Some work. The big bustimes.org news: now, for some timetables, instead of a list of dates like

Monday 16 May 2022Tuesday 17 May 2022Wednesday 18 May 2022

there’s a simpler list of what are called OperatingProfiles in TransXChange:

Monday to FridaySaturdaysSundays

Only some timetables for now, because sometimes the data makes it hard, but it’s still an improvement. And it turned out I’d already done most of the work eight months ago, it was sitting in a stale branch, that was nice, like finding money in forgotten jacket pocket.

You might well ask “is that it?”, and no it’s not, but I think you’ll still be disappointed.

Art! Well, the arts. There was a giant domino-topple here to open an arts festival, I mean you’d struggle to play a tabletop game with the unmarked blocks of aerated concrete which snaked across the city centre, but it was impressive. I was more into the spectacle of the spectators – excitedly dashing down alleyways, chasing the progress of the topple – and the pubgoers going “wahey” each time a motor car had to U-turn because the road was blocked.

I’d been worried I was becoming a miserablist, but here I was upbeat about this bit of communal fun, in the face of a few dissenting voices about it being pointless rubbish and what about the embodied carbon. At least the used dominoes will be recycled, maybe to fill in potholes or build a hospital, who knows.

Watched The Dropout, the “tale of ambition and fame gone horribly wrong” about the Theranos and the Elizabeth Holmes. (It feels strange how they call eight episodes a miniseries, I know everything’s bigger in America but still.) Apart from some cringe at the start, and I got bored at the end, it’s some satisfactory drama, well done to everyone. I’m left wondering exactly how many fun little details correspond with exactly what happened – you know they have a legal disclaimer saying it’s all made up and any resemblance to the truth is purely coincidental, which is poppycock.

Of course I was expecting it to be about a slot in a bicycle frame for attaching a wheel, ha ha. Because they too are called dropouts, like the people who abandon their university studies. Remember when I was having trouble with them some months ago until I realised the wheel itself was buckled.

This is a sort of social medium, so it’s filtered, just a list of glamorous events, we don’t talk about ennui. But I’ll share one bit of mild desolation, cos I feel I can now it’s more than a week in the past: fishing through a bag of similar T-shirts, trying to find the clean one, and the relief of finding a salty outline, the high water mark of my back sweat, so I could eliminate it, leaving the obviously clean remaining shirt. Life on the road.

Of a midweek evening, normally a poached egg and something is plenty entertainment, but quite spontaneously I went to see Confidence Man at the local venue. They scrub up well and put on a good show, the two at the front with their outfits and dancing and the two at the back dressed as gothic beekeepers. (Supported by Mind Enterprises, with their vintage tracksuits and their demeanour.)

Last time I was there, an old woman spilled drink on me and apparently I was much less angry than the last person she’d spilled drink on. This time, at one point Sugar Bones sprayed some of a bottle of sparkling wine/Appletiser everywhere like a celebrating racing driver/cyclist, which wastefulness I don’t approve of, I took a big splosh, but you’ve only yourself to blame if you go out wearing soluble clothes.

No waterside observations, apart from the little green bugs who arise from who-knows-where and crawl all over when you sit against a tree. The grass these days is long enough that, after a gorgeous day, the riverbank’s bed-headed and you can see the respectfully spaced flattened-grass silhouettes of where folks sat, all the best places to sit. And the discarded bottle of sherry – surprising choice of tipple, but no judgment! – casting a bluish shadow, some light refraction going on.

Started reading The Pragmatic Programmer. It’s a bit like what I imagine a self-help book might be like, but that’s OK, it gets a thumbs-up from me. Why not try self-improvement, affecting a positive attitude and trying to improve things and solve problems better, rather than silently moaning about shit things being shit. Its format means you could read it backwards, or on the loo, if you wanted (but I don’t).

