Week 107: hot buns

Sunday 4 April 2021

It was sunny and warm on some of the days. (Next week it won’t be. How interesting how there is all different weather.) Heartwarming to see bags of cans being enjoyed on the riverbank by groups of up to six.
Friday: made some hot buns, one or two of which had aesthetic misshapen crosses on them. Loosely followed Mary Berry’s recipe, where by loosely I mean I used orange not lemon zest, didn’t have any candied peel or mixed spice (briefly considered using Lebanese 7 spice), and was loosey-goosey with some quantities. Using less yeast just slowed things down a bit – how relaxing – more time for a bike ride while I forgot about the dough, and perhaps for the sultanas to grow plumper. Later, I had to record a time-lapse to confirm that the buns were expanding again (which they were).

Thoughts for next time: pay more attention to the size and shape, for ease of fitting a halved bun in the toaster. Also, “outy” protruding fruits get burnt, so poke them to make them “inny”.
Saturday: a mild mannered protest in the city centre against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. I wondered along to see no protesters (they had moved on), just a bungling police officer holding up a queue of buses for no apparent reason for an extra half hour, hmm. Perhaps someone cleverer than me will know what that’s all about.

I was alarmed to find myself trying to make these points in the comments section of a local newspaper, but fortunately it’s hard to log into/onto “Disqus”. The people who do leave comments have a reputation for being morons, but they’ve all managed to use some quite unreliable and user-hostile software successfully, which is more than I’ve ever achieved, so maybe we should respect them.
Some work.

Email from someone who clicked on an advert that promised a free gift voucher or something – you know, one of those obvious (but not obvious to this person, which is fair enough) scams. I went to the AdSense “review centre”, which is a bit frustrating – like, you can block adverts and categories, but can’t see how adverts have been categorised – and blocked some adverts.

I’m sure there are several companies who could be responsible, one of which is based in Kent. I thought about tweeting one of the bosses to ask “how do you sleep at night?” (to which the answer is of course “comfortably on a bed of money”), but they’re all only on LinkedIn, proving beyond doubt that LinkedIn is for scoundrels.

Week 106: mat

Monday 29 March 2021

Some more forgotten things from previous weeks:
- There’s a sort of welcome mat out on the balcony here – a “welcome to the balcony” mat. What’s the point of that? I peered at some neighbours’ balconies and none of them have a mat. I tried relocating the mat to inside the flat, by the front door, where it would serve some purpose (de-soiling shoes entering the flat, and hiding some loose crumbly-grouted tiles). But the gap between the floor and the door is too narrow for the mat, and the ghostly outline of the mat on the balcony decking suggests the mat was always there, so back it went.
- Sometimes I feel like a mug for not using Amazon Web Services. Well, I do use AWS Lambda for some toy things, but the for the hundreds of pounds of serious business per month I use DigitalOcean instead. Maybe it’s nice that DO don’t make their workers wee in bottles or have anything to do with the military-industrial complex, but I suspect that’s not because they’re more moral, it’s just because they’re a bit smaller and (s)crappier. (But still pretty big!)
  
  That OVH datacentre in Strasbourg burning down made me think about things. Hmm.
Felt a bit poorly. Nevertheless, onto the bicycle to the support bubble, and after a while I felt less poorly. On the return trip, one thing led to another and a particularly long and bumpy scenic route, which subsequent achiness I’m not sure I recommend but it was nice to see a valley and a river and an unexpected choo-choo train on the narrow-gauge railway.

Broke my Pedometer++ streak ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
The clocks sprang backwards or forwards, there’s no way of telling which way. I haven’t corrected the oven or alarm clock yet. There was one (1) bit of code I needed to fix, after a nice lie-in. (There was an automated test, but the test was wrong.) Meanwhile, the local real time passenger information systems in Glasgow, Aberdeen etc appear to have conked out much more dramatically, which is somehow comforting to know.
Boats! Because I am very smart, I quite quickly worked out that Evergreen (written on one side) is the name of the shipping company and Ever Given (written on the other side) is the name of the ship.
I think I’ve listened to all the podcasts.

