Week 163: gyros

I’ve started enjoying this sort-of blogging, so much so that I’ve started writing bits of stuff during the week instead of leaving it to be one big end-of-week resentment.

So I started to write baskingly about how the reliability of the website seems rock-solid again these days, and has been since records began. Then, you can guess what happened next. There was some networking spookiness, which quickly resolved itself, but unfortunately some things I’d tried in the meantime to mitigate the spookiness only caused further, longer-lasting, overnight trouble. Oh well. It wasn’t that bad a time for it to happen, last night, although it’d have been better if I was either less tired or already asleep.

Apart from that, some will have noticed ongoing “upstream data” problems going on. Deja vu, same as it ever was, etc. I sympathise with the people upstream doing their difficult jobs, the data equivalent of trying to stop sheep weeing in the river I suppose? I still don’t have a good stock reply to folks noticing these issues, but the fact of the noticing is good if it shows people use this stuff when it works.

Apart from that, the work continues and is satisfying and I have some ideas and a wall is getting covered with sticky notes.

Finally went to the Grecian gyro/souvlaki trailer in the Homebase car park, and it’s as good as everyone says. Because they’ve a lot fewer than 250 employees, they’re exempt from printing calorie numbers on their menus, which might be a bonus? Being a car park, the car park isn’t nice, but cross the road and there’s a big heath with some picnic benches somewhere.

In America there’s an iconic series of posters advertising gyros, and if someone offered prints on the Etsy/eBay/Redbubble they’d sell at least a few. But it’d also be a strange thing for a person have on their wall, so never mind.

Ian McMillan tweets some lovely tweets, bits of conversation overheard on the bus, I suppose you’d call them vignettes. The motorist, ensconced in their padded cage, doesn’t get to enjoy such things, but on the other hand they’re safe from being stared at by “Cosmo Landesman”.

Do I have any things I’ve noticed while using transport? Not really. Bicycled past a cricket team whose bus had broken down, they’d clambered over a bank to seek refuge on the path beside the road, and they clapped and cheered as I passed. Got distracted by someone picking wild garlic – you won’t catch me foraging for that, although you’re right it’s just the sort of thing I might do.

To Britain’s most easterly comedy night. Obviously easterliness is a daft thing to make a point of. The dilapidated seaside town crowd is an interesting sort of crowd. Legge, O’Rourke, Wool, great. Ran to catch the train but it wasn’t due for another 18 minutes, cool story.

E Musk is a doofus, but is he happy? Owning a website is a bit of pain in the arse sometimes. And one day he’ll be dead.

(Decided to mute him on that website of his. I still click through to read the bad tweets when people quote-tweet them, but I like it to be my choice to click. Alas, muting can’t stop screenshots of his tweets.)

The Evening Rocket was good. Inform, educate, entertain indeed.

(tw/s*) Down by the river, someone was sitting on the edge, shoes off, toes in the water. That’s unusual, I thought, man I hope they’re not going to jump in. I kept walking, bought milk and mayonnaise, walked back, something had happened. There was a little crowd, thank fuck it was a place with passersby about, capable people. (I know something about feeling like shit, but I’ve never wanted to go in the river.)