🖥 Last week’s network connectivity trouble recurred a few times this week. Finally, slightly inspired by some of the wisdom in the first quarter of The Pragmatic Programmer, I resolved to accept that computer hardware simply can’t be expected to work correctly all the time, and although it’s not my fault that it’s been failing so unreasonably often, it is my problem, so why don’t I do something about it?

So now the poorly bit of infrastructure has a sort of robot “understudy” ready to step in at a moment’s notice (alas not automatically yet), and the single points of failure are smaller and fewer. How embarrassing that it took me so long to make that change.

Inevitably, it’s all gone back to working perfectly for the last three days, so the understudy hasn’t been needed yet, but let’s wait and see.

🎂 Had a birthday, I’m now a whole year older, crikey. Went to Newcastle (upon Tyne), which is like other places except for the way some of the people talk and the stone some of the buildings are built with. Walked along the mouth of the Tyne and a bit of coastline, regretted wearing new shoes, blistering which made me reflect on the shame that Joyce Carol Oates is better known (to me) for one yucky tweeted photograph than any writing.

Above all, some days of actively trying not to do work, being on sort-of holiday, had a positive effect.

To Stratagem with Alan Partridge. Alan was in good form, wearing some inspirational clothes, and there were thrills aplenty, dance and song, time travel, etc, but something about the bigness of the venue, a vast arena, meant I wasn’t quite feeling it, didn’t guffaw much, oh well. Counted at least three Castrol GTX (funeral attire) jackets on the way out.

All the week’s public transport went so well until the train stopped and there burbled an announcement about a trespasser trespassing ahead. Hope they were OK. The train crew came handing out free bottled water to compensate for the delay, such a high standard of customer service that I was a bit nonplussed.

Peering over a shoulder, spotted bustimes.org on another phone screen in the wild – you can’t mistake that weak-lemon-drink colour scheme. This was on the excel, whose timetable is horribly badly presented because of the use of a split registration to avoid certain driver hours regulations – I can do something about that.

I’ve started enjoying this sort-of blogging, so much so that I’ve started writing bits of stuff during the week instead of leaving it to be one big end-of-week resentment.

So I started to write baskingly about how the reliability of the website seems rock-solid again these days, and has been since records began. Then, you can guess what happened next. There was some networking spookiness, which quickly resolved itself, but unfortunately some things I’d tried in the meantime to mitigate the spookiness only caused further, longer-lasting, overnight trouble. Oh well. It wasn’t that bad a time for it to happen, last night, although it’d have been better if I was either less tired or already asleep.

Apart from that, some will have noticed ongoing “upstream data” problems going on. Deja vu, same as it ever was, etc. I sympathise with the people upstream doing their difficult jobs, the data equivalent of trying to stop sheep weeing in the river I suppose? I still don’t have a good stock reply to folks noticing these issues, but the fact of the noticing is good if it shows people use this stuff when it works.

Apart from that, the work continues and is satisfying and I have some ideas and a wall is getting covered with sticky notes.

Finally went to the Grecian gyro/souvlaki trailer in the Homebase car park, and it’s as good as everyone says. Because they’ve a lot fewer than 250 employees, they’re exempt from printing calorie numbers on their menus, which might be a bonus? Being a car park, the car park isn’t nice, but cross the road and there’s a big heath with some picnic benches somewhere.

In America there’s an iconic series of posters advertising gyros, and if someone offered prints on the Etsy/eBay/Redbubble they’d sell at least a few. But it’d also be a strange thing for a person have on their wall, so never mind.

Ian McMillan tweets some lovely tweets, bits of conversation overheard on the bus, I suppose you’d call them vignettes. The motorist, ensconced in their padded cage, doesn’t get to enjoy such things, but on the other hand they’re safe from being stared at by “Cosmo Landesman”.

Do I have any things I’ve noticed while using transport? Not really. Bicycled past a cricket team whose bus had broken down, they’d clambered over a bank to seek refuge on the path beside the road, and they clapped and cheered as I passed. Got distracted by someone picking wild garlic – you won’t catch me foraging for that, although you’re right it’s just the sort of thing I might do.

