Week 187: recognising things

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.