Week 105

Monday 22 March 2021

Some things I forgot to mention last week:
- The anniversary of the last time I shook a hand. Although I can’t remember the last time I shook a hand without thinking “was that a good idea?” afterwards.
- Some other things I’ve forgotten again.
The delight of a reaxled bicycle. I enjoyed a muddy ride and saw a notable bench.
Some work.

You know how the government is addicted to the services of management consultants? Consultants who are only trying to do their jobs, etc, but hmm. Well, the problem I encountered in week 103 got fixed, so well done to them. Then on Sunday, instead of writing this, I found a new one, and sent off a report that evening, which I think is what is called a “weird flex” or is that when you use something novel to plug in an iron, ha ha.
You know you can change the voice of the “Siri” character on your Apple cellphone. Historically, I’ve found the man voices less problematic, but this week I’ve settled on the Irish lady voice and found it/her most agreeable.

Week 104

Monday 15 March 2021

A man came to clean out the hot water tank. I masked my face and ajarred a window; he took off his shoes, which was unexpected but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. (Here is a link to the Wikipedia article about the tradition of removing shoes in the home.) None of these things were spoken about. Afterwards, I enjoyed a consistently warm shower, lovely stuff, only slightly marred by a nagging expectation of another sudden temperature surprise. The pressure still drops every so often, like the imaginary weeing giant “Anglian Water” is taking a breath, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
🚲 Wondered why the back bicycle wheel was rubbing against the mudguard. The wheel was a bit wobbly, in a way perhaps it shouldn’t be, but so too was the mudguard. A day or so later, late in the evening, with a strange suddenness, I thought, maybe the axle’s broken. And so it was. It’s not the first I’ve destroyed, which has everything to do with potholes and nothing to do with being or having fat arse. It can go unnoticed, cos it’s not like the wheel falls off – there’s just a growing sense of something not being quite right, which is easily confused for all the other ennui from different sources.

Well, now the wheel has been replaced, and I might already have collected it back from the local non–private equity owned bike shop if only time were more elastic or I’d not gone outside without a mask.
For as long as I can remember, I have consciously tried to go out of my way to avoid walking behind lone women in the dark, etc. (I’m not saying I want a medal or anything, although a medal would be nice.) But perhaps the act of crossing the road, slowing down etc is actually more intimidating, because it’s like you’re being more sneaky. I feel like there was a sketch about it, maybe on the radio, maybe John Finnemore or Mitchell and Webb, I don’t know how I would find out.

The nighttime phone-in king Allan Beswick has just touched on the issue.
Some work.

At the start of week, I expended some time trying to make my Github Actions action maybe 30 seconds quicker (not to be sniffed at), and maybe it would be a useful exercise to try to write about it. There’s a step that uploads some stuff to DigitalOcean Spaces (which is like AWS S3, and compatible with most S3 client stuff), for which I was using another action – it’s actions all the way down – called “DigitalOcean Space Sync”, which adds maybe 30 seconds of overhead and feels like an unnecessary extra dependency. It works by installing and running the AWS Boto3 client inside a container, but I also install Boto3 outwith the container, so why not just use that?

The problem was outside of a container, Boto3 tried to connect to 169.254.169.254:80, which I learn is is the Instance Metadata Service, which is handy when you’re running something on one’s own cloud computing computer (not that one truly owns these things) but not on a GitHub Actions runner. I won’t lead you down the blind alleys I explored to try to get it to ignore the IDMS in favour of the API key and secret I’d supplied. Eventually, I realised I needed to set the AWS_EC2_METADATA_DISABLED environment variable; my final mistake was believing the documentation, which suggests setting it to false, but no of course you set it to true to, you know, disable it. Cool story.
I have subscribed to a Substack newsletter.

Week 103: glove in a canoe

Monday 8 March 2021

On the bicycle to see the support bubble. It’s a long way to go on a rusty mountain bike in civilian clothes, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. For the first time in a while, I mounted the mobile telephone on the mount on the handlebars – it means sheathing the elegantly crafted handset in a yucky plastic case – and it turns out that that stops the pedometer app recording many steps. Oh dear.

