Week 131

Monday 20 September 2021

🪒 Dropped the metal handle of my Merkur safety razor down the sink plughole. How to fish it back out? I don’t know anyone with implausibly long thin fingers, but what about magnets? I used my iPad Smart Cover to confirm that at least the razor head was a bit magnetic, and then I dangled my Apple Watch charging cable down the drain … nothing. OK, maybe something, but too weak a magnetic attraction to lift the handle out.

Eventually I’ll find a pair of chopsticks, which I’m sure will work, but until then there’s the electric razor, which is fine – less efficient at removing hair, but better at not cutting my face.
The bicycle thief thieved some more. Perhaps I ought to have warned all the neighbours to lock their bikes more securely – wouldn’t that would have been thoughtful of me? But it really didn’t occur to me, and maybe the additional crimes will make the police more interested.
🚍 The automatic vehicle location bit of the Bus Open Data Service hasn’t been working as wonderfully as one would like, and I have every sympathy with the folks involved, computers are hard, but it’s a bit frustrating how long things take to fix at professional places with all their proper processes. Anyway, I could make a remark like “bus back better my arse”, but that would be unfair.
🥯 Made some bagels. It will be recalled that I first made some some months ago; this time, I remembered to adequately butter a flat surface to prevent sticking, but it was no good cos I’d made the dough too wet as if I was making normal bread. So I made yet some more, and this third attempt was actually quite good. Maybe the fourth time I’ll make the effort to make them all the same size, and use some malt syrup for an optimally attractive taste and appearance.
Curb Your Enthusiasm reappeared on Sky Go a few weeks ago, so I resumed watching and have reached the most recent series, of which I’d previously seen some clips and been startled by how older everyone looked, but when you watch the thing in order you don’t notice (despite some long gaps between series). By carelessly reading things on the internet I’ve been spoiled by some spoilers, but it’s not the sort of thing where that matters like the police-on-a-submarine boring crap.

Week 130

Sunday 12 September 2021

Had my bicycle thieved. Gah! I suppose it’s the curse of the good form of transport – they wouldn’t steal a car because cars are shit etc. – but also the storage here is bad, and the electrically powered gate has been stuck open for some weeks. The thief had their pick of several insecurely locked bikes, but chose mine because maybe it looked cool and had a quick-release bolt on the front wheel. (They left the front wheel, presumably cannibalising someone else’s.) Peculiarly, it took me a few days to notice – a few days of walking everywhere instead, because I felt like it.

Luckily, I’d attached an Apple AirTag. It’s not ideal – the main problem is that, as a responsible anti-stalking measure, it makes a noise after 8–24 hours away from its owner’s phone, meaning a bonging sound reverberating around the out-of-Bluetooth-range bin/bike/car park. But this hadn’t yet driven me to detach the AirTag, so I could look at the Find My app and see the last reported location was up a nearby hill. Unfortunately, time had now passed, it wasn’t up the hill any more, and I guess the ruddy perp had defanged the AirTag with the smash of a hammer or by wrapping it in Bacofoil.

Well, now I have a crime reference number, but I think the police are quite rightly busy catching murderers and possibly people who walk past building sites. I trust the updated crime statistics will be reflected in the cost of the rent. And I bought a new (much older and cheaper) bicycle from off of a bloke on the internet site “Gumtree”, which will benefit from some fettling (which I’m capable of) and will be a source of joy, so I’m almost grateful to the slags what done this (but I hope they catch them).
Some work. A database query went all slow, which feels familiar, aren’t computers strange? I reckon I could’ve rewritten it to be quicker – recently I’ve noticed that EXISTSes are often faster than JOINs, which might have helped here – but instead I moved a bit more data into Redis and now it’s so astonishingly efficient that I wonder how it ever worked before. And I’ve saved me tens of dollars of monthly infrastructure costs.
Gruber mentioned the Peter principle (“every employee tends to rise to [their] level of incompetence”), which led me to to watch the late 90s sitcom The Peter Principle in which Jim Broadbent plays an incompetent bank manager named Peter. I don’t think it’s widely fondly remembered – and quite right too, as it’s unfunny and problematic in parts – but watching the whole thing (apart from the pilot which I’ve just noticed) was a fine way to spend some time.

Among other things, at one point there’s a “works on contingency[?] no[,] money down” style bit which, actually, it would be unfair and knee-jerky to say was stolen from The Simpsons cos they didn’t invent it.
Went on a rail replacement bus service, and a local bus service, to Lincolnshire, which was nice. “Market Deeping” is a nice place name.

Had some Emmental – not for the first time, but this time it struck me that it was not that nice, certainly not nice enough to justify the let’s say cruelty of dairy farming – so this is to remind me not to have Emmental again.

