Week 226: spoke

Some work. Received a rightly angry communication from someone who’d waited for a provincial bus that was never going to arrive, and it was (partly) my fault. Months since the last time I discovered a new-to-me annoying way the TransXChange standard is so powerful and flexible, I learnt that a JourneyPatternStopUsage can contain some Notes, which can contain some important information. I think I sort of knew it was possible, but I’d never come across it in use until this week.

Anyway. If I consumed the converted-into-the-GTFS-format version of the data, as I sometimes wish I did, the information in those notes would be unattainable, so that’s, I don’t know ~

Tried to buy a domain name. carlberry.co.uk was an early pioneer in the field of public transport information websites, until the titular fellow sadly died. The domain name expired and was due to drop last week. There’s a cottage industry of .uk so-called drop catching services – it’s a competitive field, with different ones claiming to have servers close to Nominet’s servers etc, because every millisecond counts – and I engaged two such services. But someone else caught it, not me. But never mind, they quickly put it up for auction, how exciting.

There are lots of now-broken links to pages of the former website around the web, and I thought redirecting them somewhere useful (carlberry.co.uk/rfnshowl.asp?L1=NAP0010 to bustimes.org/localities/napton-on-the-hill etc) would be a good stewardly thing to do, and I even did some preparatory work on that. But as the ockshun crescendoed the price got higher and sillier, and I grew uneasy about paying so much money to a ghoulish profiteer who’s profiting from a dead man’s domain name, so I let myself be outbid. Maybe that was correct and sensible of me, or maybe these things are truly worth more than I think (which would make the last such domain name I bought a tremendous bargain).

🥧 Some bicycling back and forth, this week and last, to see and coo at visiting relatives, lovely. Quite far from home, heard a sort of ping, and twigged after a while that a spoke of the back wheel had broken, which is as close to chanting “who ate all the pies” as a piece of metal can get. But seriously, it’s also something to do with cheap wheels and bumpy roads and going powerfully up hills.

Wobbled home to the local bike shop – I wondered if someone would shout “there’s something wrong with your back wheel” on the way but no. The LBS quickly replaced the spoke and also cheekily adjusted the brakes – that’s going the extra mile, great customer service. Alas they also messed up the adjustment of the gears, which I should look on as a fun little job for me – I’ve already mostly fixed it without looking once at Sheldon Brown’s website – but ugh, I wish I was enough of a prick to march back to the shop and demand that they fix it.

To the medium-sized theatre to see Josie Long’s show. I was ready for an evening of loud agreeing, but it was also funny which was a bonus. A late-arriving and early-leaving couple near the front brought some chaotic energy which I’d recount at length but you had to be there.

Walked home at a brisk pace, as one walks after deciding one wasn’t desparate enough to queue for the loo earlier. The podcast of Frank Skinner’s radio programme in one ear, where he happened to mention the film Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, and then I passed a house with a window out of which stares an enormous teddy bear, deeply terrifying and weird. (I’ve noticed it before, but only in daylight; it’s supposed to be Paddington Bear, judging by the still-weirder display of jars of marmalade alongside; in a rougher area someone would have crowbarred the window open by now, but no one has, probably because marmalade is horrible.)

Had a look at the internet site Rightmove (etc) again. There’s a place down the road, down a cul-de-sac I didn’t know existed, with the same bathroom tiles and sink and toilet and doors and doorhandles as this place, what a coincidence. I think it’s a plus – I already know they’re fine doorhandles.