There’s so much negativity about the dumping of sewage in rivers, but few consider how the practice might make riverside houses more affordable, and also the increased number of flies is a chance to put some of all the flypaper I bought to good use.

Noticed some tiny ants (?) crawling around the bathtub. Apparently ants like water, and various sources emphasise the importance of cleaning to prevent ants, but if I was an ant I’d be more inclined to stay in a nice and clean bathroom.

I’ve become a kefir user. (The natural, unflavoured kind, thank you.) Actually last week I asked Siri what does kefir taste like. It’s like runny, tangy natural yoghurt; I don’t know if it’s improved my digestion.

🎦 Past Lives (2023).

To John Robins’s Howl. All the tickets had sold out probably months before I became a newly minted devotee of Robins and Elis James’s radio programme, so I turned to the fan-to-fan resale platform Twickets, which is a bit fraught with anxiety – what’s to stop a crook selling multiple copies of the same ticket? But it was fine.

CNPS: 33! As predicted, it was a while before I saw a 32 (an lovely 1998 Nissan Micra GX).

Stevie Wonder was right, it is hotter than July. It’s annoyingly true that closing all the windows during the daytime keeps the heat out. Blueooth thermometers are great, and this week I learnt of the Xiaomi Mi Temperature and Humidity Monitor which is almost upsettingly cheaper than the ones I got earlier.

Outside, the problem is the sweat washes the sun cream down the face into the mouth, and that stuff tastes bad and is probably bad to eat, which may be why people grow moustaches. Moustacheless, I’ve been preferring to wait for the cover of darkness before going outside.

The phenomenon of content creators on TikTok holding their little lavalier microphones between finger and thumb, daintily, like they’re giants holding full-sized microphones. I understand it – they don’t have lapels to clip them to, and to buy a whole new microphone would be a terrible waste. But they look a bit daft and hard-to-take-seriously, and I don’t like how much it irritates me.

📺 Amid a rewatch of The Thick of It. It’s slightly interesting how poor the picture quality is in the early series.

Some work. The website gets less and less shit, and better at calculating the lateness (or otherwise) of a bus, and it turns out that computers are faster than I sometimes imagine them to be.

There’s a regular spike in traffic at around every 2am. I didn’t have much logging set up, let’s say for privacy reasons, but some of the unsuccessful requests are for URLs ending in things like %23map (#map URL-encoded) which is a sign of a new kind of badly-programmed crawler/bot. And now I’ve some better (still privacy-preserving) logging set up in readiness for the next morning, to investigate further, and I can hardly wait.

Bought a new toilet brush a few weeks ago. (I agree that toilet brushes are horrible and ought to be unnecessary, but so are many things in life.) Went to the local branch of Argos just as it was closing forever, so I had to go to a different one. Now the problem is I can’t bring myself to soil the nice new toilet brush, so I can’t throw away the yucky old toilet brush.

Increasingly frustrated the with stickiness of the Fellow Stagg kettle’s power button/knob (see previous discussion), I followed the manufacturer’s instructions to remove it for cleaning. (See also this video.) There was a tiny piece of debris which I blew away. I noticed that pressing the naked metal core with my bare finger was just as unreliable as pressing the assembled plastic had been … but once I’d reassembled it (which was slightly tricky), I found it worked more reliably. Brilliant.

(It’s still a bit less than 100% reliable, which is infinitely worse than the switch on any normal electric kettle.)

To Future Islands (previously mentioned here in 2019). Sad to learn that frontman Samuel T. Herring is an Evertonian, but no one’s perfect. The physicality of his performance was everything I hoped it would be; his movement around the stage is especially good if your view is obscured by a concrete pillar.

📺 The Following Events Are Based on a Pack of Lies. I’m a bit sick of things being described as “deliciously dark”, and maybe it’s a bit too achingly quirky, all the harpsichord music and title cards, but never mind. It’s got Paul Putner in it.

Happy late summer bank holiday weekend to all who celebrate.

Did some work, that was good, now there’s some more work. Got into the most dreadful tangle with my git branches this week, but now I’m out of it.

Needed, or felt like I needed, to manually test a web thing in some old versions of some web browsers. After so struggling to cancel a Browserstack subscription, I’d vowed never to return, but Browserling isn’t as good in some ways. Then I remembered to try searching Reddit, and there I found a recommendation for LambdaTest, and LambdaTest is indeed good (apart from its un-descriptive name, and the cheek of their only putting the “monthly price billed anually” on the pricing page).