Anyway, nice bubbling as per usual.
Shower trouble. Every minute or so, the sneaky water gets very hot for a few seconds, then colder, then back to normal. I think it’s something to do with air bubbles and water pressure. I went to B&Q, where they have a confusing queuing system, to replace the squashed shower hose, which I didn’t think would make any difference and sure enough didn’t. Well, someone is coming to rid the hot water tank of calcium carbonate, which I do think might make a difference. Meanwhile, I’ve been having baths, which is no hardship.
Some work. Finished rewriting some stuff to use the database less and Redis more, the effect of which hasn’t been that big, rather underwhelming, but really I should be crowing contragulatorily because nothing actually went wrong. Eventually, the benefits of stuff being a bit cheaper to run and more reliable will make themselves known.

I found a bug in something that wasn’t my fault. The flow of automatic vehicle location information through the intertubes is like the flow of hot and cold water to my shower, which is to say imperfect. I made a nice page to monitor the situation, and sent off an email, and now let’s see how long it takes to be fixed – I gather that professional organisations have a slower, more “careful” release cadence than us impatient move-fast-and-break-things types, but I remain optimistic.
Yet again, I dozed off with wireless earbuds in my ears, came to wondering where one earbud was, and worried I’d swallowed it. But I was calmer this time. Found the earbud on the floor in the other room, where it had landed when I’d taken off my jumper during the search.
An unusual Sunday evening bike ride, with the phone trouser-pocketed to boost the footstep count. Dropped a glove in the waterlogged and seemingly abandoned canoe someone’s locked to the bike rack, oh dear. The damper hand took longer to warm up.
This about parcel delivery companies letting you know their drivers’ hobbies. Some kind of columnist/diarist was intrigued by this phenomenon. Was it Alan Bennett? Wait, I’ve just realised it was Adrian Chiles. Can’t believe I mixed up those two.
Started The Sopranos.

Week 102

Monday 1 March 2021

Went to collect some food from a takeaway establishment, as a treat. Spice something. Thought I’d try one of the lower-end players in the competitive arena. They had never heard of me. It turned out I’d gone to the wrong Spice something, gotten my Valleys and Lounges etc mixed up. Cool story.
Jabbed with the Pfizer. (Pfized?) It was terrifically efficient, great service design. After a day, my arm is a tiny bit tender where the needle went in – it’s a shame I didn’t think more carefully about which arm – what side you sleep on might matter more than handedness.

There was a dude sponging down each chair after it had been used, which is a bit of silly bother but oh well, if it makes people feel better then why not, and if it turns out the virus does transmit from trouser to trouser it won’t seem so silly. More importantly, needless to say, all the windows of the building were open etc. And my bum sometimes gets sweaty, which leaves patches on seats, so I should be celebrating the normalisation of seat wiping.
Almost at the end of Better Call Saul. Operating a drugs cartel looks like such a palaver.
Big up the 70s lady rock band Fanny. Maybe the name, or maybe the patriarchy, limited their commercial success.

Week 101

Sunday 21 February 2021

Some things from previous weeks that have so far gone unmentioned:
- I heard there was a moral imperative to eat venison, so I bought and cooked and ate some. Some of which turned out to have come from New Zealand, which I’m not sure there’s such a moral imperative to eat, and some of which was sausages cut with cranberry, which I usually avoid (but was OK), and pork, which again there’s less moral imperative to eat. I see a local butcher sells some cheap and actually local venison and things, so maybe I should go there. Interacting with a meat monger feels a bit intimidating, even though I know that in practice they’re some of the most cheerful people you’ll come across.
- Something else? I can’t remember.
There are some adverts on commercial radio that get one one’s tits. For example, I hope smug Timmy, or whatever his name is, chokes on his “finest steak for two”. He tells us he omits garlic, because “you know what I mean” wink wink nudge nudge, but, as properly cooked garlic is actually neutral to fragrant and doesn’t preclude canoodling, either the lad (who I hope is fictional, because I’ve just wished an obstructed windpipe on him) doesn’t cook garlic properly, or the wink wink nudge nudge is because he’s cooking for a vampire.

