Week 62

Monday 25 May 2020

The evening is a good time to go to the supermarket – no queue, fewer people dithering about yoghurt.
Walking to Lidl, I encountered several steaming folks who must be having a tough time. That was a bit sad.
I have a bicycle again. As previously mentioned, hooray, and think I’ve been lucky to find an adequate one. I have some complaints about the bicycle storage here – the motor cars get much more, better sheltered space, which their drivers don’t have to lift their cars onto – even the bins are better located – but is this the place for those complaints?
I have partaken of some Chinese meal deliveries. I heard that unconcious racism means Chinese businesses are particularly struggling, and I live downhill, and give a bigger than average tip (based on what I’ve learned from r/Deliveroos), so it feels like a good thing to do. But the food hasn’t been that amazing, and it’s expensive. Hmm.
Unforgivably, Dominic Cummings uses the word “blog” when he means “blog post”.

I was also going to mention that he appeared to have a Tesco bag for life in the recycling bin outside his house, but it turns out that Islington Council says you can recycle plastic bags, so that’s OK.

Week 61

Monday 18 May 2020

I did some work. Great times.

The government has been doing things relevant to my interests. Their safer travel guidance for passengers briefly linked to my website, before someone decided there are more credible websites that aren’t run by one dude in his underpants somewhere. Then they laid some draft legislation before parliament, which is like I’m being subtweeted with vellum. (Although I know, because it’s still a draft, there’s no vellum involved yet.)
I got disqualified from the cress growing competition, because I haven’t been checking Twitter enough. Well, it’s good to have it confirmed that I don’t look at that internet site too much, and, anyway, I don’t want to compete in any cress growing competition that would accept people like me as a competitor.
Having been without a bicycle for two months, for reasons, I finally went to the bicycle shop. It’s a bad time to try to buy a bicycle, because more people than usual are buying bicycles for exercise, instead of using public transport, and to take advantage of there being fewer motor cars about – and good for them. It’s good to have a bicycle, and I look forward to having one again.
There is a new series of Michael Lewis’s podcast Against the Rules. Lewis’s insistence on linking everything to the theme, the role of the coach in public life, or something, is annoying. The first episode contains the stunning revelation that financial institutions act in their own best interests and are generally swines – who knew?

Lewis’s podcast contains an an advert (in which he weirdly says “backslash” when reading out the website address) for his pal Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, which is itself a long advert for Lexus motor cars. For maximum Alan Partridge points, Gladwell even makes special mention of the breakfast buffet he had on his trip to Japan.

Anyway, you can’t move for people observing that you can’t move for podcasts these days, so why on earth would you listen to either of those podcasts?

Some other things happened, but that’s enough things for this week. Keep your pecker up.

Week 60

Sunday 10 May 2020

It was my birthday. Months ago, I had planned, unprecedentedly, things such that I’d have spent the day travelling back from somewhere. Needless to say, that’s not how I spent the day. I did enjoy some cake, which I’d left in the oven for marginally too long, but which was redeemed by containing some pieces of broken up chocolate bunny. Also used Zoom for the first (!) time.
There is a new laptop. (I mean I bought a new laptop. Coincidentally, the company that makes laptops released some new 13″ laptops on the day it arrived, but I’d gotten a 16″.) It’s very nice, and less frail than the old one, and things, but the Touch Bar is an absolute stinker. I keep accidentally touching it, triggering the screen brightness or other controls. Probably because my typing is a bit “hunt and peck”, so my hands move about more than a properly educated person’s hands, but why should I have to change?
BBC Two’s I’ll Get This is strangely compelling. Five consistently eclectic celebrities (like normal people but better) play silly games between meal courses at a restaurant, competing to avoid paying the bill.

Having watched several in quick succession on the iPlayer, one thing I’ve learnt is that Richard Madeley and Eamonn Holmes, both of whom have co-presented ITV’s This Morning with their wives, both, the first to arrive at the restaurant on their respective episodes, dad joke “are these all for me?” upon seeing a tableful of glasses of champagne.

