Week 345

A little work. It dawned that sometimes it’s better to have one big database server than two of half the size, not just because of complicatedness but because of the benefit of one big shared memory.

As a treat, I wasted some time trying to move this blog from Cloudflare Pages. A roadblock – to that, and to previous abortive goes at using static site generators other than Jekyll – is that I’m locked in to the contraversial way that this blog post’s URL is /2025/10/week-345 but the file on the server is /2025/10/week-345.html, and why should my cherished URLs have to end in a slash?

To London’s glittering Union Chapel.

Left my AirPods charging case on the train – yes, I forgot to take all my personal belongings with me; if only the noise cancellation was less effective, I might have heard the announcement about remembering to do that. Fortunately, AirPods cases famously have some features to help you find them: I might have gotten a “AirPods case left behind” notification, if only my phone wasn’t in Do Not Disturb mode; the next day, by the power of the Find My network, I could see they were somewhere in the train station, but I dumbly filled in the online form as instructed on the website instead of going there immediately in person.

After a day or so of nothing, the pin on the map moved to an industrial estate in Welwyn Garden City, apparently in the car park of a plumbers’ merchants – had a travelling plumber accidentally been given my AirPods case? No, Greater Anglia outsources its lost-property warehousing to Pakex, a supplier of cleaning and packaging supplies with a warehouse on that industrial estate. (They also sell railway-ish things like whistles and dispatch batons.) The location isn’t that precise, but I think it was in a van outside and later moved inside the building.

What the fuck does “granular”, as in the phrase “more granular”, mean? Because to me, granules are coarser than a fine powder, but finer than coarse lumps – you know, granulated sugar is between icing sugar and sugar cubes on the spectrum of granularity. If I ever use that word, please know that I’ve been replaced by an impostor.