Week 67

Sunday 28 June 2020

It has been warm. I’m a sweaty little man, but that’s just a failing of my glands, and it’s bad form to complain about it being warm.
Lots of traffic about. I can believe that it’s still less than usual, but I’ve looking back and forth along the queues of motor cars at the traffic lights in campy disbelief, like, where are you all going. I also glared at a driver I saw fiddling with his mobile phone.
Some cycling. Went quite a long way to see my da, and explored some of the off-road cycle paths – they’re quite good, aren’t they.
Time for some observations about the novelty of living near a football stadium where, finally, some matches have been played.
- I walked past Martin Keown. He hadn’t donned his mandatory mask yet – not sure I’d’ve recognised him if he had – but, even so, I wasn’t completely sure it was Martin Keown until, later, I searched Twitter to see people complaining about Martin Keown’s punditry.
- Yesterday, there was a drone buzzing about overhead. This meant I could tune into the BBC and see that the Morrisons car park was empty so I wouldn’t need to queue to buy tomato juice.
- Some fans gathered to watch the team coaches (more coaches than usual, for distancing, I think) arrive and depart. Clearly they, like me, were excited by the Van Hool Astromegas, Mercedes-Benz Tourismos and Plaxton Elite is, not the famous masked athlete passengers.
😍 Liverpool.

Week 66

Monday 22 June 2020

I was unlocking my bicycle from the rack downstairs – it’s not quite the same as these, but has the same problems, designed to leave as much space as possible for cramming in motor cars, at the expense of being far less useful than a Sheffield hoop – when a motor car appeared, seemingly reversing straight into me. I backed against the wall and maybe shook my fist at the impertinence. Eventually I realised the motorist was trying to park in his parking space, which he managed after like ten attempts. He looked about 100 years old, and had presumably died in a war, so, adrenaline pumping, I pedalled away before I could be tempted to make a scene.
The Unbelievable Truth, the most bearable Radio 4 parlour game, has returned. Of all the intra-rona¹ things I’ve seen and heard, it’s the first that’s felt so flat. Perhaps it’s harder for radio, without the crutch of the novelty of seeing people’s curtains and bookshelves. I expect it’ll improve as it “beds in” and everyone gets used to the lack of a studio audience and everything.
My cultural highlight of the week, the thing I’ve watched most this week, is shopping TV presenter Rob Locke, a character played by actor Rob Locke. This is the tweet that started it for me. It’s great to see someone at the top of their game, doing something difficult (presenting unscripted television, three hours at a time) so well. I have found myself watching live, between midnight and 03:00, although more sensible people would just catch bits on YouTube or “on demand”. There are obvious comparisons to Brent and Partridge; my observation is that he has the voice of Greg Davies.
Saw my da with my bare eyes. I believe the verb is “to bubble”. Later that day, I felt all tickly in the throat – crivens – but of course that’s likely a symptom of hayfever.
Sad news that the world’s largest Budgens, which is around here, has been destroyed by fire, which is a bit like the curse of the world’s oldest person. (I wonder which remaining Budgens is now the largest.) It would be churlish to focus on the loss of some expensive quiche, as the main thing is it’s a huge blow to the local workers, suppliers, and customers.

I was going to say post-rona, but that seems to mean “in the future, when this long nightmare is over”, not “after the start of this long nightmare”, and I’m assured that intra is the one in between pre and post. ↩

Week 65

Monday 15 June 2020

Crivens.
I had a life affirming rabbit curry. You might think “Deliveroo” is a service purely for the delivery of food make from Winnie-the-Pooh’s friends, were they going to call it Kangaliver, but it came via a different unicorn.

I have some complaints about their weirdly bad handling of addresses and postcodes and things. Hmm.
Less jetlagged. Going to sleep when it’s dark, like a person.
For weeks, I’d been looking forward to seeing some rail replacement buses and coaches, and sure enough I did, and took some photographs. How wholesome.
Finished watching Law & Order UK, by which I don’t mean I’ve watched all of it at all – I skipped past some series, and it was a relief when the smug guy got replaced by a different smug guy – and it’s a bit bootlicky.

Week 64

Monday 8 June 2020

Crumbs.
A gruelling week at work down the data mine. Some intense data wrangling, and then, as a sort of treat, I did some other things like finally changing a certain primary key to a surrogate key, and moving from Travis CI to GitHub Actions.
A noticeable spike in website traffic on Monday, coincident with the increase in numbers of (empty) buses driving about.
I’ve been jetlagged, which is something as I haven’t been on any jets.
Such a shame that Iain Lee and Katherine Boyle’s radio programme, on the upsetting talkRADIO, is no more. I’d only been listening for a month or so, like I’m cursed or something (although there’s no other evidence to support that). On the other hand, a relief that I’ll never have to listen to talkRADIO again.
A(nother) birthday Zoom, which was a verb even before the zeitgeisty videoconferencing app had been thought of. We had a good old ding dong around the old Joanna, and the thrill of seeing people’s bookshelves and things extends to one’s extended family.

