Week 116

Monday 7 June 2021

Woke to a stonking headache, quite different to and less usual than a hangover. Some people get these things often, and they have my sympathy, but actually by having them all the while they get to get used to it.

If I tended to wake sensibly early, I’d have felt it earlier and gulped some water before it got really bad, but I don’t. “Well, I’ll really appreciate this being over when it’s over,” I thought, but I didn’t really.
I’ve been listening to The The One Show Show, lots of episodes in quick succession starting from the first. Maybe they’re a bit too pleased with themselves about what what a crazy idea they had, making an Obsessed With… style programme about a programme one wouldn’t think of making such a programme about, but maybe they have every right to be.
It’s been quite warm. On the bicycle I went to see some relations, with the novelty of staying the night instead of pedalling there and back in short succession. Having not slept in the countryside for a while, I’d forgotten what a racket the birds make – I didn’t fall asleep quickly, and the ruddy dawn chorus had started up by the time I managed to.

The return journey coincided with an organised “cycle event”, so there were lots of all-the-gear-and-some-idea folks whizzing about, coming the other way or overtaking me and complimenting my shorts. (I am going to get some better shorts, because the shorts of choice, although they are are natty and more modesty-preserving than cycling shorts, are really swimming shorts and are insufficiently stretchy.)
The 114th and 115th weeknoteses here were mistitled weeks 124 and 125 respectively. (Like some kind of Dominic Cummings, I’ve gone back and quietly corrected them now.) And no one mentioned it, which is comforting.

Week 115: strong and frequent language

Tuesday 1 June 2021

Twanged my ankle.

Like the last time this happened, I was wearing some Atheist Shoes – they’re quite comfortable, and look interesting from above, but I don’t actually enjoy the shouty Richard Dawkings style message on the soles, and apparently God dislikes them enough to injure me. I was just walking along, not doing anything dangerous, so there’s no other explanation.

I went to the freezer for some ice to speed up the healing, but it turned out I’d switched it off at the plug earlier – not quite unwittingly, I remembered I’d done it to silence its loud hum, but not remembered to switch it back on. Not too much ruined – just some chopped chilli and garlic, which are things to have in a freezer I warmly recommend.

Spent one day indoors and now, some days later, it feels mostly normal again, which is terrific.
I fancied a Cornetto, but the availability of Cornetti is surprisingly poor. A typical small shop has only strawberry (the worst of the flavours) or a “soft” chocolate kind (as if a normal one is too hard … sounds a bit effeminate).

Eating the vegetable fat based frozen dessert cone I settled for, I saw a car with a big spoiler. Like the last such motor I was intrigued enough by to Google the number plate, it had its own Instagram account (with not so many followers). I learn that Toyota based the shade of red paint on the bum of a macaque, which is great and reminds me that those godless shoes are available in “kitten testicle grey”.
I haven’t finished Curb Your Enthusiasm, but it’s disappeared from Sky Go for a bit, which is OK – it’s a thing that happens, and I’d noticed the expiry date warning a few days earlier, and it’s likely to reappear one day in the future.

It’s funny how the continuity announcer on some of the Sky programmes warns about “strong and frequent language”, which I guess means swearing and fast talking. But lots of boring bores on the internet have noticed the same thing, and I’ve not heard that phrase for a while, so maybe the folks at Sky have had all meetings about it and rerecorded the announcements to make slightly more sense, which is disappointing.

Week 114: Unlimited* Sports Water

Sunday 23 May 2021

Switched on the wrong ring on the hob and melted the kitchen scales. In my defence, the hob rings are arranged in a 2x2 layout, but the knobs are in a 1x4 row, which is extremely normal but literally a textbook example of bad interface design. It can be comforting to search Twitter to find other people making the same mistake.
Actually unrelatedly, bought a microwave oven. Warming up leftovers in a fuddy-duddy oven or saucepan is OK, but space age microwaves are more efficient, maybe? Apparently 93% of UK households have one.

I don’t know why I did the “click and collect” thing. Declined the offer of help carrying it to my car (I don’t have a car). Then I think I was expecting to carry it all the way home, but the box was bigger and heavier than I’d imagined.

Like a gift from god, I found an abandoned shopping trolley in a bush, with all of its wheels. But what are the ethics of using a stolen trolley? That’s the trolley problem. Obviously, after wheeling the oven home, I’d have returned it (the trolley) to where came from (the Asda, not the bush). But I didn’t.

A further present from a higher power, there was a conveniently timed bus that took me some distance. (Maybe my first experience of the alarming vibrations of a Wright StreetLite. Noticed it wasn’t tracking on the Bus Open Data feed for some reason.) I might then have caught a further bus, but for some reason I instead persisted in carrying the heavy item the rest of the way, very slowly and stoppingly. Walked past another wild trolley. Thought one of those for-hire electric scooters would have been handy – I’d not have scooted, just balanced the box on the deck and pushed – but none were around.