To Britain’s most easterly comedy night. Obviously easterliness is a daft thing to make a point of. The dilapidated seaside town crowd is an interesting sort of crowd. Legge, O’Rourke, Wool, great. Ran to catch the train but it wasn’t due for another 18 minutes, cool story.

E Musk is a doofus, but is he happy? Owning a website is a bit of pain in the arse sometimes. And one day he’ll be dead.

(Decided to mute him on that website of his. I still click through to read the bad tweets when people quote-tweet them, but I like it to be my choice to click. Alas, muting can’t stop screenshots of his tweets.)

The Evening Rocket was good. Inform, educate, entertain indeed.

(tw/s*) Down by the river, someone was sitting on the edge, shoes off, toes in the water. That’s unusual, I thought, man I hope they’re not going to jump in. I kept walking, bought milk and mayonnaise, walked back, something had happened. There was a little crowd, thank fuck it was a place with passersby about, capable people. (I know something about feeling like shit, but I’ve never wanted to go in the river.)

I keep returning to the New York Times no-knead bread recipe. Not because I don’t like kneading – I actually miss the magical joy of turning a sticky mess into something workable – but because I like the results it gives, a really pleasing texture. The recipe calls for a Dutch oven, which here means a casserole dish but can also mean the result of farting in bed. I have neither, just a loaf tin, which this week I didn’t grease properly, and a quirk of the “oven spring” meant the loaf sprouted a protruding bulge at one end, like it had grown a head like a Colin the Caterpillar cake. But “pics or it didn’t happen”, and inexplicably I didn’t take any, so

Voted by post, cos I’ll be out on the day of the day of the election, and it’s so important to have your say about bin collections. Just about managed to follow the instructions, tearing some paper along a dotted line, placing one half in an envelope that goes in another envelope with the other half. There’s a risk that my vote is rejected because my signature’s slightly too different to the one on the postal vote application form – there’s a growing problem, which I last encountered at the driving theory test centre, of young people these days not having consistent signatures.

Bought some shoes from the European Union, and there were some customs charges to pay. No sympathy expected – it’s up there with how it’s harder to take your dog skiing these days.

The Parcelforce website asked for a “payment reference number”, but of course the letter they sent only gave a “tracking reference” and a “parcel reference”. Turned out it wanted the parcel reference after all … so why not say so?

And the bank I bank with offered to let me pay the charges in instalments … which is fair enough, and in less lucky circumstances I might have taken them up on the offer, but my point is how 2022 it is.

The shoes are great, thank you.

🎦 Operation Mincemeat was merely OK. I was tired, and it was sunny outside, so I should have just had a nap in a park instead.

The Worst Person in the World – better. Watch out for the discussion of car parking arrangements in Oslo.

The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe was OK – an ITV drama, you know, but it’s a heartwarming true story about a landlord (12 rental properties) falling on hard times. Someone uses a search engine called “Bong” on a period-appropriate Windows laptop, and there’s a fictional insurance company called “Mutual Assured”.

(Oh the adverts on ITV. Bemused at Jamie Redknapp saying “plus, they’re machine washable”, and unaccountably enranged by the smug Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall–sounding voiceover advertising poncey settees.)

To a room above a backstreet pizzeria to see Liz Lawrence – a small joy.

Down by the river, it doesn’t take much sunshine for folks to lay about the goose shit–smeared grass and enjoy some rosé, which is almost enough to make you feel “proud to be British”. As I walked along, some flat-capped costermongers crossed a bridge ahead of me, and one shouted something something tits at the prone rosé enjoyers, which seemed a bit rude. Was this catcalling that I’d witnessed? As I disappeared under the bridge, I muttered STFU, too quietly to be heard, a weak attempt at allyship.

