Week 164: understudy
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Started reading The Pragmatic Programmer. Itās a bit like what I imagine a self-help book might be like, but thatās OK, it gets a thumbs-up from me. Why not try self-improvement, affecting a positive attitude and trying to improve things and solve problems better, rather than silently moaning about shit things being shit. Its format means you could read it backwards, or on the loo, if you wanted (but I donāt).
š„ Last weekās network connectivity trouble recurred a few times this week. Finally, slightly inspired by some of the wisdom in the first quarter of The Pragmatic Programmer, I resolved to accept that computer hardware simply canāt be expected to work correctly all the time, and although itās not my fault that itās been failing so unreasonably often, it is my problem, so why donāt I do something about it?
So now the poorly bit of infrastructure has a sort of robot āunderstudyā ready to step in at a momentās notice (alas not automatically yet), and the single points of failure are smaller and fewer. How embarrassing that it took me so long to make that change.
Inevitably, itās all gone back to working perfectly for the last three days, so the understudy hasnāt been needed yet, but letās wait and see.
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š Had a birthday, Iām now a whole year older, crikey. Went to Newcastle (upon Tyne), which is like other places except for the way some of the people talk and the stone some of the buildings are built with. Walked along the mouth of the Tyne and a bit of coastline, regretted wearing new shoes, blistering which made me reflect on the shame that Joyce Carol Oates is better known (to me) for one yucky tweeted photograph than any writing.
Above all, some days of actively trying not to do work, being on sort-of holiday, had a positive effect.
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To Stratagem with Alan Partridge. Alan was in good form, wearing some inspirational clothes, and there were thrills aplenty, dance and song, time travel, etc, but something about the bigness of the venue, a vast arena, meant I wasnāt quite feeling it, didnāt guffaw much, oh well. Counted at least three Castrol GTX (funeral attire) jackets on the way out.
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All the weekās public transport went so well until the train stopped and there burbled an announcement about a trespasser trespassing ahead. Hope they were OK. The train crew came handing out free bottled water to compensate for the delay, such a high standard of customer service that I was a bit nonplussed.
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Peering over a shoulder, spotted bustimes.org on another phone screen in the wild ā you canāt mistake that weak-lemon-drink colour scheme. This was on the excel, whose timetable is horribly badly presented because of the use of a split registration to avoid certain driver hours regulations ā I can do something about that.