Week 103: glove in a canoe

Monday 8 March 2021

• On the bicycle to see the support bubble. It’s a long way to go on a rusty mountain bike in civilian clothes, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. For the first time in a while, I mounted the mobile telephone on the mount on the handlebars – it means sheathing the elegantly crafted handset in a yucky plastic case – and it turns out that that stops the pedometer app recording many steps. Oh dear.

  Anyway, nice bubbling as per usual.

• Shower trouble. Every minute or so, the sneaky water gets very hot for a few seconds, then colder, then back to normal. I think it’s something to do with air bubbles and water pressure. I went to B&Q, where they have a confusing queuing system, to replace the squashed shower hose, which I didn’t think would make any difference and sure enough didn’t. Well, someone is coming to rid the hot water tank of calcium carbonate, which I do think might make a difference. Meanwhile, I’ve been having baths, which is no hardship.

• Some work. Finished rewriting some stuff to use the database less and Redis more, the effect of which hasn’t been that big, rather underwhelming, but really I should be crowing contragulatorily because nothing actually went wrong. Eventually, the benefits of stuff being a bit cheaper to run and more reliable will make themselves known.

  I found a bug in something that wasn’t my fault. The flow of automatic vehicle location information through the intertubes is like the flow of hot and cold water to my shower, which is to say imperfect. I made a nice page to monitor the situation, and sent off an email, and now let’s see how long it takes to be fixed – I gather that professional organisations have a slower, more “careful” release cadence than us impatient move-fast-and-break-things types, but I remain optimistic.

• Yet again, I dozed off with wireless earbuds in my ears, came to wondering where one earbud was, and worried I’d swallowed it. But I was calmer this time. Found the earbud on the floor in the other room, where it had landed when I’d taken off my jumper during the search.

• An unusual Sunday evening bike ride, with the phone trouser-pocketed to boost the footstep count. Dropped a glove in the waterlogged and seemingly abandoned canoe someone’s locked to the bike rack, oh dear. The damper hand took longer to warm up.

• This about parcel delivery companies letting you know their drivers’ hobbies. Some kind of columnist/diarist was intrigued by this phenomenon. Was it Alan Bennett? Wait, I’ve just realised it was Adrian Chiles. Can’t believe I mixed up those two.

• Started The Sopranos.