But when I passed by a bit later, the tits shouters had joined the winebibbers on the riverbank, and a bit like in a thought-provoking advert for a broadsheet newspaper, all was not as it had seemed. They were just normal men, they were just innocent men.

Job interview unsuccessful, but maybe the real success was the things we learned along the way, and bless them for bothering to feed back some helpful feedback. Yes, I shouted some angry words at the email, and had a warlock place a curse on their business, but I didn’t mean it. As well as all sorts of other bad vibes I’m sure, I was too honest about favouring boring technology over this week’s shimmering new JavaScript framework – did I accidentally present an exaggerated version of myself (we all do, but I here I’d exaggerated all the wrong things), or am I really old and past it already?

Anyway, it’s really not a big deal, but it felt like a negative at a time when I needed at least two positives.

Some work. There’s been some weird, occult technical shit that has slightly (one could argue) pissed on my theory that bustimes.org is easily stable enough for me to greedily do another full-time job at the same time again. Here’s a graph:

(Normally the “private inbound” line is the highest, but suddenly the two public lines went up and the other two went down. I’m good at understanding logs, but I couldn’t find any clues about what was going on there.)

A fun fact about computers is that Gunicorn’s timeout setting only really applies for synchronous workers.

Another: I thought my intuition about how to pronounce Redis was wrong, but I was right all along (“it’s like the word ‘red’ plus the word ‘kiss’ without the ‘k’”, not like “redistribute” without the “tribute”); I was too suggestible when someone else mispronounced it once.

Happy Oestre. Made some fruity buns, which were a bit bland – needed some spices and orange zest – but a better size than last year’s for fitting, halved, in the toaster.

Saturday: hopped on the bicycle to pedal across the county for some long weekend family time, at precisely the same time the website went down again. It’s funny because one of the common user-facing error messages states “backend is unhealthy”, but actually I wasn’t on the saddle for that long. Anyway, that was some further hours of downtime I ought to be embarrassed by. I could have effected a fix by the roadside, as this time the cause was less occult (database indexes, eh?), but I didn’t. Ah well, I can feel some work coming that will make everything more reliable again.

Mowed some lawn. Kept thinking of the plight of “coughing Major” Charles Ingram, the innocent man who lost at least one toe in a lawnmower accident. Pleased to say the only injury I suffered was some blistering to the thumbs.

Read a little. Then the Kindle app dared to congratulate me for “approaching a record reading streak!” and I felt so patronised I muttered “oh fuck off” at the screen. Which happens quite a lot, actually, and maybe I could keep a log of everything that provokes that response.

📺 Severance !!!

Heard about the Too Good To Go app. “Tinder for leftover sandwiches” would be a terrible way of describing it. (Olio, another food waste–reducing app, is maybe closer to that.)

So I pawed at the app, paid some money, and later went along to a carvery, which I’d walked past many times previously without realising was part of a chain. There, a box (a “magic bag”) of hot food was waiting for me and another app-brandishing fellow who arrived at the same time. I hadn’t properly thought through how to transport it home, but I didn’t mind walking alongside a main road cradling a rucksack like a baby, in fact that’s as close as you can get to feeling like a hunter-gatherer these days.

And you know what? The food was both bland and disgusting, which sounds like a complaint until you remember that’s what passes for a national cuisine here, so it’s great. The potato and stuffing were actually nice, and the meat, but not so much the sloppy bed of slop they were resting on, which included sweetcorn. Sweetcorn, I ask you. Oh well, it was fascinating to see inside the joint, the wipe-clean surfaces and the people eating miserably among the ice cream and soft drink dispensers. And I certainly won’t leave a negative review on the app.

The death of the high street. The bag I use for carrying stuff is approaching ten years old now, and it’s disgusting. No, no carvery gravy was spilt inside the bag, and yes I know you can clean these things, and I do, but it’s still disgusting, and ten years is a good innings for a cheap bag, so time to think about a new one? I slightly fancy a Fjällräven, as in John Craven’s Fjällräven.

