• Monday. Some bicyling around the idyllic countryside, where I bought some local soap and kimchi from a farm shop and got caught in a refreshing shower of rain. What a great density of churches there is, no houses just fields and churches.

• Tuesday. Past me had laid some traps for me, and they came home to roost and broke the website – Redis restarted due to factors, and a typo in a configuration file made it actually just stop and not start again. I’m not sure if I woke up just in time or the alerts woke me up, but either way I fixed it surprisingly quickly for one so rumpled and bleary-eyed.

• 🎦 Partly to escape the tedious rumble of practising military jets, I went to see Top Gun (in which Tom Cruise goes into a ladies’ bathroom). If our brave boys decided to fly over a built-up area specifically to make us retreat into the soundproofed cinema to watch the 40th-anniversary screening of their military propaganda, fair play to them, it worked on me.

• Someone’s left a copy of Coding for Beginners atop a dustbin. Makes you think.

• To leafy, leafy London. I wrote last week’s weeknotes on the train there – it’s mad that it took a whole intercity train journey to squeeze out something as short and pointless as usual, but I felt so productive and imagine how much would get done if I was travelling on trains all the time.

• I know this blog is largely read by advertising technology salespeople for the purpose of sometimes creepily embellishing their emailed blandishments with things I’ve mentioned here. This makes it tempting to be ever more candid and unprofessional here, until: our server-side header bidding is the opposite of explosive diarrhoea.

• Taking a renewed interest in my men’s physical health. You bet I’m tracking my fibre FKA roughage, which is not even one of the three macronutrients people go on about these days (in fact they say “macros” to save time), so does that make me better than those people?

• Not particularly this week more than others, I’ve been dithering over fonts.

  According to an online calculator, my head is in the top 0% of heads by circumference, so no wonder even a plus-size bike helmet leaves an imprint on my forehead, which is exactly like how bustimes.org recieves too many pageviews for the per-pageview pricing model of some type foundries. (Sorry for the humblebrag, and sorry for making it worse by acknowledging it.) And just as I don’t know my hat size, and I’m not sure exactly where to place the measuring tape, measuring pageviews is tricky and inexact too.

  But in a way it’s a good thing, it helps narrow down the dizzying choice. My other criteria are arrow glyphs, you know like ↗ and →, and maybe a frivolous ti ligature. Years ago I used Transport New, but I don’t want to be mistaken for an official government site. Similarly, P22 Underground could look misleadingly TfL-ish. I like Atkinson Hyperlegible but people would lose their minds at the slashed zero.

In a dusty recess of my mind there’s a mnemonic, an acrostic, from early key stage 3 biology, for remembering the main nutrients. Something like: rabbits find carrots munchable when raw? I’m quite sure the last two nutrients it stood for were water and roughage, although BBC Bitesize doesn’t list water and calls roughage fibre.

You might say my limited memory of it shows that it’s failed at its one job, but in fairness:

• it was a long time ago
• some fellow schoolchildren had come up with it, it wasn’t an “official” mnemonic
• I can’t remember any of the official ones, if there were any

Anyway, my latest thinking is that it was:

people find carrots very munchable when raw

corresponding with the nutrients:

• protein
• fat
• carbohydrate
• vitamins
• minerals
• water
• roughage (fibre)

Apparently they’re sometimes called “the magnificent seven” nutrients, which reminds me what a lot of things there are called that. Several films and things of that nature, of course, but also:

• London cemeteries constructed in the 19th century
• elephants with particularly large tusks living in Kruger National Park
• mansions located in northern Port of Spain
• high-performing US stocks
• a compendium of seven classic board games in one box that was sold by Woolworths

and so on, there’s surely an Only Connect question in it.

• Waited tensely for a bus on bank holiday Monday. It had disappeared from the electronic screen, but after many minutes it appeared on the map on bustimes.org, so I could reassure the fellow person waiting, When pressed, I recommended and said I’d used the First Bus app, for some reason, as if keen to avoid allegations of bias.

• It was my birthday. I did two poos of an almost perfect size and consistency, which is the greatest present one could wish for.

