-
Some work.
-
Decided it was suddenly time to use FlixBus’s GTFS data, which has some advantages over the good old National Coach Services Dataset. So began some nice boring busywork: making a fancy spreadsheet,1 cross-referencing FlixBus’s list of stops with NaPTAN, looking at a lot of bus stations on Google Street View.
Some good things about having waited until now: I think the data has gotten better, and I’ve learnt of the existence of GTFS Kit, the sort of useful thing of beauty that makes you think computers might be good after all (some of its dependencies were a bit tricky to install, but I got there).
-
Happy Django 5.0 (the web framework for perfectionists with deadlines, but I like to think I’m a pragmatist who lets things take as long as they take). I found a little bug just after it was released. A curious part of me said let’s wait and see how quickly someone else notices and reports the bug, but a curiouser part couldn’t resist investigating further, and before I knew it I’d submitted a ticket and it had been fixed – amazing brilliance – so now we await 5.0.1.
-
-
“Sir” said the man with my ham egg and chips. I quietly hate it when service workers call me sir, that’s not my name. I’m sure they’re only following the instructions in their employee handbooks, but I worry I’ve accidentally come dressed as a retired colonel with a monocle and/or twirly moustache. (I guess the solution is to go to a region where they say love/pet/m’duck.)
-
Feeling obliged to use up some of the less useful shapes of pasta (macaroni, alphabet) before getting any more of the others I’ve run out of. According to the macaroni Wikipedia article:
A sweet macaroni, known as macaroni pudding, containing milk and sugar (and rather similar to a rice pudding) was also popular with the British during the Victorian era. A popular canned variety is still manufactured by Ambrosia and sold in UK supermarkets.
Which sounds revolting, and I thought might be a made-up lie. It’s not,2 but at the very least the word “popular” is unsupported by sources so maybe ought to be removed.
Recently on the Internet, an American discovered Old El Paso Extra Mild Super Tasty Fajitas, which I remember mocking on here back in 2011. Apparently the mild fajitas were invented to cater for British consumers’ bland tastes, so there followed some provocative trolling, and nothing makes me more jingoistic – try some Colman’s mustard, my guy. But then I learn about the macaroni pudding, and I think maybe this is a shit country after all.
-
I know the world runs on spreadsheets, but I hadn’t really power-used one for years. Recall an old co-worker mocking someone who probably didn’t even know how to use a pivot table … reader, I’ve still never used a pivot table (but I reckon I could figure it out if I needed to). ↩
-
Apparently production of the canned variety was paused during the war, so we might finally have an answer to the question “what is it [war] good for?” ↩