Week 84

Sunday 25 October 2020

Last weekend, the robot vacuum cleaner started springing into life at about 7am. I didn’t mind being rudely awakened, I probably need to seize the day earlier in the morning sometimes, and it was a novelty, but hmm. It happened two mornings in a row, then stopped, then started again late in the evening at the end of the week.

There’s a timer that can be used to schedule it to spring into life, but I’m quite sure the timer isn’t set, so how strange. It’s controlled by a remote control, so my pet theory is that a neighbour with an “IR blaster” (or maybe even the same type of robot vacuum cleaner) is accidentally remotely controlling it, like John Siracusa’s smoke alarm.
The clocks autumned forwards or backwards. Last year, there were some AmbiguousTimeError errors on the website, and so it was again this year – all the fault of imperfectly designed “upstream” APIs, I might add – but this time I was concerned enough to do some hotfixes in bed, and I have some thoughts about fixing them properly, although some of the sloppy upstream stuff will have gone away by next year.

I schedule my life around the off-peak periods of the Economy 10 tariff (that’s not really true but I thought it would be an interesting thing to say), which don’t observe daylight saving time, so what a thrill it is to use the washer-dryer an hour earlier than during the summer.
I see that last year I also bicycled in the rain, and again here we are again. Crossing a lot of roads to get between bits of “shared use” foot-cum-cycle paths, sometimes with the help of a toucan crossing, but other times waiting for the unrelenting procession of motor cars to relent, it felt like more motorists than usual took pity on me and let me cross because my waterproof hair and coat looked quite wet.
Bought a tin of ale, and some other items, from a shop. Later, went to a different shop, and the ale tin had exploded in my bag (it’s a bicycle pannier that transforms into a messenger bag) and ale started to dribble down the back of my trousers. Nothing really bad happened. Cool story.
Some ennui and despair but the feeling soon passed.

Week 83

Monday 19 October 2020

Went on the bicycle to see my da. There were rain showers, so I wore waterproof trousers, which made me sweaty so perhaps I’d have been drier without the waterproof trousers. (But the main benefit of the waterproof trousers is protection not from rain but from the muddy splashes of passing lorries.)

Towards the end of my journey home, there was quite a lot of motor car traffic. One motor car did a dangerously close pass – you know, the sort of incident people like Jeremy Vine tweet videos of – and I wished I’d had the foresight to strap a GoPro to my head. Instead I just mealy-mouthedly mouthed “fucking hell dickhead” as it sped away. Then I passed a similar looking car coming the other way, and I glared at it, but it was probably not the same car, leaving the driver wondering why they were being glared at (or, more likely still, they didn’t notice my glaring).

(Those Jeremy Vine videos: I’m surprised I’ve never seen one where a confronted motorist goes “oh my god it’s Jeremy Vine from from off of Jeremy Vine.)
In the evening there were some commotions and flashing lights outside. I went to investigate and found gileted men wielding flamethrowers/great big blowtorches … making a great big crème brûlée/baked Alaska? No, they were using the fire to remove some road surface markings, and then repainting the markings. (Including a the outline of a bus stop, where no buses actually stop.) A fire was burning on the back of their truck and it looked very cosy.
The shop bought mince pies (“Christmas pies”) I have experienced so far, in chronological order:
- Lidl “Favorina 12 Mince Pies”. Pastry a bit too soft. A lingering aftertaste, which arguably represents good value – the experience lasts longer. 👎
- Sainsbury’s “All Butter Mince Pies, Taste the Difference x6”. A grown up flavour (there is some brandy in them). 👍
- Morrisons “The Best All-Butter Deep Filled Mince Pies”. A pack of 4, “baked in store”. Maybe they are deep filled, but not deep enough for an agreeable pastry-to-mincemeat ratio – really, I think the pastry is too deep. 👎
I made a pleasing observation, which is that the most common number of pies per box, 6, is ideal for a “rule of 6” compliant gathering where everyone eats one pie and there are no leftovers. But there’s no such thing as an original thought, and it turns out that Alec Evans of getsurrey.co.uk made a similar point.
Taskmaster (Channel 4) is my cultural highlight of the week.

