Week 96

Monday 18 January 2021

On New Year’s Eve I ordered a refurbished chair from an office liquidations company, the sort of place that must be doing quite well out of the vogue for from-home working. Then I listened to a podcast about why it (the Herman Miller Aeron) is not a very good chair, but I felt no regrets because the office liquidators charge more for the podcast dudes’ favourite chair, and they had none in stock anyway. If you had a more thrilling NYE, you’re a liar.

The chair arrived this week, in an upside down box that looked like it had been in a fight – which was entertaining, and hadn’t affected the contents. I still have no regrets.
- The castors are all hairy, but otherwise you’d never guess it’s not a new chair.
- It almost feels a bit too small, but having carefully examined the size chart before purchase I’m sure it’s the right size, just needs to be adjusted properly, and I’m still not fully across what all the levers do.
- I have already made two dents in my desk by swivelling with too much gay abandon. The chair is much sturdier than the desk. People with cardboard desks shouldn’t swivel chairs.
- Sitting properly is different to working in bed or on a clammy sofa or hunched over a kitchen island.
Back on the sourdough train. Made some OK pizza, the steam from which set off the smoke alarm for a few seconds – I need to find some drier cheese, well it’s good to know the alarm works and didn’t appear to summon the fire brigade, and it’s sent me down productive rabbit hole of cleaning various ventilation thingies. Then I made some bread, which didn’t taste horrible and had a nice texture.
Snow! There was some snow, slightly more than the minimum necessary to make the place look pretty, but nothing like as much as they had in other places. Had a circuitous squelch around in the Alaskan fisherman’s wellington boots, which must use some different muscles to walking in normal shoes because there was much stiffness the following day.

A taxi drove fast through a puddle of melted snow, splashing me bigtime – I tasted a bit of the salty spray. I shook my fist angrily, gloves and boots making it hard to extend a middle finger or give chase. I tweeted the taxi company in a friendly not-really-complaint, then immediately deleted the tweet because I’m a coward and stuff, and I’m not quite solipsistic to seriously think the chauffeur had done it deliberately, and I’m not even sure I’d correctly identified the company the taxi belonged to.

Have a nice week.

Week 95

Monday 11 January 2021

Wow, has it only been a week?
I’ve built up an unprecedented streak of at least ten thousand steps per consecutive day on the Pedometer++. (Nothing to do with the New Year – the Gregorian calendar holds no sway over me, thank you.)

After gracefully walking down a hill, I went a-slippery-slide on a muddy grassy knoll, landing on my bum. I think it would have been a funny pratfall to see, if I’d been there to see it.
Had a lot of Turkish grilled meat. I don’t think I ordered very well, and I wonder if one of the more down-to-earth places without pretensions of calling themselves a restaurant would have been just as good.
Snackmasters (Channel 4) is some adequate entertainment in which acclaimed chefs compete to recreate popular industrially produced food (crispy snacks, confectionery, etc). Along the way, we get to see inside the factory where the real things are made, but crucially, unlike the BBC’s Inside the Factory, they’ve realised that’s too thin a gruel to be the main focus, and they haven’t employed Gregg Wallace.
- Which reminds me about the video of the Viennetta production line, set to “Flatley my dear, I don’t Riverdance”. And a version from 2016 on Facebook – I hesitate to call it original, or scorn the Twitter dude’s claims that he couldn’t find the original, because if it’s a video on Facebook then it must’ve been rudely copied from somewhere else, and time is a flat circle.
I found myself listening to David Lammy’s phone-in programme on LBC, which radio station broadcasts hours of unbearably dreadful stuff each day but also some other things. Lammy listed some of the latest ways the orange man has disgraced himself this week, to which the cockney down the line replied, “well, no-one’s perfect,” and that was the most I laughed all week.
Some work.
- I did a tweet about an actually-not-really-game-changing new feature, which was seen and engaged with more than anything I’ve tweeted before, mainly because I don’t tweet. Well, I will continue to tweet more of that kind of thing.
- The latest load of lockdown related transport timetable changes is happening, and, thanks to the progress the industry has made, bustimes.org is much more abreast of it all than it was last year, so that’s something to celebrate and back-pat about.
- I want to save money by paying for less server overnight, on Sundays, etc. So I think I’m going to have to learn about Docker and Kubernetes and orchestrating my containerisation layer. 🐳

Week 94: egg initiative

Sunday 3 January 2021

This amazing investigative journalism about the US bucatini shortage. (And here’s a nice radio interview about it.) I’d never heard of bucatini, in fact I was reading it as “bucanti” in my head for a while, but it turns out to be available even here on rainy plague island (sometimes marketed as “bucatini spaghetti”). I look forward to having some.

