-centric about it, treated me with suspicion, maybe asked me to try a different Wi-Fi network. And I bet the new new Kindles have USB-C, and maybe they’ve moved the power button somewhere less stupid so the thing doesn’t switch off when you prop it up on a surface (moaned about previously), but this has delayed the point at which it would be acceptable to upgrade.

Resigned myself to having lost my MP3 collection. (I think that’s a synecdoche for a collection that also contained MP4s and FLACs and probably even a WAV or two.) It’s not a big deal – this wouldn’t have happened if it mattered, I’d’ve had backups and a copy on my computer – but I feel like I’ve fallen short of the glory of God. While I was distracted by Spotify, bits rotted and hard drives got wiped and Google Play Music was sunsetted and I stopped subscribing to iTunes Match. (At least I did manage to recover a few albums from an old MP3 player.)

To London’s glittering Palladium to watch another podcast like a loser. Enjoyed it more than some of the critics on Reddit appeared to – guest Julian Clary treated the endeavour with the contempt it deserved, and it finished (quickly) in time for me to easily make the second from last train.

To the medium-sized local venue to see Richard Herring’s show, and several days later to see Ania Magliano’s. Bicycling home, I felt invigorated and stuff, but I don’t know if that’s the effect of emotionally hefty stand-up, or cycling.

🎦 Opus (2025). It’s not about the permissively licensed audio codec. One of John Malkovich’s character’s sobriquets is “the wizard of wiggle”, which is hardly “the nabob of sob” is it. A highlight was perhaps the nicest-looking bread I’ve ever seen on screen.

Anora (2024) was certainly the best film I saw all week.

📺 I had no complaints about the last episode of Severance.

Oops, it was a fake spring wasn’t it.

I’m no chicken – I do the SPF and the DKIM, and now the DMARC – but it seems that some of the emails I send get marked as spam or “junk”, particularly by Microsoft products. This could explain some things, and maybe I haven’t unintentionally offended various people into ignoring me after all. But the possibility that (because they don’t check their spam folders for false positives) they think I’ve rudely broken off contact with them feels actually worse.

In the course of investigating, I logged into my extant Hotmail/Outlook account and caught up with all the misdirected emails intended for other people who have the same surname and initial as me – John, Jason, Jennifer, Jeanette. They seem like cool people with more interesting lives than mine. What if they’ve been getting emails intended for me?

Snagged a buttock on the sharp corner of a drawer, days after I’d similarly injured a big toe. As an increasingly fleshy population living in cramped conditions, more of our furniture ought to have rounded corners.

A man repaired the leak (see last week) by tightening two bolts, which I could have done. Ah, but the man knew which two bolts to tighten. But so would have I. (But the man also serviced the hot water tank, to be fair.)

Spring! The heating’s off and the crocuses are out.

Whatever mistakes were in last week’s dispatch were a final straw that reminded me I’d read something about getting the computer to help with proofreading – “my PhD advisor rewrote himself in bash”. Then I set up pre-commit with proselint, after consulting Boost Your Django DX for help with remembering how to use pre-commit (even though there’s no Django involved here).

Noticed some little puddles of water indoors, and was strangely unconcerned – passed it off as ghosts or a miracle or something. Then it became clear that the hot water cylinder was leaking when it heated up. This clarity came as a relief, because my other theory was that waste water from the shower – sometimes including pee – was somehow defying gravity and coming up through the tiled floor, which is a bit like the olden-times scientists who theorised that maggots etc. could “spontaneously generate” inside rotting carcasses etc.

Landlord suggested using a tray to catch drips, which I found patronising and stupid cos the actual base of the tank seemed to be leaking and there’s no space between it and the floor.¹ But I could Wim Hof it and keep the immersion heater switched off, enjoying progressively colder showers as the hot water ran out, or I could use newspapers (the Daily Star and the New York Times International Edition) to absorb the leak. I recall that someone wise recommended keeping sanitary products around for just such an eventuality, but the relative advantage of newspapers is they’re exempt from VAT these days they’re exempt from VAT just like newspapers.

Had to phone HMRC. Why did no one tell me the hold music was such a bop? If I’d known, I wouldn’t have been so reluctant to call before; and now that I do, I’m almost looking forward to the next time. (It’s still admin and annoying, but it’s right that this stuff is complex and secure because otherwise a criminal might hack in and pay my taxes for me.)

To London town to take in a live RHLSTP.

To the larger local venue to see the Selecter and Steel Pulse; I was more excited about a but b turned out to be marvellous.

What a lot of important work I did this week. Realigned the navigation on this website – I sometimes forget that flexbox is so damn nifty and is a thing you can just use these days – I liked having the “archive” and “search” links deliberately hard-to-find, due to embarrassment at what lay beyond, but then sometimes I wanted to find something from my past and it was annoying.

Looking at the App Store screenshots for Hyperspace reminded me that one can set a custom icon for a Macintosh’s internal storage device, and indeed any file or folder. So I whimsically applied a picture of Lee Mack – you know, because it’s a Mac – then immediately regretted it and couldn’t undo. (Eventually managed to replace the grinning funnyman with the floppy disk icon, phew.)

My most contentious opinion is that plastic recycling isn’t real and is a displacement activity for tackling climate change. Yes I’m fastidious about recycling metal and glass, and even plastic bottles etc., but not plastic that’s dirty or the “recycle with bags at larger supermarket” soft kind – better stashing it safely in landfill, surely, than it mouldering in a flammable warehouse or falling off a boat into the sea. But something’s changed, for some reason I’ve become more optimistic, I’ve gathered some bags and film lids and by Jingo I’m going to recycle them at larger supermarket.

A while ago, they stopped having proper lids on the 450–500g pots of yoghurt. You could send off for a reusable lid in the post, but I missed the deadline. This week, I found that the lid from a small tub of trout pâté fits perfectly on a 450g yoghurt tub, what a game-changer. Does it make the yoghurt taste of trout? No of course not.

Cooking highlights: leeks vinaigrette (leeks were a bit gritty), two big sandwiches.