I can choose not to listen to that, but then I walk along and find an outdoor advert – not a billboard, the wall of a bus shelter – with the prat’s smug face on it. There’s no escape from a multi-platform advertising campaign, oh dear.
Something occurred that reminded me of the story about the guy having breafast with Jeff Bezos and Bezos eating some octopus. Turns out it’s not how I remember imagining it – Bezos eating the tentacles one by one, the tentacles representing his competitors, like Julius Nicholson eating the onion bhaji or something. No, Bezos was all, “You’re the octopus that I’m having for breakfast … When I look at the menu, you’re the thing I don’t understand, the thing I’ve never had. I must have the breakfast octopus” (explaining why he bought his breakfast mate’s company). And the octopus comes buried under more normal looking elements of the appetising breakfast menu item.
Getting jabbed with the vax next week! Which is surprisingly quick. I do, technically, have an heart disease – one which has so far never caused me any trouble and I could have gone most of my life without finding out about, you could even galaxy-brainedly say my heart is normal and everyone else’s are weird – so I think that’s why the algorithm chose to send me the text message. Or maybe there’s been another mistake like the dude who was in the database as being six centimetres tall. Well, I’m relieved to have had some confirmation that my registration with the GP, some months ago, had been processed, and I look forward to standing in line with presumably older and poorlier people and feeling like a bit of a fraud.

Week 100: duck shaped snowballs

Monday 15 February 2021

In 2019, I saw a video that inspired me to buy a tool for making duck shaped snowballs. The Amazon reviews there are all singularly unhelpful: folks waiting for it to snow so they can try it out. There must have been opportunities in the intervening years, but this week there was finally the intersection of enough snow and my remembering I own that product.

Well, what is there to say? I made some snow ducks. There’s some difficulty in gathering up just enough snow to make a complete duck with no seams. I don’t have any pictures, but you can see various folks’ (apparently multiple K-pop youths’) on Twitter. 17p plus P&P well spent. (It’s several times more expensive now – such inflation/snow related surge pricing.)
Snow. It’s a lovely idea, but now I’m slightly old it’s a bit of a pain in the arse, especially a whole week of cycle paths and pavements being treacherously slippery. Now the temperature is above zero and I’ve never been more excited about the melting of the melty brown slush.

Watched a parade of bicycle users a-slippery-sliding over a bridge and thought it’s a shame the council coffers don’t stretch to sprinkling salt over more then a few key pavements. Oh well. Someone posted a link to this “Bicycles work on snow”, which is good. The “avoid camber” point is a shitter – when I used to have to cycle to a workplace in the ice, the only roads available all had pernicious cambers, which was the worst, until I got a front tyre with metal studs in it. Maybe I should get such a tyre for the current bicycle, but who knows what the world will be like the next time it’s icy, will I have a differently sized bicycle, etc?
Exercising, I finally found the holy grail of some skipfuls of lightly used office furniture, which was bound to happen after I bought that expensive office chair. So, without doxing myself, if you need an office chair in the east Norwich area, go! I think this office chair is enough, and don’t fancy returning it for a refund, but maybe I’ll still return to the scene for a rummage.
Something made me think about a snippet of David Bowie saying a “… a mountain … or a tree” that’s occasionally heard on the Adam Buxton podcast. Always wondered where it was from. Well, it’s from this widely cringy Russell Harty interview.
Some work. I was confounded by some runaway database queries that went running despite timeouts being set and resisting my attempts to use pg_cancel_backend and then pg_terminate_backend to stop them. Hmm.

Now, I’m not doing anything too “web scale” for Postgres or anything, but I think I can make some things faster and cheaper by changing them to use Redis instead. That’s reasonable, isn’t it? So that’s something for me to do next week along with all of the other things.

How do you do.

