Week 84

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.