Week 181

Monday 5 September 2022

• There’s a reply button on this website these days. But I broke it few weeks ago, so you’d type a reply and click send and your message would just disappear into the ether. Consider it a free undo button. But I’ve fixed it now.

  (It’s a DigitalOcean “serverless function”, and it doesn’t help that their documentation is so bad, and their web interface … how long have I spent staring at the silhouette of a shark bobbing up and down that they use to indicate the “loading” state?)

• This week, mainly a larger-than-expected little family rendezvous, our earlier attempts to get together this year having been stopped by various people unfashionably succumbing to the novel coronavirus. Lovely, spiritually nourishing, etc. Miles from the nearest Lightning cable for a few days.

  Duty called and I had to rent a little motor car. The last person had left the fuel tank almost empty, so I went to buy my first ever petrol. I’d vowed never to be the sort of fool who doesn’t know what side his fuel filler cap’s on, I know there’s the secret arrow on the dashboard that tells you, but both pumps on that side were occupied so I had to go through the charade of trying to stretch the hose to reach the nearside of the Vauxhall Corsa, sheepishly getting back in the car to drive a bit closer … still not the most humiliating moment of any given week though.

  Cars are bad.

• Some work.

  The old website for downloading NPTG (National Public Transport Gazetteer) data got switched off, breaking some of my shit – not in an important way, because geography doesn’t change much, but still I ought to have been better prepared because there was plenty of warning. You’ve got to download the XML now if you want regions, administrative areas, districts; the CSV download only has localities.

  Moved bustimes.org to the DigitalOcean App Platform, which has some problems and I have some further complaints about but who cares.

• Didn’t listen to any right-wing speech radio.