(I should do a joke here about how deft the producers were in editing out all the times the apparent conspiracy theorist Eamonn Holmes presumably espoused various conspiracy theories.)
I’ve very occasionally been listening to Eddie Mair’s programme on the dreaded LBC. It’s OK, but I’m worried about the risk of injury in the rush to switch off when the Farage programme starts straight after.

On the possibly more detestable talkRADIO, The Late Night Alternative with Iain Lee is actually lovely. Although it’s unrepresentative of most of the show, where sometimes troubled listeners phone in to speak to the avuncular Lee, the last bit I listened to was an interview with the great Professor Sir Cary Cooper from last month.

Then this evening I made the mistake of hearing a serious conservative thinker being interviewed on that station, and all the nasty man’s shit opinions made me sad. Ugh.

Stay alert.

Week 59

Monday 4 May 2020

The face is bare again. The skin left behind now seems especially fresh and radiant.
Bought a sun hat, to keep the skin fresh and radiant. It happens to be Canadian, and, at least when I cram it onto my head, has something cowboyish about it, which is quite a statement – but did you ever see a sunburnt Canadian cowboy? I didn’t think so.
The third part of the ongoing saga: there is a new, more repairable and aspirational, new toaster. Took the previous toaster back to the shop. The original toaster sits waiting for the dump to reopen. (A minor thing about devolution is how some chummy councils speak of tips and dumps, whereas others pompositise about household recycling centres.)
Wore the mask for the first time, at a supermarket. Felt sweaty and strange, and very much in the minority, but us trailblazers are needed to blaze trails or whatever.
I found myself reinstalling macOS, which is like a Viz Top Tips way of experiencing the busywork associated with getting a new computer. It didn’t have the desired effect of making the computer more reliable. I have long suspected the third party SSD to be to blame for it getting hot and bothered and IONVMeController related crashes. (Writing this, I’ve learnt there are newer, possibly better versions of that I could try… but it’s slightly too late as I may have just sent for a whole new computer. Oh well, 4–5 years is still a parsimonious replacement cycle for a machine used for Important Business.)
I spent some time identifying a bus seen in Killing Eve. We only see the interior, which matches an Alexander Dennis Enviro400H operated by Tower Transit. Spent some further time taking a screenshot to upload to the Internet Movie Cars Database but the swines silently deleted it, as they had my last contribution.

Week 58

Monday 27 April 2020

I’ve been allowing hair to grow out of my face. It’s terrible and patchy and I’m afraid I keep touching it. Usually it lasts until I see someone else with a terrible beard and am moved to make with the razor. This may be the longest it’s gotten.

I made a mask out from out of a T-shirt and some underpants. Used the ragmask guide. I don’t have a ruler or a printer, let alone a sewing machine, but I managed. We seem to have our heads up our arses, but folks in other countries are recommending their use – not to protect the folks wearing masks, but to protect other folks from them. And, in my case, to protect folks from seeing my terrible chin of hair. Although I’ve not worn mine yet.
Walked to some places. A heath where some overexuberant drivers were driving menacingly. A broad where everyone else and their dog had also decided to take the air – it was a Sunday; maybe it’s less busy on other days.
Delighted that I never finished the second serie of Killing Eve last year. Have now caught up.

Lots of people have been watching Devs. I have joined them, slowly.

The fifth serie of GF Newman’s The Corrputed on the radio could be a cultural highlight of the week. It feels like it could have jumped the shark, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Radio drama is hard.
The new toaster continues to trip the trip switch occasionally. One time was possibly explicable by a stray crumb on the heating element; another, it seemed like it just didn’t like crumpets (trypophobia?). I think I’m within my rights to return it to the shop, right? Keeping a chair beside the fusebox, to climb on to make the electricity go back on, is no way to live.

Week 57

Sunday 19 April 2020

One of the bread carriages of the toaster (a Russell Hobbs 18780) is broken and wobbles about and doesn’t pop up properly. So I found myself taking the thing to bits, like Alan Partridge with his Corby trouser press, but not purely out of boredom – maybe I could fix it.

