Happy UTC+1. Of course the clocks’ springing has broken some bus data things, which aren’t my fault but might be my problem. It’s probably for the same sort of reason that the laser display boards here have been showing “refer to timetables” or “welcome to [name of stop]” all day. Well I haven’t updated the oven clock yet, so I can’t claim any moral high ground.

Troubled by reports of website slowness again, pages taking 20 minutes to load? And surely there’d be even more reports if the slowness didn’t extend to the contact page. But it’s pretty fast for me, so I don’t know, I need to see a screenshot of someone’s developer tools’ network tab. The programmatic advertising crap is huger than ever these days, a large surface area, so there’s a chance it’s something in that. Years ago, my workplace’s internet connection ceased connecting to a popular CDN, which was interesting; in this case, it seems to affect customers of BT and EE, so I’ve ordered a SIM card to test. (They’ve some attractive discounts, attractive until they diabolically increase prices above inflation at the end of the month.)

An headline in the worst newspaper, “I’ve saved hundreds by never washing my bed sheets”. Read on, and actually the titular “I” still washes their bed sheets (on a cold cycle) once a month, infinity times more than never – just when you thought these callow journalists couldn’t stoop any lower. (Apparently they’ve taken some measures to keep the sheets fresh between washes: no dogs or food or dirty workclothes in bed, etc.)

By the way, I challenge the orthodoxy of bed-making, I think it’s important to let the sheets “breathe” during the day, because “sunlight is the best disinfectant” isn’t only a metaphor for the importance of transparency and accountability in an organisation, the ultraviolets kill bacteria and stuff. But the problem is it sounds like an excuse for being lazy and slovenly, and I’ll grudgingly admit that maybe traditional bed-making stops dust mites getting in the sheets in the first place.

Up to London’s glittering Royal Albert Hall, to see Wet Leg (you probably call them “the wet legs”) + special guests Honeyglaze (the worst thing to do to carrots) and CMAT (marvellous). My preferred trousers hadn’t dried completely after coming out the wash, so that was nearly maybe ironic, but I wore some different trousers instead, which by the way are so loose and comfortable that sometimes it’s like not wearing any trousers at all.

Liked the RAH, easily one of my top 10 halls. Raced against time to catch the last train back down, and somehow won, sat panting behind a group of Jim Jeffries fans just as one of them was explaining end-to-end encryption.

Big week for the Irish bus data. It was more bother than expected, but nice to have a priority and bit of self-imposed urgency for a change. There remain teething problems, some route and trip IDs in the schedules and realtime data not matching perfectly, which I have every confidence will be solved. It’s a tiny disappointment that the vehicle IDs are neither number plates nor fleet numbers but a secret third thing, but somehow enthusiastic people have already worked out which vehicles a lot of the numbers correspond to.

Caught out in the rain, my coat started foaming – the resolution to the Peterborough soap dispenser plot point from two weeks ago.

Wildlife update: found something growing, maybe thriving, in the teapot. (Needless to say, not a big teapot user.)

Not a great productive week – is it ever? But here’s what I’ll pretend were the most boring achievements:

• At the start of last month, my efforts to speed up the slurping-up of bus fares data – especially fare stages, of which there are a lot – had in fact made the process much slower, hours becoming days. So I tried again and made great improvements, not sure what I’d been thinking before.

• Revisited my handling of the traffic commissioners’ local bus service registrations data.

  Turns out/I’ve suspected for a while that a service’s presence in a registrations file is, to be fancy, neither a necessary nor sufficient test of whether it’s currently registered (not cancelled).

  So you’ve got to use the variations to figure out the latest variation and the current status. And, I finally realised this week, the variations are are only usually in a meaningful chronological order, just often enough to trick you into thinking they’re always in that order. But sometimes they aren’t.

  (I know this data has been used by data journalists to do analysises and things, and I’m sure they’re cleverer than me and will have interpreted the data perfectly. Certainly their conclusions and what they tell us sound about right, so I don’t think I can be arsed to try reproducing their results.)

Do the traffic commisioners have “FBI style” jackets like, well, the FBI (and the ICO)? I hope so.

To London’s glittering west end to take in a RHLSTP (episodes 438 and 439). A lot of empty seats in the theatre, because going to watch a podcast is embarrassing and in many ways worse than listening at home where you can bring your own food and drink etc. But it was nice to be out, and not have to fast-forward through the dire cruise line and mental health app adverts Herring records in his attic.

