Week 217: invigorating

Sunday 14 May 2023

• Some work. Trying to minimise the delay between a bus moving on the road and the corresponding rectangle moving on the map. The bus open data service purportedly updates “every ten seconds”, and it does, although the timestamp of the data is often 10–20 seconds old. (It would be better if it worked by subscription rather than polling, but the worse, simpler method has some advantages.) Every second counts, so I set about doing something clever to wait an extra 0– 9 seconds between updates to be sure of getting the freshest data. It seems to work, so I’m pleased; it’s a bit like trying to go to the pie shop as soon as possible after some pies have come out the oven, but not really.

  Amidst the work I sloppily, unprofessionally made a mistake, so the locations of some rectangles were jumbled entertaingly for a bit. I wish I was more careful about avoiding this sort of thing, but I’m not, and no real harm was done, move fast and break things innit.

• Enjoyed the thunderstorms we’ve had recently. Deliberately nipped out at the sound of some rumbling, and the hail lashed down as promised; it didn’t clean my bicycle and jacket as well as I’d hoped, but it woke me up, invigorating.

• To Simon Munnery’s show at the arts centre. He’s probably a genius, but could just be an old man talking crap – doesn’t really matter. Oh, at one point he holds up a what he calls a Venn diagram but I think is an Euler diagram (here he is with an actual Venn diagram), but it’s hard to heckle if you’re not totally confident about the pronunciation of Euler. I mean, I know how to pronounce Euler, but it would sound like I’m hollering about oil, and anyway I’m not the heckling sort.

• Forget the troll farms of Saint Petersburg, there’s a rich seam of bots tweeting things like “it pleased him to state on many an occasion that he was born at East Dereham” + some Chinese characters + a photograph of a lady overlaid with some text promoting something. The example quote comes from The Life of George Borrow by Clement K. Shorter, obviously. Not sure what the point is but it’s also (unintentionally) art.

• Was given some weird posh biscuits and – and this is the most candid I’ve ever been on here, so I so hope no-one reads it – they didn’t appeal, although I’ve met many more unappealing ones. (Placed them in a food bank donation box.)