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Not a great productive week – is it ever? But here’s what I’ll pretend were the most boring achievements:
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At the start of last month, my efforts to speed up the slurping-up of bus fares data – especially fare stages, of which there are a lot – had in fact made the process much slower, hours becoming days. So I tried again and made great improvements, not sure what I’d been thinking before.
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Revisited my handling of the traffic commissioners’ local bus service registrations data.
Turns out/I’ve suspected for a while that a service’s presence in a registrations file is, to be fancy, neither a necessary nor sufficient test of whether it’s currently registered (not cancelled).
So you’ve got to use the variations to figure out the latest variation and the current status. And, I finally realised this week, the variations are are only usually in a meaningful chronological order, just often enough to trick you into thinking they’re always in that order. But sometimes they aren’t.
(I know this data has been used by data journalists to do analysises and things, and I’m sure they’re cleverer than me and will have interpreted the data perfectly. Certainly their conclusions and what they tell us sound about right, so I don’t think I can be arsed to try reproducing their results.)
Do the traffic commisioners have “FBI style” jackets like, well, the FBI (and the ICO)? I hope so.
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To London’s glittering west end to take in a RHLSTP (episodes 438 and 439). A lot of empty seats in the theatre, because going to watch a podcast is embarrassing and in many ways worse than listening at home where you can bring your own food and drink etc. But it was nice to be out, and not have to fast-forward through the dire cruise line and mental health app adverts Herring records in his attic.
Leicester Square was being obstructed by the premiere of the new John Wick film, oh I cursed Keanu Reeves as I walked all the way around the temporary barriers etc. I bet Greggs were annoyed at all the red carpet shenanigans blocking the entrance to their new shop there.
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Went to Aldi to get a rug. They’ve been on sale for a week or so, so it was mainly boring grey ones left, but there was still one slightly nicer one, phew. (It’s a chunkier weave in real life, lower-resolution than it looks on the website.) Picked up some milk while I was there, which I then promptly dropped, harming the integrity of the plastic bottle of the famously smelly thing you never want to spill on soft furnishings. And for some reason I kept carrying the bottle to the checkouts, not realising the extent of the leak and the milky trail I was possibly leaving? Oh well, there’s probably a saying about how there’s point crying over this kind of thing, and I don’t think any got on the rug which is a charming addition to the floor here.
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Grudging respect for Gary Lineker, as much as his crisps are wank and I don’t like the little beard he has these days. It does my nut in that so many otherwise intelligent people think his surname has an a in it.