Leicester Square was being obstructed by the premiere of the new John Wick film, oh I cursed Keanu Reeves as I walked all the way around the temporary barriers etc. I bet Greggs were annoyed at all the red carpet shenanigans blocking the entrance to their new shop there.

Went to Aldi to get a rug. They’ve been on sale for a week or so, so it was mainly boring grey ones left, but there was still one slightly nicer one, phew. (It’s a chunkier weave in real life, lower-resolution than it looks on the website.) Picked up some milk while I was there, which I then promptly dropped, harming the integrity of the plastic bottle of the famously smelly thing you never want to spill on soft furnishings. And for some reason I kept carrying the bottle to the checkouts, not realising the extent of the leak and the milky trail I was possibly leaving? Oh well, there’s probably a saying about how there’s point crying over this kind of thing, and I don’t think any got on the rug which is a charming addition to the floor here.

Grudging respect for Gary Lineker, as much as his crisps are wank and I don’t like the little beard he has these days. It does my nut in that so many otherwise intelligent people think his surname has an a in it.

To Edinburgh. Two events from the journey there:

• Trying to extract a Beryl bicycle from a pile of Beryl bicycles that had fallen on each other to make a sort of bicycle gratin, I cut a finger – only a tiny cut, some blood. Such is the chaos of these dockless bicycle hire schemes.

• Peterborough. Wandered around the Queensgate shopping centre (which is looking fabulous) and eventually found the the toilets, where the liquid soap dispenser seemed to be broken. A while later, I looked down to see all soap down my front, which is an unfortunate look, even worse then the usual problem of tap water splashing there. But it smelt nice.

Nice time in Edinburgh, met the youngest new relative, enjoyed the salty air.

Tabloid journalism used to be such a noble profession – hacking voicemails, rummaging through bins, etc – but these days the so-called journalists are reduced to transcribing TikTok videos, writing so many articles about “Mrs Hinch” and her cleaning tips. Hinch claims that a magic eraser is a good tool for removing yellow stains from white plastic toilet seat, but it isn’t, or at least you’ve got to rub it for a long time to abrade the yellow to the reveal white beneath. Still, I’m reassured that the stains are just the result of cheap plastic reacting with sunlight and maybe limescale and bleach, not other people’s pee or anything like that.

“Discovered” the Frank Skinner [Absolute Radio] Show podcast. Like when that fellow discovered America, it’s not really a discovery, it’s been popular for a long time, but I’d never been curious enough to listen before, and turns out it’s a lovely way to pass the time. So I wondered about starting from the first episode, March 2009, but I’m not sure – in the last 14 years, Skinner and Emily Dean’s voices have developed richer timbres, and they’ve got better at presenting radio, which is a way of saying the earlier stuff is different and not quite as good.

Wildlife spotted, in descending order: two foppish Dulux dog–ish dogs in the back of a tricycle trailer (outside Lidl), one heron (down by the river).

Some work. Had noticed Google indexing pages with a query string like ?date=2023-02-19, ignoring the <link rel="canonical", which is bad especially when the date is in the past. Tricky to prevent without making more stuff not work without JavaScript, or obscuring the useful ability to bookmark or link to a particular date. Finally I realised you can do all sorts of stuff with a robots.txt like Disallow: /*?date=*, so let’s see if that helps.

A relative is fond of saying so-and-so is “no chicken”, as in “no spring chicken” but maybe the “spring” is redundant? There are at least two recorded cases of English learners being confused by a bit in A Study in Scarlet where Inspector Lestrade says “I am no chicken”, which these days means “I am no blend of water, vegetable proteins and rapeseed oil”, so the publishers will probably rewrite it, which is fine.

🎦 Cocaine Bear. Not quite silly enough, but there’s a cool bicycle in it. Realised I was hungry when some entrails looked to me like a string of tasty cartoon sausages. Everyone’s made the same joke that – ha ha – I suppose the bear goes on about its app, screenplay, business, gameshow format idea etc – and why not.

The cinema emailed a survey and I went yes, a chance to say the staff are excellent, and maybe win a voucher, but also to complain about their computer system not distinguishing between occupied seats and unavailable-for-other-reasons seats. There was a text box for answering “why are you extremely satisfied?”, and I reasoned that there’d be an opportunity later to expound on my little complaint, but no, it was just multiple-choice questions after that, no “is there anything else?”, I should have shooted my shot while I had a chance. If there’s a questionnaire about the survey I won’t make the same mistake.