I was going to take this opportunity to explete some rage about how fusilli (sometimes known as rotini) is the bestselling and most widely available type of dried pasta, and what a shame that is. But it’s OK.
I did a long bicycle ride – it started off sunny enough to tempt me out, then turned chilly which was a good motivation to keep moving to get home, cool story.

Towards the end, I went a-slippery-slide on a manhole cover. I managed to regain my balance by freewheeling across to the other side of the road, crossing the path of oncoming motor cars who where, fortunately, twenty seconds away – but still I’d been seconds away from getting squashed by a car and occupying a hospital space at a time when they’re in especially short supply.

I wondered if I’d feel some kind of chilling pang whenever I passed the manhole cover again, and the answer is no. I haven’t touched a bicycle since, but that’s mainly about resting my sore bum again.
Happy new year. Some enthusiasts of the Gregorian calendar set, or is it let, off fireworks in the car park outside, which was pretty.
I was just watching Seinfeld, in which Jerome says what sounds like “egg initiative” but is in fact “air conditioner”. Now, if cared more I would call back to things I’d mentioned earlier, like how I bought some duck eggs (because apparently I want to be like Willie Harcourt-Cooze) and found the shells quite difficult to crack (I know about using a flat surface), or how I accidentally broke the shells of two of the eggs I bought from farms I’d come across on the bicycle ride (because of careless pannier packing). But I didn’t mention them earlier. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Filed my last ever EC sales list. It was never exactly onerous, in fact it couldn’t be less onerous, and it was a quarterly treat to receive a free licky brown envelope with which I could do as I please (as I always filed online). May that be my first tangible ramification of breakfast.

Week 93

Monday 28 December 2020

Happy winter solstice.
Some days of isolating even more than usual, and using up most of the things in the fridge, in preparation for entering the support bubble. Then I entered the support bubble.

A relaxing time. Read an entire book, ate a bit of chicken (which I mention because if a fowl is slaughtered for one’s eating it’s only polite that one acknowledges its sacrifice in one’s blog), potato, and so on. (Which reminds me: there’s been a food retail advert on UK commercial radio in recent weeks where a lady says “…those extra-crispy roast potatoes” and the beep beep beep of a fire alarm is heard in the background – how is that alarm sound allowed, don’t they know about the boy who cried wolf?) And, for one whole day, I didn’t do any work.
Made some mince pies (“Christmas pies”). I’d attempted some last week, which were nothing to write home about – perversely, I put some ground almonds in the pastry, and possibly undercooked the shop-bought mincemeat (whose best before date was too far in the future for my liking). These were better, flaky of pastry, but my downfall is mincemeat bubbling over the sides and making everything stucky – what’s that about, not sealing the lids properly with cold water, not pricking holes in the lids, or overfilling?
Tier 4 bebeh.

Week 92

Monday 21 December 2020

Monday. An upsetting “police incident” in the central business district (someone got squashed by a bus). I was going to complain about the way the rozzers parked parked their cars in the middle of the road around the scene, causing a bit of chaos for all the people trying to wait for other buses in a physically distanced manner, but what do I know. Television dramas sometimes suggest that only the most incompetent cops are chosen for “directing traffic”, but that’s got to be specious nonsense.
Some parcel receiving and sending. At last, a use for all the bubblewap I’ve hoarded over the past several months. Hooray for parcel postboxes, and ✊ solidarity with the post office, Royal Mail and other courier company workers, although I know you can’t feed your family with solidarity. And a big 👎 to anyone complaining to corporate Twitter accounts about, say, waiting 100 hours for a “special delivery 48” – maybe some anger at the penny-pinching beancounters is warranted, but you know there’s a pandemic on?
Some work. Got rid of Google Analytics – after years and years, I’ve finally learnt how to use the interface a bit, but hello “sunk cost fallacy” – in favour of Cloudflare’s “privacy-first, lightweight, accurate” alternative. I can’t be really smug about how I’m respecting my users’ privacy and not setting any unneccesary cookies, because I’m still relying on nasty programmatic ads to pay for everything, but what do you expect me to do about that?
My cultural highlight of the week was the live stream (with a one year delay) of Jimbo Acaster’s Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999. Might be the best thing the talented boy has ever done.
Wagwan pandem.
- I lost it when the grand doofus said “NERVTAG” (which is the acronym of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Group).
- My Christmas plans – overnighting for some nights with a “support bubble”, no extended Christmas bubble – remain legal, which is something and shows that we had some sensible foresight, well done us.

