Week 100: duck shaped snowballs

Monday 15 February 2021

• In 2019, I saw a video that inspired me to buy a tool for making duck shaped snowballs. The Amazon reviews there are all singularly unhelpful: folks waiting for it to snow so they can try it out. There must have been opportunities in the intervening years, but this week there was finally the intersection of enough snow and my remembering I own that product.

  Well, what is there to say? I made some snow ducks. There’s some difficulty in gathering up just enough snow to make a complete duck with no seams. I don’t have any pictures, but you can see various folks’ (apparently multiple K-pop youths’) on Twitter. 17p plus P&P well spent. (It’s several times more expensive now – such inflation/snow related surge pricing.)

• Snow. It’s a lovely idea, but now I’m slightly old it’s a bit of a pain in the arse, especially a whole week of cycle paths and pavements being treacherously slippery. Now the temperature is above zero and I’ve never been more excited about the melting of the melty brown slush.

  Watched a parade of bicycle users a-slippery-sliding over a bridge and thought it’s a shame the council coffers don’t stretch to sprinkling salt over more then a few key pavements. Oh well. Someone posted a link to this “Bicycles work on snow”, which is good. The “avoid camber” point is a shitter – when I used to have to cycle to a workplace in the ice, the only roads available all had pernicious cambers, which was the worst, until I got a front tyre with metal studs in it. Maybe I should get such a tyre for the current bicycle, but who knows what the world will be like the next time it’s icy, will I have a differently sized bicycle, etc?

• Exercising, I finally found the holy grail of some skipfuls of lightly used office furniture, which was bound to happen after I bought that expensive office chair. So, without doxing myself, if you need an office chair in the east Norwich area, go! I think this office chair is enough, and don’t fancy returning it for a refund, but maybe I’ll still return to the scene for a rummage.

• Something made me think about a snippet of David Bowie saying a “… a mountain … or a tree” that’s occasionally heard on the Adam Buxton podcast. Always wondered where it was from. Well, it’s from this widely cringy Russell Harty interview.

• Some work. I was confounded by some runaway database queries that went running despite timeouts being set and resisting my attempts to use pg_cancel_backend and then pg_terminate_backend to stop them. Hmm.

  Now, I’m not doing anything too “web scale” for Postgres or anything, but I think I can make some things faster and cheaper by changing them to use Redis instead. That’s reasonable, isn’t it? So that’s something for me to do next week along with all of the other things.

How do you do.