Week 89

I bought some things. I’m a bit aware that vulgar consumerism is becoming a recurring theme here, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

• A coat, because, despite my attempts at repairs, the old coat was leaving a trail of feathers everywhere and the zip was broken too. No animals have been expended in the production of the new coat, in fact it’s made of recycled materials, ooh.

• Some trousers, because I have so few trousers that, when my trousers were in the washing machine, I was reduced to walking about the place bare-legged like Winnie-the-Pooh – which was OK because I didn’t need to go anywhere, but what if I had needed to go somewhere (e.g. outside) where you’re supposed to have your underpants under something?

  The trouser vendor was slow to dispatch the trousers, which made it more of a delightful surprise when they arrived. The new trousers cover my legs most well, and I’m so impressed I might get a spare pair.

• An electric “foil” shaver, because the electric rotary shaver is most unsatisfactory, and I’m still not dexterous enough with the cool acoustic razor not to cut myself, and perhaps I was influenced by some adverts on Twitter where a homunculus skateboards on a clean-shaven face.

  Parsimoniously, I got one with some superficial damage to the box, cos it was a bit cheaper. Alas, it turned out to be a shaver that someone had returned because it didn’t work, and why hadn’t someone checked whether it worked before selling it to me?

  So I had to print a return label, so, like the woman who swallowed a fly, I had to deal with a series of other broken things – the shitshow of HP accidentally sabotaging its Mac printer drivers. The printer’s too old for the suggested solution of downloading new drivers from HP’s website – a conspiracy theorist would theorise that the whole thing is conspiracy to sell new printers. And perhaps Big Printer sabotaged the shaver too, because if it hadn’t been broken, I wouldn’t have needed to print anything. Well, after hours of fun, now I have a Raspberry Pi connected to the elderly printer – it’s now a whole print server, and I can print wirelessly from any room (of the one-bedroom flat), like I’m in the future.

I’m rewatching Seinfeld again. No, I mean I’m watching Seinfeld again, I’m rewatching Seinfeld.

Some work. I was storing the titular bus times not as times, because when a bus journey spans midnight, it’s useful to have more than 24 hours, but as intervals, with microsecond precision and a maximum value of millions of years. And both the arrival and departure time for each time, even though they’re normally the same. Well, now I’m just storing the number of seconds as an integer, and not storing the arrival time if it’s the same as the departure time, and what a lot of disk space I’ve saved.