Week 204: bumbling fool

Monday 13 February 2023

• Some work.

  Wondered about going to Skegness, and noticed that my presentation of the outbound 57 (Skegness - Boston - Spalding) timetable leaves a lot to be desired. For familiar Kafkaesque reasons, it’s “split” at Boston, and the problem for me is it arrives at bay 4 and departs from bay 7. (Going in the other direction, it both arrives at and departs from bay 4, which the computer understands beautifully.) Perhaps the promise of a rewarding trip to Skeg is the conceit I need as motivation to work on handling that sort of situation better. (Not a very exciting reward, but it’s not a gruelling problem to fix either.)

  Google Maps’s journey planner is much worse, by the way, insists on a longer two-legged journey, thinks the 57 is a different bus that could leave before the 57 has arrived. Traveline’s one manages it perfectly, I’d have liked another thing to complain about but no, well done to Traveline.

• Started using the computer to spice up the experience of playing Wordle for a change:

  ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
  cat /usr/share/dict/web2 | grep -x '^[^cramp]\{5\}$'
  ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
  cat /usr/share/dict/web2 | grep -x '^[^crampjoist]\{5\}$'
  etc.

  Not really learning anything I didn’t already know about regular expressions, but learning something. I’d barely used grep’s -x option before, and it wasn’t immediately obvious to me that I needed to escape the { and } like that.

  Then one day the Wordle word was a word that isn’t in /usr/share/dict/web2. It was debug, and de and bug are in there but not debug, so ~

• Some bicycling instead of walking for a change. It’s not too cold out, just cold enough that I don’t get too sweaty, and it’s dry so the beds of leaves aren’t all slippery but just make the ride nice and smooth. I return home with all salt from off the road on my trousers, which I prefer to mud.

• A nice surprise that there’s a whole (first half of a) new series of You available to watch now. Was briefly aghast that the horrible slimy main character hadn’t murdered anyone yet, pathetic, until I realised it had only been fifteen minutes. __ is particularly brilliant in it, I won’t name them because I think the dawning of oh that’s __ is part of the fun. I don’t mind the delightful and silly geography of the pretend version of London, but I have a complaint about the sound design – the guy’s moka pot overheating made an unrealistic noise, a sort of fizzing (the subtitles say “food sizzling”) whereas in real life it’s more like a gurgle, I think?

• Have stopped subscribing to Amazon Prime these days, but I found a way to inhale Jeremy Clarkson’s Farm programme. The offensive newspaper columnist is portrayed as less of a low-status, out-of-his-depth bumbling fool than he was in the first series, which is a slight shame – it would have been better if some of the flying excrement from a muck spreader could have gone on him – but it’s still compelling. So what if Clarkson and his friends would kill me with hammers for my preferred modes of transport or if they mistook me for a badger.

  The producers of Cacklebean eggs appear in a few episodes, and what a shame it is incidentally that Marks & Spencer don’t stock them any more.