And now a few more people can use my web thing with their slightly older devices, so that’s good and interesting isn’t it?

A meeting, with a specific kind of financial adviser, that I’d agreed to sort-of out of politeness. Maybe I should have left immediately, said I didn’t like his shoes (I didn’t), instead of wasting an hour-ish of his time (and my own time too). If I was a fictional character, I might have delivered a speech about how paying taxes isn’t unfortunate at all, my dream of building a council estate on every golf course, etc, but apparently I’m not.

Towards the end he seemed forlorn, twigged that I’d looked up the large company of which he is a partner, read the news articles and posts on Reddit, and the word “crooks” had appeared in the Google autocomplete box. But anyway … in taking money from the rich (by charging fees that some people say represent poor value for money), maybe these wealth managers are really like modern-day Robin Hoods, and/or doing praxis in their own small way.

Tried some Walkers Max potato crisps a while ago. Maybe they’re called “Lays Max” or even “Maxx” chips where you are. The branding makes them look like the answer to “what if toxic masculinity was a crisp?”, but (I’m not sure if it’s a but or an and) when you eat them they’re bland and almost limp.

For a long time I really slightly thought the mixture of flour and fat known as a “roux” was named after the Roux family (as in Michel Roux, Albert Roux etc). But no, it’s just a word meaning “browned”, the Roux brothers didn’t invent it. This is thinking Pontius Pilate invented Pilates all over again (it was actually Joseph Pilates).

Had a superb cheap burrito thanks to the Too Good To Go app, and best of all I learnt that one of the Ortlieb Twin-City Urban bicycle pannier’s internal pockets is perfectly sized and shaped for the job of secure burrito-carrying.

The last time I tried using that app, sadly Pizza Express cancelled my order upon running out of food, but in the process I read this on Google Maps:

Chain pizzeria where chefs in striped t-shirts toss handmade pizzas in a relaxed space.

A lovely bit of writing that’s weirdly parroted by various different websites, with no credit given to whoever first wrote it.

Unlocking my bike/cramming shopping into a pannier outside a shop (the co-op in Spixworth), I head a man’s voice. Moments later, I recognised it as the voice of former shadow chancellor Ed Balls, I think … I’m unreasonably rueful that I didn’t linger there to see if Balls came out of the shop, and now I’ll never know if it was really him or just someone with a similar voice.

An impromptu ride on a bicycle belonging to someone shorter than me. I’d raised the saddle, but the weight of my bum forced it back down, and I couldn’t be arsed to go back to get a spanner. But maybe pedalling along with one’s head (not quite) between one’s knees isn’t so bad – it’s a way of exercising different muscles you didn’t know you had – the main disadvantage is looking like you don’t know how to use a spanner.

Some work. Converted my controversial mass of JavaScript to TypeScript, which was surprisingly both easy and not much help in preventing any bugs. Then I realised I had yet to enable “strict mode”, which I must have been using the time before when I moaned that the compiler was a cheeky wee shite.

Some work. Learnt and remembered some things about front end web development. One slightly surprising thing is how many people – maybe it isn’t that many – have their devices in dark mode, you know, prefers-color-scheme: dark, but are then offended when websites respect that preference. I guess most websites with dark modes have a setting to override the setting, but it’s usually hard to find.

The building here has communal bins. I’ve long made peace with people’s poor understanding of recycling – they seem to think you can recycle pot plants and chicken bones and so on – I’ll never understand it but I’ve given up being annoyed by it. But there’s a newer phenomenon, which is over-filling a rubbish bin when there are at least two other bins alongside with plenty of space left.

20 or so hours in Glasgow, mainly to take in James Acaster’s Hecklers Welcome, which as far I can tell is the only live entertainment in any of Scotland’s two largest cities this month ha ha. He did a bit of a Ken Dodd – not tax evasion but staying on stage for longer than billed – which was great value and fine cos I didn’t have any public transport to catch.

An unusual number of people sporting Lidl merchandise in Glasgow, which I’m sure was to do with their sponsorship of the bicycle racing championships that had finished that day – I guess some branded tote bags had been handed out to locals to apologise for the inconvenience of the road closures etc, but the sweetest were the smart tops/jackets which I reckoned were for event staff.

Overnight at the citizenM hotel (previously). Some bits felt on the verge of being dilapidated, like they’re cutting costs amid financial pressure – part of the complicated shower wasn’t working properly, which I didn’t mind, but they do use words like “boutique” and luxury. The extractor fan whistled loudly, which was just like being back at home.