Week 91

Tuesday 15 December 2020

As a change from looking at the comments on newspaper websites, I looked at a forum where some angry presumably men were arguing about surround sound. And how comforting it is to see an argument about something that actually doesn’t matter.
Down another rabbit hole, I came across The Forme of Cury. Isn’t written Middle English funny, ha ha.

Tak water and do it in a panne to the fyre and lat yt sethe and after tak eggs and brek hem and cast hem in the water and after tak a chese and kerf yt on fowr partins and cast in the water and wanne the chese and the eggys ben wel sodyn tak hem owt of the water and wasch hem in clene water and tak wastel breed and temper yt wyth mylk of a kow. and after do yt over the fyre and after forsy yt wyth gyngener and wyth cornyn and colowr yt wyth safroun and lye yt wyth eggys and oyle the sewe wyth Boter and kep wel the chese owt and dresse the sewe and dymo eggys thereon al ful and kerf thy chese in lytyl schyms and do hem in the sewe wyth eggys and serve yt forthe.

You know, I think someone from a free market thinktank cooked and tweeted a picture of that the other day. But seriously, of course various folks (not to mention serious people not on the internet) have made proper attempts to follow various recipes.
I felt a bit poorly, but only for a day – what an impressive recovery.
Someone had daubed one of the most profane profanities, and some anatomically incorrect genitalia, on the frontage of a fishmongery. I guess the perp doesn’t like fish, fair enough, but the quality of the graffito was shockingly poor. (Actually, on closer examination of the photo I took, which I’m happy to share with anyone who emails in, I can see that I was a bit harsh.)

Week 90

Monday 7 December 2020

Quite a high density week, but as per usual it’s a shame – especially for the historic ninetieth week – that I can’t remember anything interesting.
Some graffitist has written milk on several pieces of street furniture. I was going to do a funny tweet about how it must have been Mike Gapes.
Blah blah blah I did some bicycling. To see my da, and buy a long supply of sausages, and be impressed by the bicycle parking (including a handy repair station – some Allen keys tied to a post) at a new Co-op shop.

Later in the week I went to what I am calling a “destination shed” where I bought some other produce. Narrowly avoided a faceful of salt when a gritter went past – well, now I know what the lights of one look like in the dark.

Passed a number of rural pubs, most of which weren’t boarded up. At least one was advertising, in addition to normal food, a “Boris menu”, presumably consisting of items minimally satisfying the “substantial meal” criteria. Of course, people will splutter that Johnson didn’t invent the menu, any more than he invented bicycle hire or buses, but … nor was the “Woolton pie” of WW2 rationing really invented by Lord Woolton.
I ended the week having badly timed the making of a loaf of bread. Of course I should have left the dough to prove somewhere cool while I slept, but no, I stayed awake and pushed through until it was ready to go in and out of the oven. Actually, I’d been a bit impatient and it hadn’t risen to its full potential. But think what money I saved by using the electric oven during an off-peak electricity time.

Week 89

Monday 30 November 2020

I bought some things. I’m a bit aware that vulgar consumerism is becoming a recurring theme here, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
- A coat, because, despite my attempts at repairs, the old coat was leaving a trail of feathers everywhere and the zip was broken too. No animals have been expended in the production of the new coat, in fact it’s made of recycled materials, ooh.
- Some trousers, because I have so few trousers that, when my trousers were in the washing machine, I was reduced to walking about the place bare-legged like Winnie-the-Pooh – which was OK because I didn’t need to go anywhere, but what if I had needed to go somewhere (e.g. outside) where you’re supposed to have your underpants under something?
  
  The trouser vendor was slow to dispatch the trousers, which made it more of a delightful surprise when they arrived. The new trousers cover my legs most well, and I’m so impressed I might get a spare pair.
- An electric “foil” shaver, because the electric rotary shaver is most unsatisfactory, and I’m still not dexterous enough with the cool acoustic razor not to cut myself, and perhaps I was influenced by some adverts on Twitter where a homunculus skateboards on a clean-shaven face.
  
  Parsimoniously, I got one with some superficial damage to the box, cos it was a bit cheaper. Alas, it turned out to be a shaver that someone had returned because it didn’t work, and why hadn’t someone checked whether it worked before selling it to me?
  
