What happened this week?
I’ve been to Oxford town (toll the bell, pay the private eye) and had a jolly time and not exploded with rage over the concentration of wealth, power, gold ceilings etc in South England.
Mainly I have some observations about transport. The Great Western Railway’s new Hitachi trains are very pretty, although their seats – both their alignment with the windows and their paddedness – could, as others have observed, be better. At least they’ve fixed the problem where the ventilation system showered passengers with water. The Oxford Bus Company’s Wright StreetDecks are also pretty but slightly rattly, if not so bad that I’ll be pleased by the Ballymena coachbuilder’s imminent demise.
Now I’m in Cardiff for some reason. Spilled a bit of olive oil on the carpet of the “ZIP by Premier Inn” hotel (inn?) room, which I’ve made a fist of mopping up with a copy of the Financial Times – what a story! The room is as advertised – no tiny kettle, bath or view, but I’ve know far less cheap places without the last two features. (Curious that, in my limited experience, only the cheaper hotels have baths. I know “are baths Tory?” is the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate. Perhaps it’s because posher places charge extra for the option.)
I did some work. Splashed out on a “CPU-Optimised” Digital Ocean instance, which has made some CPU-bound things faster – the cheap “Standard” ones are really a bit weak, so I ought to have done this much sooner. But my database indexes keep getting slow and bloated. Cool.