Dialled into a (Microsoft Teams) conference call about the bally Bus Open Data Service. Sometimes when straightforward provincial bus managers clash with highfalutin London consultants it can be sort of entertaining, but this was just dispiriting. There’s rightly been some discourse about the state’s addiction to the services of the big four accounting firms (the “big three” in American, phonetically similar to the “big three” men’s tennis players), and I have nothing intelligent to say, but ugh those creeps make me queasy.

This time, one of the things they were on about was “timetable matching”, which to a lot of people sounds like measuring punctuality, but it isn’t, communication is hard. There’s a longer separate something to be written, containing phrases like “worshipping at the altar of block numbers” and examining the folly of measuring things just because they’re easy to measure not because they’re the best measures to measure. It will be a pity if the measurers’ measurements lead to things like rail replacement buses, poultry processing plants’ staff shuttles, things of that nature being expunged from vehicle location feeds in order to gee up data quality scores, but let’s wait and see.

Better news:

On Wednesday 22nd February the NTA will publish a new set of real time APIs from the NTA developer portal

A great opening sentence which I couldn’t help reading in a certain kind of sonorous voice and autocompleting to “and you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” With that and the release of Cocaine Bear (2023), it’s going to be a big week.

Not a single flower?

Some work.

Wondered about going to Skegness, and noticed that my presentation of the outbound 57 (Skegness - Boston - Spalding) timetable leaves a lot to be desired. For familiar Kafkaesque reasons, it’s “split” at Boston, and the problem for me is it arrives at bay 4 and departs from bay 7. (Going in the other direction, it both arrives at and departs from bay 4, which the computer understands beautifully.) Perhaps the promise of a rewarding trip to Skeg is the conceit I need as motivation to work on handling that sort of situation better. (Not a very exciting reward, but it’s not a gruelling problem to fix either.)

Google Maps’s journey planner is much worse, by the way, insists on a longer two-legged journey, thinks the 57 is a different bus that could leave before the 57 has arrived. Traveline’s one manages it perfectly, I’d have liked another thing to complain about but no, well done to Traveline.

Started using the computer to spice up the experience of playing Wordle for a change:

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
cat /usr/share/dict/web2 | grep -x '^[^cramp]\{5\}$'
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
cat /usr/share/dict/web2 | grep -x '^[^crampjoist]\{5\}$'
etc.

Not really learning anything I didn’t already know about regular expressions, but learning something. I’d barely used grep’s -x option before, and it wasn’t immediately obvious to me that I needed to escape the { and } like that.

Then one day the Wordle word was a word that isn’t in /usr/share/dict/web2. It was debug, and de and bug are in there but not debug, so ~

Some bicycling instead of walking for a change. It’s not too cold out, just cold enough that I don’t get too sweaty, and it’s dry so the beds of leaves aren’t all slippery but just make the ride nice and smooth. I return home with all salt from off the road on my trousers, which I prefer to mud.

A nice surprise that there’s a whole (first half of a) new series of You available to watch now. Was briefly aghast that the horrible slimy main character hadn’t murdered anyone yet, pathetic, until I realised it had only been fifteen minutes. __ is particularly brilliant in it, I won’t name them because I think the dawning of oh that’s __ is part of the fun. I don’t mind the delightful and silly geography of the pretend version of London, but I have a complaint about the sound design – the guy’s moka pot overheating made an unrealistic noise, a sort of fizzing (the subtitles say “food sizzling”) whereas in real life it’s more like a gurgle, I think?

Have stopped subscribing to Amazon Prime these days, but I found a way to inhale Jeremy Clarkson’s Farm programme. The offensive newspaper columnist is portrayed as less of a low-status, out-of-his-depth bumbling fool than he was in the first series, which is a slight shame – it would have been better if some of the flying excrement from a muck spreader could have gone on him – but it’s still compelling. So what if Clarkson and his friends would kill me with hammers for my preferred modes of transport or if they mistook me for a badger.

The producers of Cacklebean eggs appear in a few episodes, and what a shame it is incidentally that Marks & Spencer don’t stock them any more.

Some work. One of the things I learnt last week was that a TransXChange OperatingProfile can contain more than one ServicedOrganisationRef, i.e. reference more than one ServicedOrganisation. So that’s not really shocking but a long-standing misconception that’s lingered for years.