Week 63

Tuesday 2 June 2020

Well, shit.
Rode the bicycle to some kinds of countryside. Found a smashing meadow, and a quiet route past the local sewage works.
It’s been hot, hasn’t it? (so hott!!!💯) Some truffles I had for my birthday, not the dog or hog kind, all melted, forming two enormous megatruffles, showing that natural light, big windows aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and maybe there needs to be a hog around to snaffle food before it melts. I’d been being curiously abstemious, despite looking forward to having a useful pot to put things in – a pot marked truffles, which will be a funny joke when it’ll contain teabags or something.
Some work. Following Michael Green/Sebastian Fox’s announcement of some extra coin, they are increasing the frequency of some bus timetables back to more normal levels, which timing I don’t fully understand. This motivated me to do more work to ingest more timetable data from more different places (qv).
- There are some problems with the Bus Open Data Service (beta), which I should probably email someone about. Where possible, I’ve been avoiding it – Stagecoach have an informative web page; for First, I had to guess some filenames (http://travelinedatahosting.basemap.co.uk/data/first/FirstHampshireAndDorset.zip, etc).
- The TransXChange standard is the gift that keeps on giving – new hidden depths of complexity I’m only discovering after nearly five years of what turns out to have been a sheltered life dealing with comparatively nice data. But I can feel smug that my code and I are good enough to evolve to cope.
The website traffic is just about perceptibly increasing each week from its nadir. Of course this is to do with people planning necessary journeys, not joyriding psychogeographers.
Been watching Law & Order: UK, which I mention in part because the Palatino italic ampersand looks pretty. There are better things you could watch. The highlight is when the name “Dick Wolf” flashes on the screen.

Week 62

Monday 25 May 2020

The evening is a good time to go to the supermarket – no queue, fewer people dithering about yoghurt.
Walking to Lidl, I encountered several steaming folks who must be having a tough time. That was a bit sad.
I have a bicycle again. As previously mentioned, hooray, and think I’ve been lucky to find an adequate one. I have some complaints about the bicycle storage here – the motor cars get much more, better sheltered space, which their drivers don’t have to lift their cars onto – even the bins are better located – but is this the place for those complaints?
I have partaken of some Chinese meal deliveries. I heard that unconcious racism means Chinese businesses are particularly struggling, and I live downhill, and give a bigger than average tip (based on what I’ve learned from r/Deliveroos), so it feels like a good thing to do. But the food hasn’t been that amazing, and it’s expensive. Hmm.
Unforgivably, Dominic Cummings uses the word “blog” when he means “blog post”.

I was also going to mention that he appeared to have a Tesco bag for life in the recycling bin outside his house, but it turns out that Islington Council says you can recycle plastic bags, so that’s OK.

Week 61

Monday 18 May 2020

I did some work. Great times.

The government has been doing things relevant to my interests. Their safer travel guidance for passengers briefly linked to my website, before someone decided there are more credible websites that aren’t run by one dude in his underpants somewhere. Then they laid some draft legislation before parliament, which is like I’m being subtweeted with vellum. (Although I know, because it’s still a draft, there’s no vellum involved yet.)
I got disqualified from the cress growing competition, because I haven’t been checking Twitter enough. Well, it’s good to have it confirmed that I don’t look at that internet site too much, and, anyway, I don’t want to compete in any cress growing competition that would accept people like me as a competitor.
Having been without a bicycle for two months, for reasons, I finally went to the bicycle shop. It’s a bad time to try to buy a bicycle, because more people than usual are buying bicycles for exercise, instead of using public transport, and to take advantage of there being fewer motor cars about – and good for them. It’s good to have a bicycle, and I look forward to having one again.
There is a new series of Michael Lewis’s podcast Against the Rules. Lewis’s insistence on linking everything to the theme, the role of the coach in public life, or something, is annoying. The first episode contains the stunning revelation that financial institutions act in their own best interests and are generally swines – who knew?

Lewis’s podcast contains an an advert (in which he weirdly says “backslash” when reading out the website address) for his pal Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, which is itself a long advert for Lexus motor cars. For maximum Alan Partridge points, Gladwell even makes special mention of the breakfast buffet he had on his trip to Japan.

Anyway, you can’t move for people observing that you can’t move for podcasts these days, so why on earth would you listen to either of those podcasts?

Some other things happened, but that’s enough things for this week. Keep your pecker up.

