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Week 205: Decades happen
We both took Monday off and went to see the 80s photographic exhibition at Tate Britain. It’s an interesting mixture of big events (the miners’ strikes feature large), everyday life, and images of minority and subculture experiences that give a different view on the decade.
Ideally we’d have looked at the Turner Prize show as well, but L— was full of a cold so we went straight home. I hope to get a chance to see that before it closes.
I fixed my laptop. My original plan was simply to buy a replacement for the broken upper lid, but they don’t seem to be available anywhere. Instead, I bought the same model with a broken screen but otherwise in good condition for £62, and swapped in the screen and (faster) motherboard from my old one. I also swapped in my old illuminated US layout keyboard. It took me under an hour in total.
As a bonus the donor case is in much better condition. I no longer have paint flaking off, and the trackpad feels brand new compared to the worn-shiny one I was using before. As I had to repaste the CPU heatsink as part of the reassembly, it should run a bit cooler than with the crusty old thermal paste.
A second bonus was that I ended up with some spare batteries – the laptop has two – both with a respectable 78% capacity remaining. L—’s laptop is a T460s which is almost identical to the T470s and takes the same batteries; one of hers was so decrepit, with 9% capacity left, that it would run out with no warning mid-sentence. That’s no longer a problem.
The downside is that I’ve lost my cool sticker collection. My laptop looks far too professional, like it belongs to a LinkedIn guy.
I also now have half a laptop going spare. Perhaps I should DIY a smaller case for the motherboard and find something useful for it to do.
Microsoft Teams is destroying my mind and my soul. I had seven online meetings in one particularly bad day. I find that I can’t really concentrate for hours after one of them. I don’t know why I find online meetings so awful, but it’s clearly not something we evolved to do, nor is it something I have done much of in the past.
The other problem I have is that because I’m only allowed to access the client email and calendar through a browser version which signs me out if I haven’t looked at it for an hour (or after 12 hours even if I have), and I can’t share my calendar to an outside contact (i.e. myself), I don’t get any useful notifications to join these calls in time.
The only good thing about the setup is that, since Teams struggles if I have the video turned on, I have to turn off my video for tolerable audio. Not having to keep up a visual performance is at least one thing I don’t have to worry about.
the human body was never meant to withstand daily standup in the midst of multiple concurrent geopolitical crises
In my last contract, I had one online meeting per week, and because we were so effective at collaborating asynchronously, we spent more of the time chatting than getting stuck in details. I miss those days.
Our Christmas tree was delivered and it’s now bringing festive cheer. We’ve had Nordmann firs in previous years. They last well and don’t shed too much, but they’re a bit wide and they don’t have much of an aroma. This year, I went for the newly offered Fraser fir. It’s a tighter shape, which fits better in a small house, and the scent is delightful.
A US healthcare CEO was murdered and I don’t think I’ve seen such a gleefully unsympathetic reaction since Henry Kissinger died. It showed just how reviled the US health insurance system is. I’m not surprised: it costs an awful lot, but still bankrupts and kills people.
I wonder whether this idea might be catching. We don’t know the exact motivations of the assassin, but it doesn’t necessarily matter if the seed has been planted. The US seems to be well on its way towards Ancien Régime levels of inequality, and you don’t need guillotines in a country with more guns than people.
The French government lost a vote of no confidence and can’t pass a budget, and it doesn’t seem possible to put together any kind of workable coalition, and they can’t even call more elections for months. Will they get through it without either bringing the far right into government or creating the conditions that lead to even more electoral success for the far right?
There was a coup in South Korea and then there wasn’t.
In Syria, the Assad régime fell, gradually, then all at once. The opposition took Aleppo, and that felt like a big deal, and then they took Hama, then Homs, and then they took Damascus and it was all over.
53 years of oppressive dictatorship were undone in what felt like days. I hope the celebrations and optimism about the future are justified.
Romania’s first-round presidential election was annulled because of alleged Russian interference.
In Georgia, the pro-Russian government has suspended EU accession negotiations after elections believed to have been rigged. There are daily protests, and it looks uncomfortably similar to Ukraine in 2013.
Storm Darragh didn’t seem to cause too much havoc around here, but I did notice one consequence this afternoon, when I found my path blocked by a fallen tree in Russia Dock Woodland.
Storm-felled tree in Russia Dock Woodland
We had a sort-of joint birthday party on Saturday. I say sort-of because I don’t really do birthday parties, so it was mostly L—’s thing. It was fun, but I was exhausted to the point of catatonia by the time I got home.
Lenin didn’t actually say that, by the way.
A few links that I found in between meetings:
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Week 204: Gravitational event
I broke my laptop. I normally cycle down to Peckham, but on Tuesday evening I discovered that one of my front brake pads was prematurely worn, so on Wednesday I went in on foot instead. I was dressed and ready in plenty of time to catch the infrequent-enough-to-need-planning (four trains per hour) service to Peckham and arrive before I had to join a Teams call. (That must be the most depressing four word sequence in the English language.)
Subscribing to feeds that Cloudflare blocks
If you run your own feed reader (I use Miniflux) you might find that you can’t successfully follow some feeds that are behind Cloudflare, because their aggressive “Bot Fight Mode” is doing what it says: aggressively preventing automated access, without any regard for the fact that automated access is exactly the point of RSS and Atom feeds.
Week 203: Milk snatcher
I achieved the dream of walking out of Tesco with something I hadn’t paid for. I bought a carton of oat milk that had a promotional price of £1.50 on the shelf edge, but after checking my receipt I saw that I’d been charged £2. Out of principle, I immediately headed for the customer service desk to point this out. The employee disappeared off to check and came back with the shelf edge label announcing the discount. She said that the promotion was supposed to have ended, but the tag had been left, so she was going to refund me the difference.
Week 202: The Mystery of the Mutilated Minion
The hardest weeks to write about are the ones in which it feels like nothing happened.
Older entries can be found in the archive.