I have no regrets, apart from maybe everything. It’s the simplest (just two knobs, and a “ping” sound when it’s done) and smallest microwave oven I’ve ever met, but there’s still not really room for it. Delivery would have been cheaper than the bus ticket, but imagine what an equivalent gym session (obviously I am now shredded AF after the carrying 💪) would have cost.
That reminds me: I was briefly curious about gyms a few weeks ago, and read the phrase “Unlimited* Sports Water”, which is just brilliant. Somewhere, this Sports Water and its limits are explained, but I’d prefer it to remain a mystery, and I refuse to join any gym that would have me as a member, so I’ll continue taking kitchen appliances for walks instead.
Also unrelatedly, joined a “car club”, which is not like the Dodge Charger Owners’ Club but lets you hire a motor car, which might be useful occasionally.

Week 113

Monday 17 May 2021

Months ago, probably last year, someone from the water company left a note to say they’d “exchanged” the water meter, like I was meant to know what that means. It turned out they’d installed a smart meter, which unlike a smart electricity meter doesn’t come with an “in-home display” (IHD) but does automagically transmit regular meter readings to the water company (which is especially helpful cos the meters here are all locked away in a mysterious central location we don’t have access to).

This week, for some reason, I became interested in (it would be wrong to say “obsessed by”) looking at the water company’s app, which is excessively theatrically secure (cos we wouldn’t want a criminal to steal my phone and sneer at how much water I use or pay my bill for me), and which, in the absence of an IHD can, after a fashion, show an hourly water usage graph (delayed by a day or two).

Alarmed by the allegation that I use “more water than other similar homes”, I’ve been consciously using less water. Like, turning off the shower during the soap-and-shampoo application phase – yes, it’s a bit hard to turn the poorly designed tap with a soapy hand, but we don’t do these things cos they’re easy. It won’t save much money, cos most of the bill is a standing charge, but it’s a fun game, and a reason to feel smug about having a slightly smaller environmental footprint. One day, get this, I used just 45 litres of water.

I had some arancini for, I think, the first time (!). Of course I’d seen Inspector Montalbano eating some before, and thought those orange balls look intriguing, and sure enough they are very tasty.

Some work.

You know in TransXChange documents when you have a ShortWorking in a StartDeadRun? I was embarrassed to learn I’ve been mishandling those journeys – treating the DepartureTime as the start of the dead run – for possibly years. Oh well, those structures are surprisingly rare – which helped the problem go unnoticed for so long – and I’ve fixed my understanding now. Cool story.
There’s a problem with fraud in the internet advertising industry – you know, robots clicking on adverts. The robots’ motives may vary from wasting advertisers’ money to making it look like website publishers are fraudulently clicking on their own adverts – there’s a supposed extortion scam involving the latter.

This week, I noticed hundreds of pounds of extra clicks per day, all apparently from Germany – and that Germanity made me suspicious, because very few folks outside of the UK use a website about buses mostly in the UK. I found a bit of suspicious German traffic in the logs, which I blocked, but it made no difference. Then, as an experiment, I removed all the ad code from the website, and only the German clicks continued, proving there was nothing I could do – if I were a robot, I’d put the ad code somewhere local, and edit my /etc/hosts to point bustimes.org to localhost, and that (or something similar) seemed to be exactly what they were doing.

The thing is, I haven’t had any emails about extortion. I have now filled in Google’s “Invalid Clicks Contact Form”. Either I get to keep all the money, or I get banned from AdSense unjustly and have to explore alternative business models (get a proper job), or something in between, which is probably OK.

Week 112

Monday 10 May 2021

Some things I saw last week which I can’t believe I didn’t mention here:
- A seal bobbing about in the river, which would have been a surprise if I’d not previously read some articles in the local press about the seal.
- Some dudes with a modified Audi they were photographing with a big camera. They’d detached the front numberplate, to make it more photogenic. The car has its own Instagram account, with more followers than most people I know. I thought I’d be angry at their blocking a pedestrianised area, and the “performance exhaust” system making a terrible offensive racket, but I suppose it’s a mostly harmless hobby.
Well, it was nice to see a celebrity sea mammal, and a celebrity hatchback, which both happened to be grey.
It was my birthday. A man came to replace the water heater timer which with a new, dramatically less charred one. I went to Lowestoft – my first time in a different county for more than a year – where I walked north until I could walk no more, and then returned home.
The alarm clock mentioned last week arrived. It’s fine, but there was a hair beneath the transparent cover – yuck. Luckily, I’d also just bought a squeegee, which came with a suction cup for attaching the squeegee to a wall. So I could use the suction cup to remove the transparent cover, and dislodge the hair. What luck! Although it would have been luckier to get a clock without a hair.
I also bought a new Chemex coffee maker, to replace the one I smashed into a thousand pieces a few months ago, because although I’ve a better way of making coffee, I wanted to use up the remaining ⅔ boxful of paper filters. Maybe producing a whole new glass thing is more wasteful than discarding some bits of paper, but my feelings don’t care about your facts.

