Week 172: sardine

Monday 4 July 2022

“I’m in oil”

• There was the head (and some body) of a sardine on the Tesco Express self-checkout. Unexpected item, not quite in the bagging area, it was next to the barcode scanner, and it was cool how the sardine had evolved its silver skin to blend in with the brushed stainless steel surface.

• Some of the product names on Amazon are the way they are, like “unisex bicycle doorbell”, for interesting reasons no doubt.

  If they’re not too big, you can get things delivered to an Amazon Hub Locker – you see them at railway stations and petrol stations and supermarket car parks, places of that nature. Usually there’s a bit where you try to scan a barcode, or key in a code on a touchscreen keyboard, and after an indeterminate amount of time a door of the locker swings open, hitting you in the head, revealing your parcel.

  But this week I had the pleasure of using a better kind of locker, which uses Bluetooth to pair to the app on your phone, which can be done while you stand back a safe distance, and I was really delighted not to be hit in the head.

• Some work. Doing some modern JavaScript stuff. I know what Hooks are in React now, they seem neat. And there’s optional chaining now‽

  The goal is to redo all the maps on bustimes.org using the modern stuff. The end result might be, by some measures, worse and more bloated than before, but also better in other ways. And I’ll feel less stagnant, more dynamic and employable.

• Went to Thetford, where they’re really quite excited about being the birthplace of Thomas Paine, a historical figure best known these days from various guys’ Twitter profile pictures. Went there mainly to see some live comedy, headlined by Paul Sinha who’s the famous star of TV quiz The Chase, which is also the name of a value chain pub in outer Thetford, a coincidence that went unnoticed.

• Finally tried Adrian Chiles’s soda bread recipe. And, how can I put this without using the dreaded “moist”? It wasn’t wet, but I think it wasn’t dry enough. Anyway, soda bread is nice sometimes, but when there’s plenty of yeast about (as there is these days) use it.