Reader, I couldn’t fix it. Maybe with some pliers one could straighten the bent metal that seems to be the problem, but I don’t have any. Reassembling it, I accidentally disconnected a wire, and tripped the fusebox a few times during the ensuing trial and error, and possibly broke something else.

The upshot is I’ve bought a new toaster, a Which? best buy (the Russell Hobbs 24081), which boasts improved browning evenness (surely an admission that the old model was shit). Alas, it also seems to have a tendency to trip the fusebox, possibly when defrosting frozen bread or using the “lift and look” (sometimes called “peek and pop”) feature. Cool story.
I bought some hummus (reduced for quick sale), which was horribly sweet and a funny colour. Turned out I’d accidentally bought caramelised onion hummus. Oh well, in some ways it would be worse to discover that I actually like caramelised onion hummus and had been missing out for all these years.
Of course I’d been looking forward to Quiz, the ITV “couging major” drama, ever since maybe last year when I heard about Michael Sheen playing Chris Tarrant. And wasn’t it the televisual event of the week?
Some work. Made the search feature better, so folks can finally see click beyond the first page of results, and I’m happier that it no longer depends on Elasticsearch and Haystack, although there’s nothing wrong with them. It’s an improworsement in one respect: there’s no “did you mean?” if you can’t spell.

Of course the business is adversely affected by less advertising money sloshing about, and fewer people using buses, and nobody using intercity coaches, woe unto me, but I’ll be fine.

Stay well.

Week 56

Monday 13 April 2020

I was making bread, sometimes sourdough, “before it was cool”. It’s not that difficult. I made some “this week”, which was fine, and I’ll make some more this week, cool story.

Adrian “Toby jug of hot piss” Chiles, who is a broadcaster whose work I enjoy, has shared his soda bread recipe and his sourdough experiences, in response to a supposed shortage of dried yeast. I’m tempted to try Chiles’s soda bread recipe, simply because “Adrian Chiles’s soda bread recipe” is a fun idea, just like Julia Sawalha’s hummus, Rory Bremner’s orange soufflé, etc.
I have a robot vacuum cleaner now.
- For reasons, I got it delivered to the “Amazon PopUp” in the Morrisons cafe, which is apparently now a thing – indeed, there’s a sign up outside the repurposed cafe, but after waiting til the appointed opening hour I found no staff on either of my visits, which is explicable by their maybe having more important work to do. Eventually I spotted an Amazon cardboard box, and sure enough it had my name on it, so I just took it … which was thrilling. As there was no way for it to be marked as “collected”, I’ve since been emailed a reminder to collect the parcel – “If you can’t collect your parcel, it will be returned for a full refund” – and it would be unfortunate if this means I’ve accidentally done a crime.
- The wandering overlord is providing hours of entertainment. It’s not an actual Roomba, which is the Hoover of robot vacuum cleaners and a character in Breaking Bad, Parks & Recreation and Jonathan Creek – it’s a cheaper sort, and doesn’t even have an app or Wi-Fi, which I suppose is for the best because I don’t want it to be recruited to fight in some cyber war.
- I’ve met vacuum cleaners before, so I’m not surprised by the surprising amount of dust, but I am surprised by all the hair it’s picked up – presumably that of the people who used to live here – yuck – which inspired me to remove a mound of their hair from the washbasin plughole, a satisfying treat.

Stay safe.

Week 55

Monday 6 April 2020

A bit of work. Lots to do – I could tell myself I’m deliberately being restrained, saving it up for all the further weeks of this lockdown, but that’s a bit stupid.
Some things I forgot to mention in previous weeks:
- I approve of Helen Zaltzman’s advice for working from home.
- A Twitter thread about the origin of the name of the food product “Triscuit” got some attention. As if to annoy me as precisely as possible, it even began with the phrase “buckle up”. The author says he did some “sleuthing” and “stumbled upon” evidence that led him uncover the truth, which smells disingenuous because the snack crackers’ Wikipedia page has for some years held some clues. Maybe I’m taking this too seriously, and poetic licence applies.
More Spooks. Another thing I forgot to mention last week: the woman from the BT adverts inexplicably has a picture of a pig:

Well, maybe explicably – it’s an excellent pig, an absolute unit, no explanation needed.