So I went to some shops, and they had some bags for sale, and … pfft. It’s good that there’s such a diversity of bags, cos if they all looked the same there’d be chaos and confusion, but where are all the nice ones? I think I’ll just carry things in my hands from now on.

A fun fact about rucksacks is that the ballroom dancer turned presenter Tony “Anton Du” Beke hates them.

Some things watched indoors this week:

The Souvenir. Marred by the delivery method – my first time renting something on the iTunes Music Store, and thanks to dayfuls of tiring activity/pollen blowing at me I kept falling asleep until it was a race against time to reach the end before the rental expired. As for the film itself, oh the interior design, there was a dining table and chairs I really liked.

The Savile documentary (A British Horror Story). Quite a lot of moments of WTF. When someone tells you they’re a paedo, believe them.

A muted cheer for the return of Have I Got News For You. I know it’s shit, and of course I disapprove of how they garnished the reputations of some disagreeable politicians, and how bad they treated Angus Deayton just for supporting some small entrepreneurs, but still we watch. There was a time when I had time for both the tightly edited and the extended A Bit More versions per week, but I’ve cut down, which is some kind of progress.

I bet the film about Thomas Cromwell playing golf is jolly old fun, but I’ve sat through the trailer so many times now (only 0 times this week mind) ugh.

To the theatre to see Nish Kumar, supported by the great Kemah Bob. Of the vast roomful of people who’d come to see the Quibi star, the one who sat in front of me had the largest head and ears, and good for him, all the better to to see and hear the shouted opinions we all agreed with. An entertaining evening.

Had a little job interview. 😮 The world has changed since I last applied for a job – Zoom did exist back then, but only now have we all heard of it (it used to be what you did with a Mazda?). And some of the other software involved has gotten better too – imagine that, software improving, incredible stuff.

Anyway. I think, maybe, I don’t want to be part of any company that would have me as an employee. So is my ideal outcome to be rejected, but they later change their mind, making it clear that they feel they’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel?

When asked about “salary expectations”, a braver soul would go “my expectation is for a salary to be mentioned in the job advert, that’s what I expect, you swines!” Because some smart people say the weaselly secretiveness is a barrier to equal pay, and just benefits cocksure negotiators. But on the other hand, they might be wrong.

In case I was too controversial earlier, I just want to say: sweetcorn is OK really.

You know the websites where you can watch hookie streams of live football etc? Obviously I don’t know them, except to say they’re powerful innovators in the field of online advertising – you wouldn’t believe the things they can do with popups these days.

I mention this because you may have noticed the advertising on bustimes.org getting more intrusive. It’s been a gradual process, like boiling a frog, or the guy in The Twits gluing wafer-thin bits of wood to lengthen the legs of his wife’s chair. Anyway, IDGAF, and I will not stop until the soccer stream wallahs are looking to me for inspiration. Actually, no, I think we’ve reached the apex, or is it the nadir, and the next phase is probably to get rid of a few of the worse-performing ad slots.

I clicked on the Daily Mail the other day 😱 and they’re an innovation powerhouse too – there was an autoplaying video ad that followed you round the page, in which a like a murmuration of smiling fashionable young people somehow made me want to buy some petrochemicals. Inspiring stuff.

Some more work. Improvements and improworsements. Satisfying stuff.

Been sort of enjoying the horrible rain and sleet showers a bit. I’ve decided my mood is inversely correlated to the weather, or just completely untethered to it as if I’m more emotionally complex than a leaf.

Went and looked at a flat. Had some thoughts, but they’re boring. I know rich people dithering about what house to buy is literally a whole huge category of TV programmes, but still.

Some things I left the house to see:

• Death on the Nile. The “enough champagne to fill the Nile!” bit, obviously the most overpowering bit of the trailer, is less egregious in the full context of the film. (Is this a spoiler?) It’s weirder that Russell Brand is in it, which took me by surprise. Is that Russell Brand? Yes, I think it’s Russell Brand.

