Week 130

Sunday 12 September 2021

• Had my bicycle thieved. Gah! I suppose it’s the curse of the good form of transport – they wouldn’t steal a car because cars are shit etc. – but also the storage here is bad, and the electrically powered gate has been stuck open for some weeks. The thief had their pick of several insecurely locked bikes, but chose mine because maybe it looked cool and had a quick-release bolt on the front wheel. (They left the front wheel, presumably cannibalising someone else’s.) Peculiarly, it took me a few days to notice – a few days of walking everywhere instead, because I felt like it.

  Luckily, I’d attached an Apple AirTag. It’s not ideal – the main problem is that, as a responsible anti-stalking measure, it makes a noise after 8–24 hours away from its owner’s phone, meaning a bonging sound reverberating around the out-of-Bluetooth-range bin/bike/car park. But this hadn’t yet driven me to detach the AirTag, so I could look at the Find My app and see the last reported location was up a nearby hill. Unfortunately, time had now passed, it wasn’t up the hill any more, and I guess the ruddy perp had defanged the AirTag with the smash of a hammer or by wrapping it in Bacofoil.

  Well, now I have a crime reference number, but I think the police are quite rightly busy catching murderers and possibly people who walk past building sites. I trust the updated crime statistics will be reflected in the cost of the rent. And I bought a new (much older and cheaper) bicycle from off of a bloke on the internet site “Gumtree”, which will benefit from some fettling (which I’m capable of) and will be a source of joy, so I’m almost grateful to the slags what done this (but I hope they catch them).

• Some work. A database query went all slow, which feels familiar, aren’t computers strange? I reckon I could’ve rewritten it to be quicker – recently I’ve noticed that EXISTSes are often faster than JOINs, which might have helped here – but instead I moved a bit more data into Redis and now it’s so astonishingly efficient that I wonder how it ever worked before. And I’ve saved me tens of dollars of monthly infrastructure costs.

• Gruber mentioned the Peter principle (“every employee tends to rise to [their] level of incompetence”), which led me to watch the late 90s sitcom The Peter Principle in which Jim Broadbent plays an incompetent bank manager named Peter. I don’t think it’s widely fondly remembered – and quite right too, as it’s unfunny and problematic in parts – but watching the whole thing (apart from the pilot which I’ve just noticed) was a fine way to spend some time.

  Among other things, at one point there’s a “works on contingency[?] no[,] money down” style bit which, actually, it would be unfair and knee-jerky to say was stolen from The Simpsons cos they didn’t invent it.

• Went on a rail replacement bus service, and a local bus service, to Lincolnshire, which was nice. “Market Deeping” is a nice place name.

  Had some Emmental – not for the first time, but this time it struck me that it was not that nice, certainly not nice enough to justify the let’s say cruelty of dairy farming – so this is to remind me not to have Emmental again.