Week 129

Monday 6 September 2021

🚄 Train back from Edinburgh. I found myself thinking what an almost shame it was that trains were so punctual these days and there was so seldom the opportunity to do a “delay repay” claim. Then there were some overhead line problems! But I’d forgotten that the longer-distance operating companies pay nothing for a delay of less than half an hour, so never mind.
🚍 Say, did you have a good LateSummerBankHolidayNotScotland?

The week before English schools “go back” is busy – it needn’t be that busy for me, as I sit and let the website update itself, but I try to do my bit as if to justify the extra money resulting from extra website traffic. And the state of open bus timetable data still isn’t good enough – it’s better than it was last year, and it’ll get better still, but ugh. Especially “First West of England”, who I’m unfairly singling out but I’d quite like to jettison from the database. And aren’t Bath and Bristol all posh and smug, all because they invented baths and the Bristol stool chart?

As well as everything else I made big progress with gtfs.bustimes.org, which is a semi-pointless sort of self-pastiche.
I walked innocently past a construction site, and an alarm blared and a Northern Irish voice said my presence had been detected and something something police. I returned a few days later and approached with a camera ready to record, but it would not be goaded; never mind, here’s a news story about a cockapoo walker furious with the same model of intruder detection system barking the same pre-recorded message which you can hear if you can click through to the video. I wasn’t so much furious as amused; it’s a bit like the alleged anti-theft measures of electric scooters.

Week 128: tomato juice

Monday 30 August 2021

The shortage of heavy goods vehicle drivers (and consequently some food and drink), eh? I went to buy some tomato juice, but the shelf of cartons of the cheap salty from-concentrate kind was bare. So I sighed and got a more expensive bottle, which I don’t think is as tasty. But it turns out that I was wrong, and the tory “spiced” juice is excellent after all.
Google Maps is imperfect, so sometimes drivers of light goods vehicles (ven) ask me where somewhere is and I get to tell them, which is satisfying, but it would be better if it were better. Anyway, I’m more fond of OpenStreetMap, which a concerned user has the power to change. (I know one can suggest edits to Google Maps too, but pfft.)

There are some new buildings around here, which I’ve added to OpenStreetMap, and I’ve marked the non-obvious entrance of this building, and there are some new roads I want to add (but it’s a bit difficult). All of which are even more satisfying, and might make those delivery drivers’ jobs a tad easier, although I suspect their robot GPS bosses mostly don’t use OSM.
Went to Edinburgh. Excellent.

I was going to bring my bicycle, but there are disconcerting stories about the hassle of booking a bike onto the train, and the handlebars banging into the emergency 🛑 button. And anyway, I had a flat tyre – an inner tube seemingly full of water, or was it some kind of special glue intended to automatically seal any puncture?

So I hired one of them Brompton folding bicycles from Peterborough station. I’ve tried before – they text you some digits to enter into a keypad, and I’d never got past the stage of the keypad beeping to say “you did it wrong you stupid human”. But this time I tried again and again, and by the time I was almost late for the train a little door unlocked for me to lift out an entire bicycle contorted to the size of a small suitcase.

Apart from anything else, it meant I had something to sit on in the vestibule for the first few hours of the journey until a proper seat became free. And it’s quite a fun bicycle – you can’t help but smile and laugh when you see a grown adult pedalling furiously on a silly little-wheeled contraption, and it’s nice to spread smiles and laughter.

Week 127

Monday 23 August 2021

Went to Luton, which is the sort of thing I like.

You know the magnetic swipe cards that modern hotels have instead of room keys? You’re supposed to keep them away from mobile phones, lest the electromagnetic radiation affect the magnetic stripe, which is bollocks, but still they invariably stop working after precisely the second night. I only had one night in Luton, but getting into the hotel room was a challenge, even after the excellent staff replaced my card twice – I think something was (and remains) wrong with the lock. Woe is me.

And the combined bath/shower was a bit poor (water kept trickling out of the taps, no matter how hard I yanked the knob to engage shower mode), and the air conditioning wouldn’t be silenced, and I took against the ergonomics of the stylish plastic chair and the TV remote control. And the breakfast was strange – while perusing the buffet, I was presented with a big plate of egg and bacon and sausage, which was fine but a bit presumptuous (how could they tell I would eat those things?). (And I usually enjoy a badly scrambled egg, but there was something quite wrong about this one.)