Week 82

Sunday 11 October 2020

A bit of cycling around. Near the industrial estate where my socks were possibly misdelivered (see last week), a small supermarket piqued my interest. It turned out to be Polish, and an Aladdin’s cave of fresh produce and pastries and mysterious packets. Bought three items and added it to Open Street Map.
- The franchise network’s blog is something. Women’s day salad, indeed.
Ooh new Apple Maps. Very impressive building outlines for the UK. Still no cycling directions or “Look Around” outside of megalopolises yet – I met one of their vans with the camera on the roof years ago in a minor market town, so processing all that footage must’ve taken longer than they might’ve hoped – but let’s be patient.
Saw a relative.
Hurt my foot. I’m not sure when or quite how it was hurt.
- Well, perhaps when I was theatrically hopping about in toilet despair upon confirming that some public toilets were closed. (I won’t pretend to be confused about why they were closed – I know there’s probably a non-specious rona related reason, I’m not like Allison Pearson or someone.) (I was eventually relieved to use an excellent loo a bit closer to home, and the excellence almost made up for the earlier discomfort.)
Anyway. I continued to do some long walks with a sore foot – that I was able to do suggests I’m making a fuss over nothing and it couldn’t have been that sore, but now it really is sore because turns out long walking makes sore feet more (not less) sore.

Well, at least the damp weather and rona mean I’m not missing much stuck hopping indoors.
First mince pie of the season.
Started listening to Sunburn: The unofficial history of the Sun newspaper in 99 headlines, which is read by Alexei Sayle, who is very good at reading aloud.

Week 81

Monday 5 October 2020

Well, the weather has been a bit miserable. Without the sun streaming in through the windows making the place like a greenhouse, and with less residual heat from the neighbouring flats for some reason, I might finally have to learn how the electric heating works. I already know how to twiddle the knobs on each electric heater until they heat up, but there’s a little programmable control panel I’m intimidated by.
Seen the parcel delivery dude a bit more than usual, by which I mean two or three times over the last few weeks.

One thing I ordered was some socks which, as far as I can tell, were inexplicably delivered to a building on a distant industrial estate… very strange.

Another was a “recipe box”. You know the deal: pay a startup quite a lot of money (although you’ve probably got a discount code) and receive a box of just the right amount of individually packaged ingredients to cook some adventurous recipes. Well, I have no regrets – the food was tasty and I’m sure I’ll find a use for the woollen insulating packaging – but I won’t be letting my subscription go on that long because come on. (Maybe I’ll try some of the other different companies’ introductory discounts.)
It occurred to me that I would like to eat a mince pie. And, actually, apparently there are already some mince pies being sold in some shops. But I haven’t seen any (or jars or mincemeat) yet.
My cultural highlight of the week is this extraordinary interview with Claudia Winkleman. Who knew the erstwhile presenter of Liquid News would be so anti-liquid?

Week 80

Sunday 27 September 2020

To the countryside. I was going to cycle there, but found one of the new bicycle pedals hanging off – not a slight on Zonkie’s excellent craftsmanship, but rather the old crankset had somehow perished – perhaps I’d not adequately cleaned out and greased up the thread. Bit odd that the problem appeared to appear suddenly overnight – why didn’t I notice it on my previous ride? – but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

So I went on the bus instead. Good to see the poster about face coverings had been moved from knee to head height.
It was lovely and sunny and good to splash around some saltmarshes and places like that. I almost tripped over a seal pup, who was a bit distressed but managed to wriggle some distance towards the sea.
Then it was cold and rainy and windy. Sometimes the rain was horizontal. Isn’t it remarkable how there are different types of weather, sometimes within the same week.

After the worst of the wind, I noticed a lot of UK Power Networks vehicles outside the Holiday Inn. I suppose engineers from less windy areas were drafted in to help mend all the overhead power lines, and they overnighted (overnought?) there. How interesting.
Of course I made a partrimage, a partrimilgrimage to see the Alan Partridge statue. The genius of the “AHA!” inscription on the plinth is that it’s still readable in reverse (i.e. when captured by a selfie camera).
I am this week’s Coach & Bus Week magazine, which is nice. (Don’t tell anyone, but I slightly prefer Buses magazine, but only slightly.) There’s a bit in it where I said “use case”, but they’ve changed it to “user case”, which is really my fault because it turns out that “use case” is a bit of jargon – what have I become? – and I ought to have just said “use” (as in “hundreds of uses”).

Week 79

Monday 21 September 2020

Some work. I let a so-called “SSL certificate” expire, which is embarrassing. (It can ∴ ought to/should be automated.) I was outdoors when I noticed that something was wrong, and on the iPhone it manifested itself as a mysterious networking error that I convinced myself wasn’t my fault. (I see the Android error message is more detailed, as well as alarming.)
I don’t have many thoughts about iOS 14, because come on. As some kind of plutocrat, I am pleased that the experience of using AirPods and switching between devices is much improved.