I deliberately got a bigger Chemex this time … forgetting that the bigger one requires bigger filters. And it turns out there’s a shortage of Chemex paper filters.
Voted, using a Noris Triplus pencil. As far as I can tell, this electoral ward is now entirely represented by Green councillors … and that’s what I voted for, slightly spur-of-the-momently. Some prominent folks in that party are posh idiots incorrectly opposed to electric railways and stuff, but that’s neither relevant nor as bad as the alternative.
To the hospital, for a somewhere-between-annual-and-biennial thing involving having jelly rubbed on my chest, which perhaps eels and certain kinds of pervert enjoy.
Second jabbed. No side-effects, apart from being wet cos it was raining heavily, and all the oil washed off the chain of my bike on the way to and from the medical practice.

Week 111

Monday 3 May 2021

Inexpensive label printers, without which there wouldn’t be all those stickers everywhere, are up there with crypto bollocks and other polluting inventions. Someone recommended a two pence coin, which is a both a useful invention for removing conspiracy theories from lampposts and a better way of paying for things than Bitcoin. Yeah!

I do operate a website that, hypothetically, someone could advertise by printing QR codes corresponding to bus stop URLs and adhering them to relevant surfaces. Needless to say, it would be bad vandalism. More galaxy-brained would be to advertise a competitor (say Citymapper) that way.
Bicycled to see the pa and was almost most excited to see he had a new clock – technically an alarm clock, but only employed as a small clock – whose second hand moves silently untickingly, and I thought I’ve got to get me one of those. I have a handsome Braun clock, which Dieter Rams might have had a hand in designing, but its tick is so noisy and if you whack it (which can sometimes quieten the ticking) the battery can fall out the back, so these innovative Chinese clocks are worth investigating.

The particular model is offered under a variety of funny names, at slightly different prices, with or without a logo printed on the face. This one has a product image apparently photoshopped by MC Escher. The kerning of the numbers looks a bit off, but I’ve just noticed the headings on this website are just as bad.
I made of a note of this tweet from The New York Times on Twitter: “Millions of Americans are skipping the second dose of their Covid vaccines. State officials are rushing to keep that number from growing even more.” I think I thought it rummy that “keep” there means “prevent” but could just as easily mean “make continue”. But actually my point doesn’t have any point because of the extra word “from”, you know, “keep from”.
Just in time for the bank holiday weekend, the little beige box that controls the water heater made a sizzling noise and let out some smoke. I suppose I should be grateful because normally you have to pay for pyrotechnics. My understanding is that smoke is the “life force” making any electronic thing work, so when the smoke puffs out it works no more. The upshot is I’m more unwashed than usual, which apparently is how many from-home workers have been over the last year, but I’m a latecomer to the trend. I’ve enjoyed cold showers before, but not now. 🥶

Week 110

Sunday 25 April 2021

Went on a bus – the first motor vehicle I’ve touched in 2021 – to a market town, “just to feel something” as they say on the internet. It was quite fine. Spent some time walking around looking for an open public loo, and it was richly rewarding to eventually find one with some splendid shiny blue tiles.
I’ve not felt like doing very much work, so I haven’t, and that’s great – like a holiday.

I did some work on recreating some of bustimes.org using the new official GTFS data, and also using DigitalOcean App Platform, which both make things much simpler, but (it’s a relief to find) have enough drawbacks that I needn’t feel like a mug for not using them. (The GTFS is wrong or missing for some of my local bus routes, and stuff. I’m sure it will get better.)
Saw a relative. A disappointing pub lunch was had, in part because the “today’s specials” blackboard outside a much better establishment had “tomato soup” written in such faint chalk that I thought it had been rubbed out, maybe it was yesterday’s special, so in search of soup we went somewhere worse that really didn’t have any soup. Cool story.
This afternoon, I took a walk, as I almost always do. I needed to collect a parcel from a distant Amazon locker, and hoped it would be delivered there in time for me to walk past. (In fact, it was delivered a bit later, so I had to double back.) I got something sticky on my shoe, and something in my eye, neither of which I’ve satisfactorily dislodged yet, which I suppose serves me right for daring to go outdoors.