This week there was a little DigitalOcean incident which made me wonder about taking my custom elsewhere, but I do know that other cloud computing platforms sometimes have outages that they’re also sometimes slow to acknowledge. Then I proceeded to break some bits of the website myself, as if I’m unprofessional and not perfect either, so…

People who review bicycle lights fixate on lumens and beam patterns, they never mention if the charging socket (USB Micro-B) is so recessed that the connectors on most cables can’t penetrate far enough, or if the stiff rubber strap makes it really difficult to unstrap from the handlebars, both problems with the Blackburn Dayblazer 800. I thought the latter point would at least make it hard to steal but, you can guess where this was going, I was almost pleased to be proven wrong. Let’s see if the CatEye AMPP is better.

🎦 Babylon. (It’s a love letter to cinema.) An elephant does a big poo in the first few minutes and I was on board from there. It’s a lot of film, maybe too much, but three hours in a nice warm cinema is good value for money.

The Fabelmans. (It’s a love letter to cinema.) My eyes wept at some moments, and if you think that’s good you’ll love onions.

“People on Twitter who, when someone says they’ve been charged a ridiculous fare for a train journey[,] then post a screenshot showing you could it for sixpence if you book nine years in advance, change six times and travel at 2.30am dressed as a Pastry Chef. Those people.”

Which reminds me, I dimly remember reading in the Journal of the Transport Ticket Society about somewhere in probably Scotland where unaccompanied parcels of smoked salmon travelled by passenger train, with a special ticket issued of course. So maybe disguise yourself as some smoked salmon? (That explains the colour of Michael Portillo’s trousers, ha ha ha.)

(Previously: “CHEAPER to fly to SPAIN?”)

My dentist had a sign outside with a chalked message, something like “is your day as smooth as your forehead?” Thanks a lot, until this point I’d never considered whether I had a rough or lumpy forehead, and I’m still not sure if it’s better to have a smooth one. (But I guess they’re branching out from teeth into Botox, etc? Weird.)

Was so taken with a sign outside a church

A new start
to a new year with
renewable energy
from the son
– Jesus

(spotted from a moving bus) that I went and walked for some miles to take a picture the following day. (Went to Lidl on the way back.) Just great copywriting, and possibly the first time the son/sun pun’s been thought of. But it’s a little late to be going on about new starts to new years now, we’re past the statute of limitations.

Last week when I mentioned the leaking wool detergent bottle, it had actually been months since any spillages. Spookily, just days later the bottle got knocked over again and it took two goes with two different kinds of mop to get the slick slippery surface off the surface. But it smelt lovely.

🎦 TÁR. The pencil cupboard! I wondered why her Porsche Taycan had a Stuttgart registration plate, but it was a never explained. ~

Went to see and hear Police Dog Hogan. They’ve updated Shitty White Wine (it tastes like turpentine/a kangaroo on the label is never a good sign) to account for inflation, Threshers ceasing trading, and Ice Road Truckers ending, but there’s still an outdated reference to “buy one get one free” which is a rarely seen sort of offer these days. When in Scotland, do they consider the minimum alcohol unit pricing?

Happy year of the rabbit.

Got some wool detergent last year, because I respect wool. I want to say the bottle bore the Woolmark, the seal of approval of the International Wool Secretariat (Brian Woolnough, Glen Wool etc), but I’ve checked and it doesn’t. Anyway, obviously you don’t want to place the bottle on top of the vibrating washing machine and have it fall off and crack open and ooze on the floor, and think disgruntledly “this is what I get for respecting wool”, although after you’ve cleaned up the mess your mop and floor will be rather nice and fragrant.

Went outside to put out the recycling, then one thing led to another and I found myself on a bus, and then another bus to the seaside. (On the 6A between North Walsham and Cromer it was just me enjoying the Edinburgh landmarks depicted on the moquette, but otherwise things seemed busy enough.) Have been thinking for a while I would benefit from the some salty sea air, and now I’ve had some, and I don’t feel particularly different.

Hate the Observer’s Sunday With column more than expected. Jack Dee’s got a clay oven barbecue.

🎦 M3GAN, an excellent bit of nonsense.

Glad the Odeon’s got rid of the smug disembodied voice who’d say “ooh yeah the trailers … all specially chosen for this film, actually.” Maybe the poor voice actor is now destitute and unable to shoe his children, now he’s lost that work … I don’t care.