The wristwatch can now remind you to wash your hands when you get home, which I can verify works. And it can also, allegedly, detect when you’re washing your hands and start a timer, which, despite campily exaggerating the way I washed my hands, I couldn’t make work. I even tried telling Siri “hello I am washing my hands” and “start a handwashing timer”, but it was all “u wot m8”. Then I was washing some dishes and lo, a timer started. (I suppose the folks who design these things all use dishwasing machines.)
This is my space to record that I had some heavily discounted goat curry and it was OK and I don’t mind that some stuck in my teeth. I’m sure there was also some food that hadn’t been ordered, which is always nice – who knows if it’s normal, and/or the product of disorganisation or the milk of human kindness.
I’ve been listening to Adam and Joe’s old XFM programmes, thanks to the lovely power of RSS feeds which aren’t dead. 2003–2006 really was a different time, as evinced by a few things (e.g. something a bit ignorant about the Wachowskis) I noticed because I’m not a monster, but I also understand that it was, as I said, a different time.
I commend to you David Tennant’s chilling performance as … Denis Norden? Harry Nilsson? Creepy.
Bicycle pedal update. I removed the old busted bicycle pedals, which took lots of straining until suddenly it became very easy, and put the new ones on. Cool story.

One of the things about bicycle pedals is that, to stop it unscrewing during pedalling, the thread goes “the wrong way” on one the pedals. To be precise, the left pedal. If you give it no thought, you might nod along happily with why it’s the left pedal; if you give it a bit of thought, you might start to have questions because based on the way the pedals rotate during pedalling. Sheldon Brown, the best Sheldon, has a good enough explanation that I will remember. (It’s because of “precession”, an effect that can be demonstrated with a pencil and a pair of hands.)

Week 78

Monday 14 September 2020

I keep gashing my leg on some sharp bits of the bad communal bicycle rack here. Thought about complaining to the residents’ association. I suppose I’d have to maim myself badly to have a personal injury case.

Then I decided to effect change in a more positive way, by taping bubble wrap to some of the sharp corners. There’s too many corners and not enough bubble wrap to eradicate the danger completely, but seeing the bubble wrap there is enough to remind me to take care, and the wounds are healing. So that’s something achieved.
Cycled to some places. In addition to all the usual eggs and jam, spotted a roadside mask stall, quite near a railway station actually, which is entrepreneurial.
Some work.

Someone complained that the website had become slow, which is a form of nerd sniping, because I care very much about it, and although I’d normally agree that it’s not fast enough, I’d recently made various server-side things faster actually, and it’s certainly not like a state-of-the-art modern monstrosity with lots of JavaScript, and “so slow that you write an email of complaint” is very slow indeed. Who knows if their mobile phone or their internet connection are significant factors, or exactly what is being slow?
A plastic bicycle pedal is starting to fall apart, and it’s actually started to wear a hole in the sole of my shoe (which might say more about the quality of the Allbirds Tree Runners). I’ve wound up ordering some “Zonkie” branded pedals, clearly weird and off-brand and maybe I’d hesitate before buying something like a chain from them, but isn’t Zonkie an excellent name (like a weirdly spelled zebroid), and who wouldn’t want some pedals with ZONKIE written on them?

Good morrow.

Week 77

Sunday 6 September 2020

Cycled past a house with (what I’ve just learnt is called) a “flexi tub” full of cooking apples outside. I didn’t have a pannier with me – had only gone out to put some recycling out, next thing I knew I was miles away on a bicycle – but I had the bag for life the recycling had been in, which I filled with cooking apples and tied to the bike.

Closer to home, disaster struck – the bag for life split, apples all spilled out, a couple got sliced up by the spokes of the back wheel – it could have been a spectacular disaster if it it hadn’t happened at such a low speed, which I suppose is just as well. I still managed to convey most of the apples home, and they baked very nicely.
There have been happenings in the car park here, folks in “test and trace” branded gilets setting up awnings and trestle tables and directing traffic. Hmm.
Had another look for some Toblerone ice cream. There was still no Toblerone ice cream. Then, in a burst of spontaneity, went on a bus to a seaside resort – which I wouldn’t’ve been able to do if there had been some Toblerone ice cream, cos if it would surely have melted in my bag, so that’s good.

