Week 186: hegemony of fusilli

Monday 10 October 2022

• Some work:

  • https://bustimes-timetable.com/ is an interesting website I’m deliberately not linking to sorry. It appears to be someone in Turkey copying and pasting from bustimes.org into WordPress to earn some advertising pence, which is cheeky. It’s good to be a bit cheeky, but is this too cheeky? Maybe. “Ironically”, they’ve even deployed some ingenious JavaScript to disable text selection and right-clicking (and therefore copying and pasting) on their website. Cheeky.

  • Sure ___ is great but have you ever had an idea and implemented it and then seen the lines go down on the graphs showing CPU usage and cache bandwidth? Turns out caching the rendered HTML of a timetable is much better than just caching the Timetable object – takes up less space in the cache and saves the computer more work. So that’s a bit of electricity and pounds saved.

• My fourth helping of novel coronavirus vaccine. The venue was City Hall, where the copper dogs salute you on the way out. Forgot to bring a mask, which was fine – of course they’ve a supply of disposable ones at the entrance – but fell short of the standard of preparedness to which I aspire. Felt slightly rougher than usual afterwards.

  Bicycled a bit far and fast the following day, when some relaxing taking-it-easy would have been more sensible. Think I need to raise the saddle a bit. Deyhdrated, had to stop off at an electic vehicle charging station to economically stimulate the bottled water industry. But the day after that felt amazing, can’t remember feeling less achy.

• Received a parcel. Inside was a box for a “star shower laser projector”. And a star shower laser projector is the last thing I need or want, entirely at odds with my values. I quite like stars and showers and lasers, but never the three combined.

  Realised I’d ordered something else on eBay, and from the reference on number on the address label it looked like this was supposed to be it. I supposed the seller sold a lot of different stuff and had got their labels mixed up, what a wally. Messaged them.

  Of course, the item I’d ordered was simply in the star shower laser projector box. What a wally. It’s just that it was bigger and heavier than anticipated, and there’s a tendency among amateur eBay sellers (me included) to over-package, putting boxes within boxes, swaddling parcels in layer upon layer, having so little faith in the careful handing of the postal service.

• Pasta shapes. You know I’m not a big fan of the hegemony of fusilli. At the moment I’m on some gigli, and there’s a sealed packet of alphabet pasta in the cupboard. You might say dried pasta is durable enough that it’s fine to have several packets open at once, and you’d be right, but it’s good to have something to look forward to. You might also say “what a sad little life”.

• 

  Been annoyed by the illegibility of the date and time in the menu bar in the top right hand corner of the Apple Macintosh computer. Dark text on a dark background. Thinking Steve Jobs would be spinning in his grave if he was still alive; even thinking of turning to desktop Linux, cos at least there you get a choice of different bad user interface designs.

  

  Anyway, turns out the Mac was in “Do Not Disturb” mode, a feature I know from silencing my phone at the theatre and stuff, but that seems a bit strange on a big computer. macOS also has Do Not Disturb While Driving, which is even stranger, cos if you’re driving around while working at your computer you have bigger problems than being disturbed by a bit of bright text.