Week 109

Monday 19 April 2021

There’s a new product called “Twinings Dark Mint” tea, part of the “Twinings Dark Collection”. Unlike usual “peppermint tea”, which a pedantic bore will call a tisane cos it’s not made from any part of the tea plant, it’s black tea with some added mint. Maybe it’s very nice if prepared properly, but I treated it like peppermint tea and was so disgusted by the stewedness that I’m sorry to say I discarded the whole box. Please don’t make the same mistake.
Got one of the government-funded free-at-the-point-of-use lateral flow test kits, because who doesn’t like something that’s free. You get a pack of seven. Well, it’s jolly difficult to shove a swab all the way up one’s nostrils. Maybe mine are peculiarly ticklish. Anyway, I tested negative, you know, “positively toward negative” (sorry), which is good; now there are six more opportunities to see how deep the nostrils are.

Week 108

Monday 12 April 2021

Was looking around Newton Flotman on Google Street View, which is a normal thing to do, when I discovered that you can navigate around using the arrow keys on your keyboard. It seems so obvious now, but I don’t remember doing it before, and it’s a game-changer, much nicer than the struggle of clicking and dragging.
There’s a place where motor-cars and their owners gather to, I don’t know, everything from watching sunsets to dogging. Walking past, I saw a scrote in a glacier white metallic Audi drop a cigarette butt on the ground. I gave the dude a withering stare. Cool story.
One of my cultural highlights of the week is This Is My House. No, a game show hosted by Stacey Dooley (with whose oeuvre I wasn’t au fait) doesn’t sound like the sort of thing I’d like either, but it’s transcendent. It’s odd that the houses featured are all so vast and presumably expensive, but I suppose someone has to live in all those vast houses you see about the place.
I replied to an email, and my reply caused disgust. (The disgut– words are a shibboleth for … something.) (It’s interesting how much the level of disgust, as measured by Google Books, has risen since the turn of the century.) Which furthers the case for not replying to emails. Some of my reply was rushedly poorly worded, but the main problem was the disgustee’s poor reading comprehension, understandable in the circumstances of being stressed having missed a bus etc, and which should have been apparent from their sending me the first email in the first place.
This is a strange country. An old geezer has died, which is sad for his family, but broadcasting the same news over and over again all day, on several TV and radio stations, is a bit odd. A waste of bandwidth apart from anything else. But I wouldn’t say I’m disgusted.

Your treasonous social media postings are making me proud.
Spraying my feet with spray has made my feet much less fungal. Science! Maybe I will see a podiatrist about my disgusting toe.

Week 107: hot buns

Sunday 4 April 2021

It was sunny and warm on some of the days. (Next week it won’t be. How interesting how there is all different weather.) Heartwarming to see bags of cans being enjoyed on the riverbank by groups of up to six.
Friday: made some hot buns, one or two of which had aesthetic misshapen crosses on them. Loosely followed Mary Berry’s recipe, where by loosely I mean I used orange not lemon zest, didn’t have any candied peel or mixed spice (briefly considered using Lebanese 7 spice), and was loosey-goosey with some quantities. Using less yeast just slowed things down a bit – how relaxing – more time for a bike ride while I forgot about the dough, and perhaps for the sultanas to grow plumper. Later, I had to record a time-lapse to confirm that the buns were expanding again (which they were).

Thoughts for next time: pay more attention to the size and shape, for ease of fitting a halved bun in the toaster. Also, “outy” protruding fruits get burnt, so poke them to make them “inny”.
Saturday: a mild mannered protest in the city centre against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. I wandered along to see no protesters (they had moved on), just a bungling police officer holding up a queue of buses for no apparent reason for an extra half hour, hmm. Perhaps someone cleverer than me will know what that’s all about.

I was alarmed to find myself trying to make these points in the comments section of a local newspaper, but fortunately it’s hard to log into/onto “Disqus”. The people who do leave comments have a reputation for being morons, but they’ve all managed to use some quite unreliable and user-hostile software successfully, which is more than I’ve ever achieved, so maybe we should respect them.
Some work.

Email from someone who clicked on an advert that promised a free gift voucher or something – you know, one of those obvious (but not obvious to this person, which is fair enough) scams. I went to the AdSense “review centre”, which is a bit frustrating – like, you can block adverts and categories, but can’t see how adverts have been categorised – and blocked some adverts.

I’m sure there are several companies who could be responsible, one of which is based in Kent. I thought about tweeting one of the bosses to ask “how do you sleep at night?” (to which the answer is of course “comfortably on a bed of money”), but they’re all only on LinkedIn, proving beyond doubt that LinkedIn is for scoundrels.