“I’m never staying at an Ibis again,” I found myself thinking, which is possibly a seven-word short story or a reusable New Yorker Caption Contest cartoon caption. But actually I’m curious to see how other Ibides compare – I’m sure I’ve been to a better one before, and what about the “Ibis Budget”?
I’m not Christine Teigen’s mother (who’s she?), but I’ve owned more than one pair of AirPods. I console myself that they’ve been out for a few years now, and I would probably have broken more wired earphones in that time, but it’s an icky situation, and one can’t simply throw them in the bin because batteries etc. Well, at last I went and took the busted AirPods to CeX, which is less remunerative than eBay might be but also less hassle. Cool story.

Week 126

Monday 16 August 2021

I’ve been making something using the “Street Manager” open data about roadworks in England. There are synergistic synergies with other things I’ve made, and haven’t we all stories of passenging on a motorbus (or another combination of gerund and wheeled noun) only to discover that the gas/water/electricity/telephone wallahs have duggen a big hole without telling anyone?

There’s already a website that used to be called “roadworks.org”, now just part of a whole “suite of operational tools” made by a whole compamy of beshirted smiling people. I look at it sometimes, it’s useful, but is there’s some point in making yet another thing that’s a bit like that existing thing?

Apart from anything else, I’ve been using OpenLayers for the first time, about which I have some complaints, but this isn’t the place.
For some while, I’ve been suspending avodo pits in water, and at last one (an unusally big one) has sprouted roots and a stem so into some compost it’s gone, which I’ve just realised is possibly too early so back into the water it will go.
A dog and a person spent a night in the living room here. Some other things happened but I’m tired.

Weeks 124 & 125

Tuesday 10 August 2021

Some different stuff occurred to me, which is good cos that’s what I usually write about here. But mostly I went to France, which was nice, lucky me. I won’t go on about the novelty of being in the company of more people and animals than usual, and everything, because this isn’t the place, but I have some observations about inanimate objects.
It’s been a rollercoaster of legislative dilly-dallying. But in the end we were allowed to go there, and come back, and not quarantine, with only two up-the-nose swabs (one down, one to go). Kafkaesque.
The France have introduced the “passe sanitaire”, a 2D barcode one must present before entering some places like museums and restaurants, to prove that one’s been vaccinated or tested negative. I don’t think there’s much to stop an unsanitary person fraudulently using someone else’s pass. Our NHS barcodes were rejected by the TousAntiCovid Verif app staff use to verify passes sanitaires (“bip bip bip”, which is French for “beep beep beep”), but invariably we were allowed through anyway with little hemming and hawing. (And apparently the newest version of that app would have accepted them.)
Unusually, I didn’t bring home any mustard (the same mustard you can get here, but in more repurposable packaging) or cheese (probably for the best, although the ventilation and mask-wearing situation on buses means one can get away with more).
Roaming! Nice of Vodafone to wait a bit before reintroducing roaming charges, the Brexit dividend isn’t it. An underrated has-anyone-noticed about roaming is that they have an arrangement with more than one network, so one can switch between Orange, SFR etc depending on which one’s thicker in the air. Is it almost worth getting a foreign SIM to use in one’s home country, to enjoy the same flexibility? I don’t know.
One of the ideas of being on holiday is not doing any work. But that leads to having ideas, you know, inspiration, so I might have done a bit of work in a fit of pique, and that’s fine.

Have a good

Week 123: plonk(er)

Monday 26 July 2021

Now the maxinated can enter France without proof of a negative test result. It’s topsy-turvily much harder to re-enter the (yet more disease-ridden) UK, so there’s a risk of catching the virus and being stranded abroad, but I guess I can privilegedly cope with that if it happens.

I have ordered the tests needed for returning and having returned, and man the enterprising startups’ hastily developed webistes are shonky. (I’ve used a couple, as if to spread the risk of one being dodgy.) Makes you think.
It’s been humid, and has anyone noticed it’s tricky to tell if you have a fever or it’s just really humid? Well, I think it’s just really humid.
Some work. Among other things (well, of course among other things) going through and using the nicer pathlib where previously I’d used os.path, which is a bit pointless but I can think of more pointless ways to pass the time. It turns out that some parts of the Python ecosystem break if you use a Path in place of a str, so it’s not that simple a change.
In weeknoteses past, I’d admitted to enjoying the radio broadcasts of an newspaper columnist (who has really disgraced himself in the last fortnight). Later (still more than a year ago) I’d concluded, partly from the plummy voiced company the guy keeps, that he’s actually a berk and I resolved to read and listen to better people. And I was delighted to stop my subscription to the newspaper of record earlier this year, without even having to speak on a telephone (because it’s not like the customer retentions department is responsible for the editorial hatefulness). So hooray for me, is that growth?