Now, some series and deaths and disappearances of main characters later, Martine McCutcheon – from some yoghurt adverts, and who is famously rhyming slang for “escutcheon” – has appeared, and well done to her.
I enjoyed James Acaster’s “Quarantunes” playlist, particularly as my Spotify “discover weakly” playlist has been being rubbish.

Happy new tax year.

Week 54

Monday 30 March 2020

Some work. Now ingesting timetable data from more different sources, which I’d been unhurriedly working towards for some time but necessity is the mother of invention. The point is that the more different sources are more up to date, which is useful when all the timetables have necessarily been changing hurriedly.

The English Bus Open Data Service was launched a few months ago, and one of its advantages is that data can be updated more quickly, but it’s not been much use as only a few proactive operators are using using it so far, and even fewer have updated their data in the last week or so. If the pandemic could have waited a year, it would would have been great, but viruses don’t care about public transport information.

Oh well, the older Traveline National Dataset has been updating more frequently than usual – in the past I’ve imagined a donkey pulling a rope to turn a wheel to work the interconnected computer systems, but that would be an unfair characterisation. 👏 to all involved.
Another little database outage this weekend. I mention it because it’s nice for me to be able to look back and see that, for example, it’s been two months since the previous outage – getting better. I took a while to fix this one, possibly because it had been so long since the last one, so I wonder if I ought to write me an “incident response playbook”, although that sounds like too grand and professional a phrase for just one dude in his underpants.
I rashly pre-ordered a year of Disney+ subscription a few weeks ago. Then Disney+ launched here this week, and I realised that, apart from maybe some badly cropped episodes of The Simpsons, I have no interest in any of the content on Disney+. I phoned up to obtain a refund, which was fine, and make me feel like I’d achieved something that day.
Ingeniously, they’ve stuck labels on the floor of the big Morrisons, near the tills, at I guess two metre intervals, to help queuers keep a safe distance from one another. There’s a temptation to leap from one label to the next, like they’re lily pads, but that’s not the point at all.

I trust someone’s working on a computer game where you have to go about while keeping two metres from other people.

Now wash your hands.

Week 53

Monday 23 March 2020

Well, this pandemic is something.

I’m a bit bored of the “I went to the supermarket and they had sold out of eggs” stories. It did occur to me that “the wisdom of crowds” has been discredited suddenly, and in fact supermarket queues are somewhere where the wisdom of crowds never holds – usually the least popular queue is the best. But then I waited behind an unlucky man who took a long time to scan his groceries on the self-checkout machine – as long as it took the several people in the next queue. Also, it may be that I don’t know what the “the wisdom of crowds” actually is, and I’m just guessing, like people do about “the law of large numbers”.

Queueing while maintaining a safe distance from other humans is awkward – people just think you’re standing there.

I’ve been feeling a bit out of sorts. It’s reassuring to see other veteran from-home workers report that they, too, have been unproductive recently. There is some pandemic related public transport information work to do – this blog post from TransportAPI mentions some efforts I ought to duplicate – but I’ve not done much.

I haven’t touched Supermarket Market, and now supermarkets’ grocery delivery websites are being hugged to death it seems wrong to be further adding to the load by scraping them for prices.
Remember I moved house last week. I’ve some plants now, and have set up all the direct debits, and some kind of broadband (which I might write a whole blog post about). I “need” to buy a vacuum cleaner, a bicycle, a potato masher and a cheese grater, but going out for such inessential items feels increasingly like the wrong thing to do. Maybe some bicycle, potato masher etc shops are still open, but maybe they shouldn’t be.
Started to watch Spooks. One of the people in it is Tom from Succession, who is also called Tom in Spooks. Also, a Sontaran looking guy, and lots of other familiar faces. It’s preposterous, and that’s OK.