Week 60

Sunday 10 May 2020

It was my birthday. Months ago, I had planned, unprecedentedly, things such that I’d have spent the day travelling back from somewhere. Needless to say, that’s not how I spent the day. I did enjoy some cake, which I’d left in the oven for marginally too long, but which was redeemed by containing some pieces of broken up chocolate bunny. Also used Zoom for the first (!) time.
There is a new laptop. (I mean I bought a new laptop. Coincidentally, the company that makes laptops released some new 13″ laptops on the day it arrived, but I’d gotten a 16″.) It’s very nice, and less frail than the old one, and things, but the Touch Bar is an absolute stinker. I keep accidentally touching it, triggering the screen brightness or other controls. Probably because my typing is a bit “hunt and peck”, so my hands move about more than a properly educated person’s hands, but why should I have to change?
BBC Two’s I’ll Get This is strangely compelling. Five consistently eclectic celebrities (like normal people but better) play silly games between meal courses at a restaurant, competing to avoid paying the bill.

Having watched several in quick succession on the iPlayer, one thing I’ve learnt is that Richard Madeley and Eamonn Holmes, both of whom have co-presented ITV’s This Morning with their wives, both, the first to arrive at the restaurant on their respective episodes, dad joke “are these all for me?” upon seeing a tableful of glasses of champagne.

(I should do a joke here about how deft the producers were in editing out all the times the apparent conspiracy theorist Eamonn Holmes presumably espoused various conspiracy theories.)
I’ve very occasionally been listening to Eddie Mair’s programme on the dreaded LBC. It’s OK, but I’m worried about the risk of injury in the rush to switch off when the Farage programme starts straight after.

On the possibly more detestable talkRADIO, The Late Night Alternative with Iain Lee is actually lovely. Although it’s unrepresentative of most of the show, where sometimes troubled listeners phone in to speak to the avuncular Lee, the last bit I listened to was an interview with the great Professor Sir Cary Cooper from last month.

Then this evening I made the mistake of hearing a serious conservative thinker being interviewed on that station, and all the nasty man’s shit opinions made me sad. Ugh.

Stay alert.

Week 59

Monday 4 May 2020

The face is bare again. The skin left behind now seems especially fresh and radiant.
Bought a sun hat, to keep the skin fresh and radiant. It happens to be Canadian, and, at least when I cram it onto my head, has something cowboyish about it, which is quite a statement – but did you ever see a sunburnt Canadian cowboy? I didn’t think so.
The third part of the ongoing saga: there is a new, more repairable and aspirational, new toaster. Took the previous toaster back to the shop. The original toaster sits waiting for the dump to reopen. (A minor thing about devolution is how some chummy councils speak of tips and dumps, whereas others pompositise about household recycling centres.)
Wore the mask for the first time, at a supermarket. Felt sweaty and strange, and very much in the minority, but us trailblazers are needed to blaze trails or whatever.
I found myself reinstalling macOS, which is like a Viz Top Tips way of experiencing the busywork associated with getting a new computer. It didn’t have the desired effect of making the computer more reliable. I have long suspected the third party SSD to be to blame for it getting hot and bothered and IONVMeController related crashes. (Writing this, I’ve learnt there are newer, possibly better versions of that I could try… but it’s slightly too late as I may have just sent for a whole new computer. Oh well, 4–5 years is still a parsimonious replacement cycle for a machine used for Important Business.)
I spent some time identifying a bus seen in Killing Eve. We only see the interior, which matches an Alexander Dennis Enviro400H operated by Tower Transit. Spent some further time taking a screenshot to upload to the Internet Movie Cars Database but the swines silently deleted it, as they had my last contribution.

Week 58

Monday 27 April 2020

I’ve been allowing hair to grow out of my face. It’s terrible and patchy and I’m afraid I keep touching it. Usually it lasts until I see someone else with a terrible beard and am moved to make with the razor. This may be the longest it’s gotten.

I made a mask out from out of a T-shirt and some underpants. Used the ragmask guide. I don’t have a ruler or a printer, let alone a sewing machine, but I managed. We seem to have our heads up our arses, but folks in other countries are recommending their use – not to protect the folks wearing masks, but to protect other folks from them. And, in my case, to protect folks from seeing my terrible chin of hair. Although I’ve not worn mine yet.
Walked to some places. A heath where some overexuberant drivers were driving menacingly. A broad where everyone else and their dog had also decided to take the air – it was a Sunday; maybe it’s less busy on other days.
Delighted that I never finished the second serie of Killing Eve last year. Have now caught up.

Lots of people have been watching Devs. I have joined them, slowly.

The fifth serie of GF Newman’s The Corrputed on the radio could be a cultural highlight of the week. It feels like it could have jumped the shark, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Radio drama is hard.
The new toaster continues to trip the trip switch occasionally. One time was possibly explicable by a stray crumb on the heating element; another, it seemed like it just didn’t like crumpets (trypophobia?). I think I’m within my rights to return it to the shop, right? Keeping a chair beside the fusebox, to climb on to make the electricity go back on, is no way to live.