Which reminds me I enjoyed Jeremy Clarkshole’s farming series, notwithstanding a bit where he blames a poor crop of oilseed rape on not being allowed to sicken bees, and some things that went unsaid about the negative externalities of sheep farming. Which is not a shock to me – I’m entertained by lots of his and his colleagues’ work – we can contain multitudes. I think the wrinkled motormouth is a textbook case of “we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
“Hey guys I was today years old when I learned that…” No, sorry, but yesterday I read something about the transport of grapepickers in the 70s, which made me wonder where the “plonk” word (for cheap wine) comes from, and I learnt it’s probably an alteration of “[vin] blanc” (but who knows?).

Week 122

Sunday 18 July 2021

The excitement of booking an antigen test and printing Eurostar tickets and things. And then the new “amber plus” status was announced. But we’re undeterred by the prospect of quarantining for at least five days upon returning from France – think how productive I’ll be – so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. It will be more of a pain in the arse than anticipated, but don’t let’s get out the world’s tiniest violin on my behalf.
Some work.

I’ve been disappointed by the autonomie de la batterie of my téléphone portable, and the big problem is all the time I spend looking at bustimes.org – you know, dogfooding. (A former distant collegue called it “we drink our own poison”, so don’t ask them to look after your pet.) It’s not that much time, but it more than decimates the battery, so maybe I can do some things to make that less of a problem.
On the bicycle to see a relative. A bit horrible with all the pollen blowing in my face, but you know, worth it, and then lovelier with a nice tailwind on the way back, only a bit marred by some mechanical crappiness at inopportune moments at traffic lights with important people with places to go behind me.

Bicycle mechanics’ waiting lists are long because it’s the summer and everything, so I boldly traded the old bike in for a newer (still second hand) one. I look forward to seeing someone else enjoying the old bike, re-refurbished, in the near future.

I have some complaints, like it’s a bit heavy, but eating less pies and fewer ale would have as big an effect as getting some carbon fibre forks. It’s difficult to see what gear one’s in, indicated by a red thing on a black background behind some reflective translucent plastic – what was Ian Shimano thinking? – so I dismantled one gear shifter and dabbed the red thing with a silver metallic marker pen, which is a slight improvement.

Then on my first longish ride I got the chain all tangled up. Untangled it after much sweating and having unnecessarily detached the chain, and eventually gave up trying to reattach it and walked home. Bought a whole new chain with a “Quick Link” link, which turned out to be even harder to attach, but then I remembered how to reattach the old chain so that’s good. This is quite boring, isn’t it?
It’s been warm out. Stay hydrated.

Week 121

Monday 12 July 2021

Honoured to address a branch of the Omnibus Society on Zoom. Whoever said there’s no such thing as society? Because here’s a whole society dedicated to the study of those weekend broadcasts of EastEnders, The Archers etc, where the past week’s episodes are concatenated into one. Although it turns out that the EastEnders omnibus ended a few years ago, killed by the iPlayer I suppose, which must be why the Society pivoted to focus on the “man on the Clapham omnibus” sort of omnibus.

I think a video recording will be published at some point. I forgot to say some of the things I’d planned to say – in “Chekhov’s gun” terms, it was like I’d brandished a gun but never fired it – but that’s OK. Everyone was very effusive, and any pigheadedness resulting from that was neutralised today (entirely unrelatedly) by a grumpy email from a charmless Graham, who made some valid points but… (I think I wrote some similar emails as a child, but I grew out of it. Learn about compliment sandwiches, dude.)
Found myself scrolling through the Instagram account of a “car-free [name of city]” campaign. I think I’m as motor car intolerant as anyone, but suddenly I felt like a Mr Toad ready to combust some hydrocarbons. I don’t think they post very often, so with a few strokes of the screen I got a concentrated dose of a whole year’s worth of lobbying … but ugh. In particular, it’s shitty to complain about creative parking by delivery drivers, who are just trying to meet their paymasters’ unrealistic targets, and who have never knocked me off my bike.
On Sunday evening, I had a lovely bicycle around the unusually quiet streets, with the football commentary in my ears (AirPods Pro transparency mode), the radio stream lagging a few seconds behind pubs’ televisions. And it was lovely. I was mildly annoyed by the police van parked on a pavement (sidewalk) blocking a bicycle lane, but I’ve nothing but respect for vans of all kind (see previous bullet point). And I saw a hedgehog.

“You can shove your Lamborghini up your arse” is a fine thing to chant and I’ve never felt such national pride, because that make of motor car is stereotypically owned by folks profiting from exploitation, nothing to do with “the politics of envy” or anything like that.
I think I’m going to go to a foreign country at the end of the month. Incredible stuff. I’ll be slightly relived if a mutant variant or something means we can’t go, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ what are the chances of that?