Week 139: semi pedestal

It’s always a struggle to remember exactly what’s been occurring when I sit down to write these things. For example, last week I forgot to remember:

• 🪒 I finally extracted the razor handle from the U-bend. Remember I had a go with magnets, and more recently chopsticks, but succeeded only in lodging the handle there more firmly. Finally I decided to try removing the semi pedestal, which is the name of the great lump of porcelain hiding the pipes from view, because how hard can it be. But how? This is the fragment of a forum post that changed my life:

  Numpty tenant when sending me photos didn’t see the two spring hooks at the side of the semi-ped just under the basin. Pulled them with a pliers and the semi ped is off. Good advice as I had help - defo a two person job. Those springs are mighty tough though - it’ll be a pig to get this thing back on.

  Now I wonder if this “numpty tenant” is real or just a literary device to mask the poster’s own numptishness, but it doesn’t matter. The phrase “spring hooks” was all I needed to remove the semi pedestal and reattach it later, and actually with help from no one but a just-the-right-height pile of boxes placed under the pedestal to break its fall in case I dropped it. “Defo a two person job” my arse.

• They painted the grey fence black – it’s nice and glossy, but a shame they painted over the moth picture.

What happened this week?

• The dominant provider of provincial bus ticket machines had an outage, which didn’t affect the sale of tickets but did affect apps, screens and control rooms all over – feels like it would have been a (minor) news story if it had affected London. Naturally I received a small number of emails about it.

  It’s not ideal that one private equity–owned company is in such a dominant position, and charges its smaller customers so much money. I heard that they even charge for investigating bugs in their own software, which isn’t normal is it?

• New computer arrived, possibly the most expensive thing I’ve ever bought. It’s fast enough, but most of all it’s that fast without getting warm or the fans making any noise, which is unlike anything I’ve ever met before.

  Being a computer, it’s a pain in the arse to set up. The biggest problem I encountered is that GEOS doesn’t work perfectly with the Apple M1 chip. Instead of investigating further and reporting that bug in the proper place, I worked around it by finally starting to use Docker. 🐳

  Now I’m selling two older computers and some other accoutrements. Maybe it would be prudent to keep a spare, but I’m not doing that. eBay is the place, and it turns out that people can be annoying – messaging “what condition is this in?” (read the description and look at the pictures), “is this still for sale?” (yes I listed it less than an hour ago) etc. I quickly received two offers of £800 but said no, I’ll let the auction proceed. Currently at £461; it’s thrilling like a teatime television gameshow.

• I’ve been unusually tired, but it’s usually explained by my having walked or bicycled a long way and/or being long past my bedtime. Goodnight.