More than the usual amount of going to consult various different experts (accountant, dentist, bicycle mechanic) this week. Booked to see the dental hygienist next year, by which time of course my excellent brushing will have made my gums so healthy I won’t need to see the dental hygienist, just as I’d mostly fixed the bike myself between booking an appointment last week and the appointment this week.

I slightly hoped the accountant would try to suggest some dodgy tax-avoidance schemes, just so I could haughtily reject them. The only sort-of thing was suggesting, as accountants are wont to do, shifting some income to one’s spouse or other significant other – dodgy, but mainly just a reminder of one’s lack of rizz, but it did remind me of (Don’t Get Done Get Dom’s) Dom Littlewood asking “you married?”.

Cleaned all the glass around the balcony here – which I promise is less fancy-pants than it sounds – all the better to see the spectacular splatter of bird poo on the other side of the glass. On returning indoors, found I’d gone temporarily blind – it was unusually bright out there – so that’s why they say not to clean windows in the sun, not just because the rays’ drying effect leaves streaks. But actually the effect of the ocular damage was fun in a trippy sort of way.

Some work. Suddenly, I felt ready to release my unusually large clump of tightly-coupled changes into the world – on a Friday, which some squares say is a bad day to do such a thing, but never mind them. I did, and I got some useful feedback, some of it positive, and it’s nice that people care so much. Later I decided to roll-back the changes for now, which is fine actually.

Vampire Weekend are overrated.

Boring week. Did some work, quite pleased with it.

Turns out the Lidl T-shirts (see last week) are bad, poorly sewn and strangely tailored. Unless you have a very thick neck and thin arms, in which case they’re the T-shirts for you.

🎦 Barbie (2023) has a motor car in it – a 2024 Chevrolet Blazer – with red seatbelts that made me go ooh, that’s the first time I’ve gone ooh at the colour of some seatbelts. (I looked it up on the Internet Movie Car Database, where a berk in the comments was being strongly angry about some aspect of the soundtrack – too incoherently to make much sense of, but as far I could tell they were a new variety of massive racist.)

Oppenheimer (2023) (several days later). I fear I’m turning into Richard Madeley, but some of the dialogue was difficult to hear. Of what I could hear, once or twice I swear Dr Robert sounded just a little bit like someone doing an impression of Terry Wogan. I was pleased to do a big wee once it was over.

It’s a shame about the hard and unyielding plastic armrests of the new seats at the cinema. But I think some of the screens still have the older, more comfortable chairs, so perhaps one must pay attention to which ones they are.

(Is “hard and unyielding” a tautology? I thought about complaining to a tabloid editor about “very ample”, but actually that has a specific meaning in algebraic geometry when describing line bundles, so er maybe it’s the same for cleavages.)

📺 Nearing the end of Billions. It’s not very good, which is good for the times when you don’t feel like watching something good. A nice thing about the earlier seasons was that everyone’s iPhones were, by today’s standards, noticeably old. Also, there’s a step in Damian Lewis’s character’s bedroom that must be a nightmare for tripping over at night – wouldn’t a real billionaire have a level floor?

For completeness, some other content consumed recently. The new run of Black Mirror, of which I cried at one bit. One episode of The Bear, which was too good so I felt I must save the rest for later, is that weird? There’s a new series of Ed Reardon’s Week on the radio.

Cherries.

To London, to watch the recording of a non-broadcast pilot of a putative culinary spin-off of Taskmaster. (Sounds shit.) They over-allocate tickets, to counteract the inevitable no-shows, and I didn’t turn up early enough. But, to apologise for the disappointment, they promise a priority ticket for next time – it’s almost worth deliberately being late, to get a better chance of seeing a popular show another time.

Tried to use Apple Pay Express Mode to touch in on the bus there. And in a rush to avoid being an annoying slow person – just use a plastic card like everyone else! – I probably didn’t touch in properly, and then I got inspected by an official polo-shirted Revenue Control Inspector. So I think they’ll write to me and I’ll have to pay a fine, or maybe all the successfully-paid-for journeys I made that day will count in my favour.

(What’s with the horribly squashed type on the destination blinds of the new Wright StreetDeck Electroliners on route 111? Edward Johnston would be turning in his grave.)

The next day, I bought a reduced-for-quick-sale sourdough pizza, and the barcode from a more heavily-discounted quiche or something had stuck to the pizza box, and once again it could have looked like I was deliberately committing some kind of fraud. (Obviously, solidarity with folks who fare-dodge or sort-of-shoplift out of necessity, but I have no excuse.)

