Week 164: understudy

Sunday 8 May 2022

• Started reading The Pragmatic Programmer. It’s a bit like what I imagine a self-help book might be like, but that’s 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 don’t).

  🖥 Last week’s 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 can’t be expected to work correctly all the time, and although it’s not my fault that it’s been failing so unreasonably often, it is my problem, so why don’t I do something about it?

  So now the poorly bit of infrastructure has a sort of robot “understudy” ready to step in at a moment’s 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, it’s all gone back to working perfectly for the last three days, so the understudy hasn’t been needed yet, but let’s wait and see.

• 🎂 Had a birthday, I’m 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.

• 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 wasn’t quite feeling it, didn’t guffaw much, oh well. Counted at least three Castrol GTX (funeral attire) jackets on the way out.

• All the week’s 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.

• Peering over a shoulder, spotted bustimes.org on another phone screen in the wild – you can’t 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 – I can do something about that.