• Went to Dereham briefly to take in the fumes of the Mid Norfolk Railway’s vintage bus day, which isn’t mid at all.

  On the (normal not vintage) bus back, the driver missed various signs about road closures and diversions and went down a dead end, which to be fair is the sort of bungling I’d be doing if entrusted with that job. A capable man leapt to try to help and “see back” the abortive attempt to turn the bus around – it was no good, there were many dreadful sounds of metal scraping against road – and direct the eventual successful reversing. By the way, it just so happens that this week I’ve been working on improving the way I show the GPS traces of buses:

  

  Later I noticed our have-a-go hero looking at bustimes.org on his phone. Legend! Some fellow passengers had been quietly mocking of his attempt to help, but not me.

• The other five days of the week were more normal and I touched no buses on them. Do you know, I think I’ve never met an arancini that wasn’t disappointing,

• Down by the river, the place has been reverberating to the guff-like sound of paddleboards being deflated at the end of a day in the water. Similarly but differently, I overinflated a bike tyre – like doing a few press-ups has given me an unknowable strength – and the inner tube burst, terrifyingly, the in the warmth of the hallway while I was relaxing later.

• Some websites and apps similar to bustimes.org have a “favourites” feature. The argument against is easy: the beauty of everything having its own URL is people can simply add their most used bus stops etc. to their browser’s bookmarks, so let’s not reinvent the wheel. But increasingly these days I don’t even know where to find that bit of Safari on my phone.

  Radio 4’s The Secret World, which used the mimicry of impressionists to imagine the private lives of famous people, imagined Morrissey as a harmless pedant rather than a horrible racist, complaining to Microsoft support, or possibly Bill Gates himself, about Internet Explorer’s so-called favourites feature: that you should be limited to picking one favourite and, if I remember correctly, “other agreeables”. And for some reason I’m a bit tempted to copy that pedantic boreness.

• I walked up a hill and saw a snake in a pond, while listening to a podcast about the man who reviews tinned fish watched longingly by a dog in short videos on the internet.

• roadworks.me.uk keeps existing, hoarding details of all the roadworks in England for no obvious reason but eventually I want the map on bustimes.org to show ⛔ where there are road closures. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the data is bit of a mess, but it’s OK, I’m just jolly grateful that it exists at all.

  One of the things about it is it includes the location of every skip on a public highway. (A skip is superficially similar to a dumpster.) If you don’t think about it for very long, you might wonder what’s the point of that, but it could be game-changer for dumpster divers. I would like to find a nice dining chair in a skip, but selfishly they’re usually full of all rubble and old sinks and stuff.

• Watched at least two thirds of the Twenty Twelve, W1A, etc sort of trilogy for the first time, which was amusing enough I suppose. The saying of the word “yes” is elevated to something special, like a vegan restaurant roasting a whole cauliflower. Here’s the thing, one of the characters frequently says “so that’s all good”, which is one word away from “so that’s good”, a phrase I’ve used nearly ten times in past weeknotes here, and I would hate for anyone to think that was not a total coincidence but really an inept misquote.

• In Lidl, I was so impressed by someone who seemed to know his 17-digit Lidl Plus membership number off by heart. But it wasn’t his membership number – turns out, in lieu of scanning your Lidl Plus card, which is not a real card but a QR code on an app unless you print it out yourself, you can tell the checker-outer your phone number, which is a less unusual thing to remember.

• To Blackpool, a charming place to go for a few days, and not just so you can post a picture of the tower with the caption “Paris is divine at this time of year”.

  The complimentary (Hamilton by Hilton) hotel breakfast was nasty, but it’s partly my fault for being too scared to use the conveyor-belt toaster machine I’d heard so much about but never met one before, or the autoclave/centrifuge they had for making waffles.

  Despite it being relevant to my interests, I was not sticking around for the UK Coach Rally which was to happen there at the weekend, but you bet I was excited to see some of the exhibitors setting up and a new Volvo B13R UNVI XL arriving before I left.

• In Blackpool I took in James Acaster’s show. For reasons, he was supported by a Luther Vandross tribute act, who was a consummate professional in the face of an understandably nonplussed audience, and performed for just long enough to justify his being there but maybe longer than some of would us have liked. For the same reasons, the interval and pre- and post-show music was marvellously the Mike Flowers Pops album A Groovy Place.