Week 99

Monday 8 February 2021

A few weeks ago, the toilet roll holder fell off the wall. I wriggled it back on, but it’s come loose a few more times. Meanwhile, the algorithm showed me some online advertisements for toilet roll holders, which is extraordinary because it’s not like I’d searched the internet for anything relevant – it had been airgapped knowledge until today.
- Just now, I watched some seconds of a YouTube video, which inspired me to break out a bicycle mulitool to tighten a screw. No need to buy a new holder, not that there was ever any suggestion that there was. It was a bit interesting to learn that roll holders (and towel rails etc) nearly all attach in the same way, but, if you think about it, it shouldn’t be a surprise.
- Of course you wouldn’t have this problem with a bidet.
They’re repainting the communal areas of the building. I’m not sure who they are, and if I were them I’d feel uneasy about risking lives to make some walls look smarter, but I suppose painting and deocrating carries risks even in normal times. They’ve erected indoor scaffolding, the height of the building, to reach some hard-to-reach bits of the wall, which feels unnecessary because, being hard-to-reach, the paint has not been blemished by people brushing past, and anyway couldn’t they just use a very long handled brush?
The man employed to stand in the entrance to Lidl, encouraging customers to take a squirt of hand sanitiser, has tremendous gravitas. But to get to the hand sanitiser one must stand uncomfortably close to the man. And I was so taken by the gravitas that I forgot to survey the selection of houseplants.
Heavy weather – for the first time I almost felt like breaking my Pedometer++ streak, but I didn’t. Discovering new (to me) muddy paths through various copses, spinneys and thickets, which make a change from pavements.

Week 98: Balmoral cairns

Monday 1 February 2021

🥯 Made some bagels. My big mistake was not greasing the greaseproof paper they sat on to prove, so they went all misshapen when I tried to separate them from the paper to give them a hot bath. I won’t make that mistake again. Apart from the lumpen appearance, they were tasty and at least as chewy as they’re supposed to be. The only other mistake was not being arsed to brush them with egg to make them glossy and adhere the poppy seeds.
Better Call Saul. I watched a bit of it at least a year ago, but I must have been in a deep stupor. I’ve started from the beginning again, and, several episodes in, there are still snatches I remember. Very strange. (It’s not a problem, but I wonder if it’s possible to mark things as unwatched on the Netflix?)

Seeing Michael McKean’s character use a space blanket sparked a Wikipedia rabbit hole: space blankets → ? → ? → the Balmoral cairns. Who knew there were piles of stones commemorating some members of some family and the events in their lives? And King Edward, from off of the potatoes, had removed some stones commemorating his mother’s PA because he disliked the PA.
To the Mark Watson show “at” the Chorley theatre (Zoom). (Mark Watson from off of the pears cider advert.) He hadn’t done the thing of going to Chorley and streaming from an empty theatre, in fact he pooh-poohed the idea, which is fair enough, I think only Daniel Kitson did that.

We were encouraged to turn on our cameras and microphones, and it was nice to hear the sounds of strangers’ living rooms. I had made my walk a bit too long so had to listen on the phone, c and m muted, while striding purposefully and eventually hiring a bicycle. When I did get home, it’s a bit tricky to move a Zoom call to a larger device without the organisers thinking you’re sneakily trying to share your ticket with someone else, oh well.

Anyway, I heartily recommend that sort of thing.
(A few weeks ago) I saw a pair of hoodlums on a municipal picnic table playing chess. Thought about phoning the police, ha ha ha.

Which reminds me about some of the recent lawlessness I’ve seen from people with motor cars. A Vauxhall Corsa driven enthusiastically the wrong way down a one-way street before the driver realised and reversed back in the correct direction. A Vauxhall Vectra parked on ziggy-zaggy lines by a pelican crossing, the driver eating from a box of noodles. (The zigs and zags are painted there to stop cars parking there obscuring oncoming traffic’s view of the crossing.) I could have have taken pictures, memorised the number plates, tapped on the window of the noodle eater, but I’m too sensible enough to risk confrontation/am no a grass/possibly a coward.

Stay auspicious.