Some iconic Lidl branded T-shirts, trainers etc “dropped”. I remembered quite late in the day, when stocks of the best designs in my size were depleted, and I wished I was a less average size. I could have done a little tour of all the other local Lidls, but let’s not be silly. Now some enterprising capitalist scumbags are selling them on eBay for a lot more than the RRP, which doesn’t mean they’ll sell any of course.

To Suffolk’s Latitude festival, just for one day, a dry one. Named after one my my favourite geographic coordinates, it’s often described as “achingly middle-class”, which is an annoying turn of phrase. Within minutes I’d heard someone ask their small child “would you like to sit and have a brioche?”, but you’ll probably say brioche is extremely common these days, they serve it in the canteen at the school of hard knocks. It all looks the same when it comes out the other end.

Anyway, I had a lovely time, saw ~5 bands I like, great value, I don’t know how to expound in more detail without it being cringey. I’ve forgotten how to sit cross-legged on the floor without getting pins and needles. Now I ache.

Some work. Received a rightly angry communication from someone who’d waited for a provincial bus that was never going to arrive, and it was (partly) my fault. Months since the last time I discovered a new-to-me annoying way the TransXChange standard is so powerful and flexible, I learnt that a JourneyPatternStopUsage can contain some Notes, which can contain some important information. I think I sort of knew it was possible, but I’d never come across it in use until this week.

Anyway. If I consumed the converted-into-the-GTFS-format version of the data, as I sometimes wish I did, the information in those notes would be unattainable, so that’s, I don’t know ~

Tried to buy a domain name. carlberry.co.uk was an early pioneer in the field of public transport information websites, until the titular fellow sadly died. The domain name expired and was due to drop last week. There’s a cottage industry of .uk so-called drop catching services – it’s a competitive field, with different ones claiming to have servers close to Nominet’s servers etc, because every millisecond counts – and I engaged two such services. But someone else caught it, not me. But never mind, they quickly put it up for auction, how exciting.

There are lots of now-broken links to pages of the former website around the web, and I thought redirecting them somewhere useful (carlberry.co.uk/rfnshowl.asp?L1=NAP0010 to bustimes.org/localities/napton-on-the-hill etc) would be a good stewardly thing to do, and I even did some preparatory work on that. But as the ockshun crescendoed the price got higher and sillier, and I grew uneasy about paying so much money to a ghoulish profiteer who’s profiting from a dead man’s domain name, so I let myself be outbid. Maybe that was correct and sensible of me, or maybe these things are truly worth more than I think (which would make the last such domain name I bought a tremendous bargain).

🥧 Some bicycling back and forth, this week and last, to see and coo at visiting relatives, lovely. Quite far from home, heard a sort of ping, and twigged after a while that a spoke of the back wheel had broken, which is as close to chanting “who ate all the pies” as a piece of metal can get. But seriously, it’s also something to do with cheap wheels and bumpy roads and going powerfully up hills.

Wobbled home to the local bike shop – I wondered if someone would shout “there’s something wrong with your back wheel” on the way but no. The LBS quickly replaced the spoke and also cheekily adjusted the brakes – that’s going the extra mile, great customer service. Alas they also messed up the adjustment of the gears, which I should look on as a fun little job for me – I’ve already mostly fixed it without looking once at Sheldon Brown’s website – but ugh, I wish I was enough of a prick to march back to the shop and demand that they fix it.

To the medium-sized theatre to see Josie Long’s show. I was ready for an evening of loud agreeing, but it was also funny which was a bonus. A late-arriving and early-leaving couple near the front brought some chaotic energy which I’d recount at length but you had to be there.

Walked home at a brisk pace, as one walks after deciding one wasn’t desparate enough to queue for the loo earlier. The podcast of Frank Skinner’s radio programme in one ear, where he happened to mention the film Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, and then I passed a house with a window out of which stares an enormous teddy bear, deeply terrifying and weird. (I’ve noticed it before, but only in daylight; it’s supposed to be Paddington Bear, judging by the still-weirder display of jars of marmalade alongside; in a rougher area someone would have crowbarred the window open by now, but no one has, probably because marmalade is horrible.)

Had a look at the internet site Rightmove (etc) again. There’s a place down the road, down a cul-de-sac I didn’t know existed, with the same bathroom tiles and sink and toilet and doors and doorhandles as this place, what a coincidence. I think it’s a plus – I already know they’re fine doorhandles.