• I am grateful for some of the patchy 4G connectivity along the West Coast Main Line for saving me from sending a slightly nonsense typo-ridden message. In a more developed country it would have sent before I had a chance to switch on Airplane Mode to stop it in its tracks.

• The apparent discontinuation of Patum Peperium Gentleman’s Relish – the brackish anchovy spread, not a euphemism – might not be the worst news, but it feels typical, isn’t it just typical? Some people are holding out hope that it’s a publicity stunt, like all the times Heinz has stopped making salad cream … for an hour, but I don’t think so. I thought I still had a pot or two in a cupboard, and some of the salmon-based Poacher’s Relish too, but no – I know it’s so salty that use-by dates don’t really apply, but I threw them away because it’s bad for the old blood pressure.

  Do you know I’ve had a blog post about the stuff in my drafts folder for more than ten years? I suppose I can delete it now. Past me found it interesting that the smaller pots were somehow cheaper per gram than the larger pots, but I might have got that wrong, and I didn’t think it was interesting enough to finish and publish it.

  There’s still an Italian anchovy paste that comes in a tube that’s disquietingly similar to toothpaste.

• Some work. I did one of all the things I’ve been thinking about and putting off for ages, and stuck Vinyl (fka Varnish) in front of the website, and it is good. I’d been making do with Cloudflare’s support for the CDN-Cache-Control header, but to do things like caching a different version of certain pages for visitors in Ireland I’d have needed to jump on a call with an enterprise salesperson, no thank you. And now I’m slightly closer to being able to dispense with Cloudflare one day if I want to.

• I cracked and bought some emergency in-ear headphones (wired USB-C). They’re magnetic and metal, which heft gives the impression of quality but also makes them more likely to fall out of your ears. They produce a quiet background hiss, which I suppose recreates the sound of vinyl and you get used to after a while.

• In the news, “Track your bus live on Google Maps in No 10 bid to boost public transport”. The dodgy PolitlcsUK tweeted: “The Government says bus passengers in all of England will be able to start tracking their bus in real time through Google Maps from tomorrow.”

  • My astroturfing campaign a lot of fellows replied “but bustimes.org has done this for years” which was nice, but they’re missing the point – this is Google Maps we’re talking about.

  • I feel almost gaslit – I swear Google Maps has had some bus tracking in parts of England that aren’t London for years, e.g. a collaboration with Arriva as early as 2015. The press release and news stories are light on detail, but I guess what’s new is Google is finally using some of the outputs of the Bus Open Data Service – which was set up by a previous government, by the way – a bit more than it was?

  • I hope the “breakthrough new partnership with Google” doesn’t mean they’re really giving an American Big Tech company special privileges over all the home-grown app-mongers like Momego, Bus Checker, Mapway and Citymapper (and me).

• Hasn’t it been windy? They should try using it to make electricity.

• To Great Yarmouth for an unmentionably boring reason, but I warmly recommend walking many miles and having some average beer and chips.

• To North England, to see gathered relatives and common law spouses.

  I forgot to pack headphones for the several-hour train journey, but thank goodness for mobile phone speakers I was very brave and endured, and I’m determined that I can go the several days here and the return journey with nothing in my ears, i.e. without buying a materially wasteful other pair. Although I lose headphones often enough that it wouldn’t make a significant difference.

• There were some football-related bus diversions in Liverpool, and Merseytravel’s idiosyncratic printed publicity has just a fairly meaningless un-visual list of roads, but thanks to an obscure feature of the bustimes.org website I could see the diversion route in relation to where I was on a map – in that moment, suddenly years of work had been worth it – so thanks to whoever’s responsible for that.

  (Thanks to well-intentioned but imperfect legislation, of course the bus was fitted with the mandatory audiovisual equipment they have these days, but like most it hadn’t been set up properly and was just displaying the time, and not even the correct time. It’s such a shame and a waste, but I wouldn’t say “it beggars belief” or anything like that – it’s computers, have you met computers?)