• Lou Sanders. Good. Supported by Luke McQueen, who was great too – I remember not thinking much of a little Channel 4/internet show he did, but never mind.

Guy who has only seen the beginning of the first episode of the Branagh Wallander, seeing a field of oilseed rape: “Getting a lot of Wallander vibes from this.”

Some work, which can be summarised as “Why must they keep mucking about with everything?” To be clear, it’s me who’s mucking about with everything, and that’s my right, in fact it’s my job, thank you very much.

The bit of mucking about I consider most successful (just because no one’s remarked on it yet): inspired by the aesthetic AF Overcast redesign, I went and changed the font that folks using Apple platforms see on the website from SF Pro to SF Pro Rounded, and I think it’s good?

Friday. To London, mainly to see “A Night For Ukraine”. A packed line-up of mostly I’m afraid unknown-to-me nineties bands (¯\_(ツ)_/¯) and known-to-me comedians. Had a nice time anyway. A few years ago I listened to a lot of Sleeper for a bit.

Here’s a phenomenon: people holding their telephones aloft, shakily livestreaming to their friends. Which seems a bit cheeky, but am no a grass, and who’s to say their friends hadn’t actually bought tickets but just couldn’t be there in person. Strategies differ: some hold the phone one-handed, the spare hand occasionally joining in to type a reply to a comment on the stream, whereas others go two-handed to reduce camera shake, holding their plastic cup of drink with their teeth.

Just the previous evening, I’d seen “Stand Up For Ukraine” from the comfort of a (legit) private YouTube link, so this was two consecutive evenings of seeing James Acaster and Milton Jones, and that’s OK.

The Central line gets busy doesn’t it.

Saturday. Thought I was being so clever, avoiding railway engineering works by catching a National Express coach, but turns out there’s a sort of motorway equivalent, namely congestion and roadworks, so arrived an hour late in the end. Oh well, it was cheap and I had things to read and listen to and even got to look out of the window for the final hour.

And I noticed and appreciated the subtle branding someone’s added to the moving rectangles representing National Express coaches on the bustimes.org map ↑. When it was up to me I couldn’t be bothered, but some people can, good for them, and sometimes it’s good to bother.

To the local provincial music venue for Absolute Bowie, a great bunch of lads and quite good tribute act. A clever bit of superlative theatricality was how they did some long drawn-out instrumental bits so Zavid could go round the back for a costume change.

Fear I’m becoming the thing I hate most, someone who screenshots rather than links.

Saharan dust eh? The amazing abseiling window cleaners, who are disappointingly neither giraffe, pelican, nor monkey, came to work on the building here exactly a day before the winds blew, and now the glass and shiny surfaces are dirtier than they were before, woe unto us. Also, my jacket’s been anointed with a reddish tint, which looks rather fetching actually.

(There are some swathes of glass that the abseilers don’t touch, for which I am responsible, and I’m sort of OK now at achieving a streak-free finish with a sponge, a squeegee and bucket of mysterious water. But it’s difficult, and the professional window cleaners deserve maximum respect.)

Some work, mainly on Sunday evening.

Earlier, I think during a restorative bike ride, I’d remembered that “real artists ship.” So now, at last, a growing number of bus services suddenly have fare tables easily accessible on bustimes.org. It’s not much, and there are definitely friendlier ways of presenting the data (see the more ambitious version of the feature from more than a year ago), but it’s literally better than nothing. And “shame driven development” is a thing – I think having people using a thing acts as an incentive to keep making it better.

Going and doing and seeing things.

I was going to go and see a live performance, but the performer contracted the novel coronavirus, so that didn’t happen.

Went (physically) to to a Web3 meetup. It was more self-aware and less amusingly cringey than expected, but … still, obviously, I have no immediate plans to mint any tokens or anything like that. I have some thoughts I might collect later. Above all, it was a chance to stand in a room of people and exposed pipework amid networking opportunities, which … you know.