The seaside was OK, warm and grey. Plenty of unattractive people walking about outside (as opposed to inside shops). The beach was deserted. Perhaps I’ll go to to some other seaside resorts next week.
Had … a Nando? No, Nando is the creator (of the famous South African Portuguese restaurant chain, and the restaurant nearest to my front door), so suppose I had their monster, and it was merely OK. Nothing I couldn’t have cooked myself. Got the hiccups.
Went to a Paul Foot (the mulleted comedian, not the dead journalist) Zoom show, which was at least worth the price of admission.
Cycled towards some roadworks (it was the evening, so no work was happening), where I was about to dismount to obey the one-way system enforced to accommodate the roadworks. A motorcycle roared past me, ridden by a self-employed delivery person. A worker dressed in PPE leapt from a van, where apparently he’d been guarding the roadworks – so that accounts for some of the high (according to local newspaper comments) cost of the roadworks – and shouted patronisingly at the rider for roaring across a cycle path – you can’t do that, mate – and normally I’d be on the side of the what some would call “jobsworth”, but here there were no pedestrians about and I felt sorry for the gig economy dude who was merely going to park outside a restaurant. But I was too spineless to shout back in their defence. Cool story.

Week 76

Monday 31 August 2020

Some larvae took up residence in and around the bin, which was rude of them. I think I have seen the last of them now.
Just days ago, I’d not come across the phrase “coupe bowl”, but now here I am the proud owner of a whole number of coupe bowls. I suppose they are named coupe bowls because they’re low-slung and sporty like a coupé, or maybe after the former Sainsbury’s boss and margarine brand manager Mike Coupe.

I’ve been eating from some cracked Ikea bowls for a while, and that’s unsanitary, so it seemed time to replace them with some similar but uncracked ones. I swung by John Lewis – pfft, but I was intrigued to learn the phrase “coupe bowl” for the first time. Then tried Sainsbury’s, and lo, they had bowls just like the cracked Ikea bowls (apart from the cracks), and at a discounted price, and also described thrillingly as coupe bowls. (So it turns out that I’ve known coupe bowls all this time, although the nasty retailer doesn’t use that insufficiently Swedish phrase.) And I conveyed them home on the bicycle without breaking anything.

Cool story. I also bought what’s described as a “pasta bowl”, and it’s reminded me how eating from such a large, flat bowl really heightens the experience of eating pasta compared to eating from a plate. Cool story.
Proving again the power of influencer marketing, I bought some new masks. And that was a great decision – it turns out that masks made by professional seamsters are better than the ones I made by cutting up a threadbare tee shirt and roughly sewing with a needle and thread.
Some work, in fact rather alarmingly a lot. Maybe I should write about it. One thing I did, which wankier typists would call an “architectural change”, made the line on a CPU graph plummet wonderfully, and I was really pleased. (I’d previously dismissed it as premature optimisation, and to be fair it was at the time – it’s amazing how long my terribly inefficient batshit sufficed for.)

That, and other grand things fixed, but still plagued by some problems I don’t understand. But what a thrill to think that maybe in weeks to come I’ll understand them.
Anything else? I was starting to become jetlagged again – despite having not touched a jet, of course – but I think setting an alarm on a Sunday morning has snapped me out of it as I feel appropriately tired, so it’s good to know that works.

Week 75

Monday 24 August 2020

Some cycling. For once, I had some coins with me, so from various kerbside stalls could buy some jam, some eggs (although that stall had a card terminal – the way of the future), and some free cooking apples. Now the cooking apples are slowly rotting as I dilly-dally about buying an apple corer, in a thrilling race against time.

Pausing on a railway bridge, I glanced at Real Time Trains, which is a thing to do. On this occasion, I saw that some interesting train was about to appear, and sure enough minutes later a yellow Network Rail infrastructure monitoring train roared underneath me – not the actual Flying Banana, maybe the flying plantain.

Trains! From my bedroom, and other rooms, especially when the window’s open, which it simply has to be sometimes, I can hear trains rattling over a distant bridge, sometimes their horns cheerfully honking. I don’t have a problem with that, but I’d have even less of a problem if I could see the trains, which I can’t without a system of mirrors or a drone or a canoe. If only there were some way of seeing them on the internet.
Some work. One thing I’m trying to do is discourage enthusiastic fellows from contributing information about bus vehicles’ previous owners and stuff, because there are specialist websites for that sort of thing, and each bit of information takes up some of my time because one has to check for spam and porn because it’s the internet, and anyway who cares? But how to discourage it now the genie’s out of the bottle, without pissing over all the enthusiastic fellows’ contributions so far?
Spent some time peering at different shops’ freezers, looking for Toblerone ice cream. Didn’t find any Toblerone ice cream. As I said, I don’t like Toblerone ice cream any more than the normal amount, but I’ll be disappointed if it’s been discontinued. Perhaps supply has been affected by the rona – in which case, fair enough, people not dying in ice cream factories is more important than ice cream itself – or demand has been affected by warm weather.
Semi-Detached is less shit than one would expect. Well, the pilot is half an uproarious hour, but maybe don’t bother with the series after that.