  So I had to print a return label, so, like the woman who swallowed a fly, I had to deal with a series of other broken things – the shitshow of HP accidentally sabotaging its Mac printer drivers. The printer’s too old for the suggested solution of downloading new drivers from HP’s website – a conspiracy theorist would theorise that the whole thing is conspiracy to sell new printers. And perhaps Big Printer sabotaged the shaver too, because if it hadn’t been broken, I wouldn’t have needed to print anything. Well, after hours of fun, now I have a Raspberry Pi connected to the elderly printer – it’s now a whole print server, and I can print wirelessly from any room (of the one-bedroom flat), like I’m in the future.
I’m rewatching Seinfeld again. No, I mean I’m watching Seinfeld again, I’m rewatching Seinfeld.
Some work. I was storing the titular bus times not as times, because when a bus journey spans midnight, it’s useful to have more than 24 hours, but as intervals, with microsecond precision and a maximum value of millions of years. And both the arrival and departure time for each time, even though they’re normally the same. Well, now I’m just storing the number of seconds as an integer, and not storing the arrival time if it’s the same as the departure time, and what a lot of disk space I’ve saved.

Week 88

Sunday 22 November 2020

Anyone who uses the word “dinner” is an arse. Because there’s dinner as in “dinner lady”, also known as “lunch”, and there’s the tory dinner as in “dinner party”, known as “tea” or “supper” to sensible people. Yes, the meaning is usually clear from the context, and yes, dinner ladies are called MSAs (midday/mealtime support assistants) these days, but why be ambiguous? And yes, it is a class warfare thing.
There was much shouting about Fleets, the new pretend Instagram Stories content type on Twitter, and I was dismayed that I couldn’t access this new feature because it was still being rolled out. And then I could access it, and it was underwhelming. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A type of beer that had disappeared from UK shelves has reappeared on UK shelves, in enormous boxfuls. I picked up an enormous box and carried it as far as the checkouts, then thought better of it – it was such a heavy enormous box, so hubristic, what was I thinking? – and returned it to the pile on the other side of the big shop, all covered in my germs. Oh dear, but I got away with it, and maybe one day it will be expedient to buy such a boxful, with the help of a trolley and a bicycle.
It turns out that Morrison’s stocks Buses magazine. The barcode scans as Barbie magazine, which is 89p cheaper than the Buses cover price, and it’s more respectable to appear interested in barbecues or dolls than buses, so great.
The consumer pronoun Which? has pronounced on shop bought mince pies. Their website has a paywall, but various newspaper correspondents are here to reword press releases and reveal the results for free. They gave short shrift to the “claggy” Sainsbury’s pies which remain my favourites so far and deserve longer shrift.
The bicycle had gone months without sustaining a puncture, which reflects excellently on the Kevlar reinforcement of the Schwalbe City Jet tyres. Then this week there was a puncture – in fact, two punctures at the same time – which I fixed and it was fine. So that was something to do. Cool story.
📺 Industry. I have also watched some of Ted Lasso, which … well, it’s unusual that they made the trailer make it look much worse than it actually is.

This is a bit boring isn’t it

Week 87

Sunday 15 November 2020

There’s a famous guy – by which I mean he writes an email newsletter – who lives around here. He glins, you know? He doesn’t seem very mentally well, but I think even folks who sympathise with his terrible views would agree that he’s a prick.

The other day, I walked past him. I must have thought about him less than an hour ago, which would have been a spooky coincidence if he hadn’t lived rent-free in my head for a period during which I didn’t walk past him once. I extended a middle finger in a way he was unlikely to notice because my coat has long sleeves, but nevertheless must have sent a shiver down his spine and made him reconsider his position. I think he was walking a dog – it was post-sunset, and I didn’t give him a proper stare, so I might have imagined it – and, a bit further along the road, I almost trod in some dog shit – so I can’t rule out the possibility that the guy doesn’t pick up his dog’s turds, which is pretty bad if true, grounds for another cancellation. Perhaps he’s too busy glinning to mess about with plastic bags.

Black Books was an excellent sitcom, wasn’t it?
The SwitchBot Curtain I ordered some months ago arrived, taking me a bit by surprise. It’s a sort of robot that runs along your curtain rail to automatically open or close your curtains, which I just think is a neat idea. Alas, it struggles to close the horrible “grommet top” curtains here – there’s too much friction – and the curtain rod in my bedroom is not of a consistent girth, so it gets stuck. Clearly, the only solution is to move house. Meanwhile, at least it just about manages to open the curtain in the other room – not quite the waking me up with bright sunlight I’d envisaged, but then it’s quite gloomy out anyway.
Looking back at my camera roll to see if anything else happened this week. Cycled up a hill and looked at some fog. Bought some flour from a shed and made some very puffy bread.
Why not email in to let us know your least favourite type of jam. I think mine is chilli.