Last week I went and played some board games with some strangers. James Acaster does something similar in James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes; pleased to say the vibe here was friendlier, more inviting. Would I go again? Maybe – would going again itself count as a new experience?

My last/only profound thought about “pineapple on pizza”: if I meet a pizza with pineapple on it, it’s likely in the context of free pizza, and free is good, so by extension pineapple must be good too. Maybe.

On a similar vibe, I have a theory about what makes something acceptable or not to deep-fry, but I’m not ready to share it yet.

Some content consumed in the past few weeks, in roughly reverse chronological order:

• Simon Rimmer and Tim Lovejoy’s appearance on Fortunately…. Rimmer came out with a great sort of Marxian analysis of the history of licensing laws, and did you know he invented pulled pork?

• The Witchfinder (BBC). Such a cast – among others, it was a nice surprise to see alistair green appear briefly. Someone complained that it’s not densely hilarious, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it’s worth persisting with; it’s a nice place to be (burning innocent women aside), and they went to the trouble of making it so it’d be rude not to watch.

• The Curse (Channel 4). Weird, extraordinary.

• Inventing Anna (Netflix). Crap, but in the way that snuggling up in a big warm heap of manure is probably quite nice?

Smart people only pay for Netflix one month at a time, but I’ve accidentally let my subscription renew for another month. That’s how they get you – it’s like what Jeremiah Colman said, “I make my money from the mustard that people throw away on the sides of their plate.”

The Batman was OK. Didn’t actually feel too long. Top grunting by … Robin Patterson? Bobby Pattinson? It was a surprise to see Trevor off EastEnders, even though, if I think about it, I had heard he was in it – and a bit spooky that he came up in last week’s weeknotes too (as did the phrase “winged rat”).

The temperature of the cinema was just perfect.

Some work.

Suddenly I have sort of strategy: to automate/outsource more stuff, unlocking even more time for me to do … who knows what? Which has been a strategy all along, but this week, with a newfound clarity, I did a little development and now I don’t need to waste much time at all being bothered about the colouring-in of bus icons on the bus map and the filling-in of other boring details about vehicles. And it’s great, a weight has lifted, why didn’t I do this sooner? I slightly disagree with the level of detail people want to add to the little moving rectangles – it’s incredible what you can do with CSS – but it’s OK, the point is not to think about it, and I no longer need to, so I just don’t.

Last week I cleaned the disgusting little drip tray at the back of the refrigerator. I was in the area trying to make the freezer be quiet, and obviously cleaning a bit of a completely separate appliance had no effect on that, but in some small way I’ve made the place less smelly, or at least delayed the point at which it will start to stink.

There are YouTube videos that will give you enough confidence to remove the drip tray for cleaning without breaking anything – it takes a bit of yanking. They’re longer than neccesary – a few-seconds-long GIF would suffice – but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. (I linked to the timestamp of the crucial bit of the video there.)

Is this my quarter-life crisis? Not sure what they usually involve – buying half a sports car? (I haven’t.) As crises go, it has much to recommend it – funny things are funnier, beautiful things have more beauty, I’m even less angry.

One thing I can share is my Sleep++ “Readiness Score” screen, which might be evidence that “the quantified self” isn’t crap.

Indeed I felt different on the low-scoring days, but I think the poor sleep was a symptom not the cause. This is boring, but actually so far this month I’ve had no alcohol and barely a cup of tea of caffeine per day, which science would have you believe is good for sleep – and my experience doesn’t prove or disprove anything.

The excessively manual blogging workflow means I keep misnumbering and misdating these posts – e.g. week 154 accidentally had the same date and title as 153 – and nobody appears to notice. And that’s a relief as, obviously, by “accidentally” I really mean deliberately, to tempt anyone reading this into identifying themself by sending in a correction, and no one’s blown their cover. Good work. Have a nice week.