Week 187: recognising things

Sunday 16 October 2022

• Some work:

  • A lot of fiddly-fart-arsing, trying to make a GitHub Actions workflow better and faster – so far I’ve made it slower and less reliable, but that’s progress. All the different nouns involved are a bit confusing – Actions actions and workflows and steps and jobs – and also I realise I’ve never properly learned YAML, just muddled along forever inferring the syntax from examples, but turns out the rules are written down somewhere.

  • The Descriptions in TransXChange files are sometimes bad. Sometimes they’re orthographically weird, sometimes the OutboundDescription and InboundDescription or Origin and Destination are the wrong way round. There’s a case for ignoring them and generating nice consistent ones, but I don’t. So people would helpfully report the wrong-way-round errors – “there’s a St Helens to Liverpool timetable under the heading ‘Liverpool to St Helens’, you idiot, don’t you know they’re different places?” – and I’d be unfairly annoyed, I know they’re just trying to help. Well now I’ve finally fixed it again so the descriptions are automatically swapped to the correct orientation – the things you can make computers do these days! – so that’s good.

• Really fancied some soup, not sure why.

• Finished watching This England (mentioned previously) last week. (There’d been an advert for it at the cinema, after the trailers, around the point where for a while Nicole Kidman would say “somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.”) It would be terribly meltily centrist to conclude, from how some reviews called it a hatchet job and some others said it was oversympathetic nonsense, that it must actually be just right – so don’t. Anyway, there’s a bit where Aylsham doubles as a flooded town in Derbyshire, and I was pleased with how good I was at identifying a Norfolk market town.

• 🎦 Amsterdam (2022). There’s a lot to it. A bit of wondering is that Taylor Swift? (it was – I’m so good at recognising things) but that’s just the start.

• 🩼 Flu jabbed. The venue was Carrow Road, next to where besuited football men were arriving for some kind of catered reception before travelling to Watford I suppose. Almost the makings of a Hennimore! sort of farce where slightly clinically vulnerable people have to go in the football team? Darren Huckerby arrived in his motor car as I was leaving, personalised number plate in case he forgets his name, it’s a Jaguar with what looked like naff aftermarket modifications but might just be the factory-fitted options they offer these days, there’s no accounting for taste.

• The YouTube channel High Peak Autos. It’s a second-hand car dealer who we see inspecting a used car which is then cleaned and sometimes repaired and sold for a profit – a tale as old as time. I wouldn’t say the presenter is “my Zoella” – he’s a flash git who occasionally says something outrageous (addressing a recessed bit of the Citroën C3 Picasso dashboard assembly, “I always thought that these things here looked like soap dishes, which is ironic with a C3 Picasso because most C3 Picasso owners wouldn’t know what soap is”) but also has a point about the merits of keeping an old gas-guzzler on the road versus manufacturing a whole new electric luxury car. Still, some of the best episodes are where it all goes wrong and he loses money, a bit like in Homes Under The Hammer where a heroic planning enforcement officer foils a would-be slumlord’s plan.