Week 50: jet set swines

Sunday 1 March 2020

UKPersonalFinance is one of the few things on the internet site Reddit I sometimes look at. Some of the people on it seem to be quite rich, which is nice for them. This week, there was a post about flying business class, which garnered unusually many replies, mostly people banging on about all the flights they do, which was a bit unsettling – like, did an aeroplane write this? It shouldn’t really be surprising – 1% of English flyers did 18% of all the flying in 2018, and other statistics – and it’s not all frequent flyers’ fault that they have to fly so frequently, and that Matt Hancock’s electric aircrafts aren’t yet available.

Well. Thanks to the jet set swines, I learned of the closure of mySupermarket, a supermarket price comparison website. Now, some years ago, I started “Supermarket Market”, a sort of competitor. I stopped it soon afterwards – too much work alongside my then full-time job and other, more successful website – but kept the idea up my sleeve, and only a few months ago registered ispyprices.com, which used to be the domain name of another one-man operated supermarket comparator.

Well. Undaunted by the failures of both the lavishly funded behemoth mySupermarket and the scrappy upstart I Spy Prices, I’ve resurrected Supermarket Market. It would be lying to say I’ve defeated the competition, but maybe that won’t stop me. The timing is unfortunate – I’ve plenty of other work to do – but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Unsurprisingly, some of the supermarkets’ stuff has changed, breaking my stuff, which means lots of the prices there are years out of date at the time of writing. On the other hand, it’s surprising how much still works.

Flatulating in bed at night, I was reminded of my childhood. The farts acted like Proust’s madelines, but rather less effectively – I wasn’t sure if I ever owned up to farting in an art classroom, or was I thinking of someone else? I am sure a woodwork supply teacher bollocked someone for not holding a fart in, which seemed rather unfair. More liberal teachers dealt with these situations by making fun of the perp, which is somehow better – or is it? Cool story.

Nice to attend nor(DEV):con. It’s certainly the best technology conference at this time of year in the Norfolk area. Now there are some pictures of the back of my head on Twitter, which for any self-haircutter helps with identifying tufty bits.