Inexpensive label printers, without which there wouldn’t be all those stickers everywhere, are up there with crypto bollocks and other polluting inventions. Someone recommended a two pence coin, which is a both a useful invention for removing conspiracy theories from lampposts and a better way of paying for things than Bitcoin. Yeah!

I do operate a website that, hypothetically, someone could advertise by printing QR codes corresponding to bus stop URLs and adhering them to relevant surfaces. Needless to say, it would be bad vandalism. More galaxy-brained would be to advertise a competitor (say Citymapper) that way.

Bicycled to see the pa and was almost most excited to see he had a new clock – technically an alarm clock, but only employed as a small clock – whose second hand moves silently untickingly, and I thought I’ve got to get me one of those. I have a handsome Braun clock, which Dieter Rams might have had a hand in designing, but its tick is so noisy and if you whack it (which can sometimes quieten the ticking) the battery can fall out the back, so these innovative Chinese clocks are worth investigating.

The particular model is offered under a variety of funny names, at slightly different prices, with or without a logo printed on the face. This one has a product image apparently photoshopped by MC Escher. The kerning of the numbers looks a bit off, but I’ve just noticed the headings on this website are just as bad.

I made of a note of this tweet from The New York Times on Twitter: “Millions of Americans are skipping the second dose of their Covid vaccines. State officials are rushing to keep that number from growing even more.” I think I thought it rummy that “keep” there means “prevent” but could just as easily mean “make continue”. But actually my point doesn’t have any point because of the extra word “from”, you know, “keep from”.

Just in time for the bank holiday weekend, the little beige box that controls the water heater made a sizzling noise and let out some smoke. I suppose I should be grateful because normally you have to pay for pyrotechnics. My understanding is that smoke is the “life force” making any electronic thing work, so when the smoke puffs out it works no more. The upshot is I’m more unwashed than usual, which apparently is how many from-home workers have been over the last year, but I’m a latecomer to the trend. I’ve enjoyed cold showers before, but not now. 🥶

Went on a bus – the first motor vehicle I’ve touched in 2021 – to a market town, “just to feel something” as they say on the internet. It was quite fine. Spent some time walking around looking for an open public loo, and it was richly rewarding to eventually find one with some splendid shiny blue tiles.

I’ve not felt like doing very much work, so I haven’t, and that’s great – like a holiday.

I did some work on recreating some of bustimes.org using the new official GTFS data, and also using DigitalOcean App Platform, which both make things much simpler, but (it’s a relief to find) have enough drawbacks that I needn’t feel like a mug for not using them. (The GTFS is wrong or missing for some of my local bus routes, and stuff. I’m sure it will get better.)

Saw a relative. A disappointing pub lunch was had, in part because the “today’s specials” blackboard outside a much better establishment had “tomato soup” written in such faint chalk that I thought it had been rubbed out, maybe it was yesterday’s special, so in search of soup we went somewhere worse that really didn’t have any soup. Cool story.

This afternoon, I took a walk, as I almost always do. I needed to collect a parcel from a distant Amazon locker, and hoped it would be delivered there in time for me to walk past. (In fact, it was delivered a bit later, so I had to double back.) I got something sticky on my shoe, and something in my eye, neither of which I’ve satisfactorily dislodged yet, which I suppose serves me right for daring to go outdoors.

There’s a new product called “Twinings Dark Mint” tea, part of the “Twinings Dark Collection”. Unlike usual “peppermint tea”, which a pedantic bore will call a tisane cos it’s not made from any part of the tea plant, it’s black tea with some added mint. Maybe it’s very nice if prepared properly, but I treated it like peppermint tea and was so disgusted by the stewedness that I’m sorry to say I discarded the whole box. Please don’t make the same mistake.

Got one of the government-funded free-at-the-point-of-use lateral flow test kits, because who doesn’t like something that’s free. You get a pack of seven. Well, it’s jolly difficult to shove a swab all the way up one’s nostrils. Maybe mine are peculiarly ticklish. Anyway, I tested negative, you know, “positively toward negative” (sorry), which is good; now there are six more opportunities to see how deep the nostrils are.

Was looking around Newton Flotman on Google Street View, which is a normal thing to do, when I discovered that you can navigate around using the arrow keys on your keyboard. It seems so obvious now, but I don’t remember doing it before, and it’s a game-changer, much nicer than the struggle of clicking and dragging.

There’s a place where motor-cars and their owners gather to, I don’t know, everything from watching sunsets to dogging. Walking past, I saw a scrote in a glacier white metallic Audi drop a cigarette butt on the ground. I gave the dude a withering stare. Cool story.

One of my cultural highlights of the week is This Is My House. No, a game show hosted by Stacey Dooley (with whose oeuvre I wasn’t au fait) doesn’t sound like the sort of thing I’d like either, but it’s transcendent. It’s odd that the houses featured are all so vast and presumably expensive, but I suppose someone has to live in all those vast houses you see about the place.

I replied to an email, and my reply caused disgust. (The disgut– words are a shibboleth for … something.) (It’s interesting how much the level of disgust, as measured by Google Books, has risen since the turn of the century.) Which furthers the case for not replying to emails. Some of my reply was rushedly poorly worded, but the main problem was the disgustee’s poor reading comprehension, understandable in the circumstances of being stressed having missed a bus etc, and which should have been apparent from their sending me the first email in the first place.

This is a strange country. An old geezer has died, which is sad for his family, but broadcasting the same news over and over again all day, on several TV and radio stations, is a bit odd. A waste of bandwidth apart from anything else. But I wouldn’t say I’m disgusted.

Your treasonous social media postings are making me proud.

Spraying my feet with spray has made my feet much less fungal. Science! Maybe I will see a podiatrist about my disgusting toe.

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 wandered 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.