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Week 200: Be gull do crime
I watched An Taibhse (The Ghost), the first-ever Irish-language horror film, on Oíche Shamhna. It was followed by a Q&A with the director and one of the actors. It’s genuinely terrifying. I guessed what was really going on pretty early on, but that didn’t make it less scary. It’s an amazing achievement for a budget of £5,000.
I’m still not a fan of horror films, though.
The goodbye party for Hatch Peckham was fun. We ate, we drank, we did silly dances. This is the last week before the Trampery take over running the workspace. I’m going to stay on for now, but I’m not sure how well it’s goig to work out for me. My new contract has a lot of meetings, they’re offering fewer meeting room credits, and I can’t pay by the day, which means I’m still paying even if I choose to spend a day full of meetings at home.
I went to the (very busy) preview of the Southwark Park Galleries Annual Open on Saturday. It’s an open exhibition with no selection criteria, so the type and quality of work was varied, but there was some good stuff there.
I stood in the cold for longer than anticipated for the official opening of the Canada Dock Boardwalk later on Saturday afternoon.
Waiting for the local worthies to open the boardwalk
When I saw the original plans I was sceptical – it doesn’t really save much of a walk – but it’s turned into something that looks good and is a pleasure to cross, and the wildlife habitat seems to have been significantly improved.
I witnessed a crime in progress in the car park of Peckham Lidl. An adult gull stole a pastry off a juvenile and flew away.
Be gull do crime
I bought a ticket and booked a hotel for Brighton Ruby 2025. The summer seems a long way off right now, but it’s something to look forward to.
A selection of random links for you:
- Live Free or DEI. “The right’s recent embrace of hereditarianism and natalism suggests that eugenic thinking is once again ascendant beyond the fringes.” (Great title!)
- Not remotely cool: The science of “Zoom fatigue”. “Platforms aim for a lag time of less than 150 milliseconds. Yet that is long enough to violate the no-overlap/no-gap convention to which speakers are accustomed. A round-trip signal can take up to 300 milliseconds before one gets a reply, a pause that makes speakers seem less convincing and trustworthy. Repeatedly having to sort out talking over one another and who goes first is also tiresome and draining to everyone on the call.” I feel this so much.
- How electric trains work and why they make interesting sounds.
- osxcross is a Mac OS X cross toolchain for Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Android.
- Neural Networks (MNIST inference) on the “3-cent” Microcontroller.
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Week 199: Embra
The main excitement of the week was a trip to Edinburgh for the inaugural Haggis Ruby conference on Thursday. It revives the tradition of a Ruby conference in Scotland a full decade after the last Scottish Ruby Conference.
Week 198: Cultural extravaganza
This week, I saw two plays, two concerts, and two art exhibitions (although the last two were in the same place).
Week 197: Teams player
I started a new contract. So far, I have spent almost all my time on calls, which is absolutely my least favourite part of work in the modern age. In-person meetings could be bad enough, but it’s so much harder to have a conversation over dodgy, high latency connections with people talking over each other. It’s just really hard work.
Week 196: Plumb forgot
Have you ever seen the inside of your own stomach? I got to see mine, live when I had a capsule endoscopy on Wednesday. You swallow a little capsule, about 20 mm long, with a camera and some LEDs at each end, and a couple of coils around the middle, and it sends a video feed out to a recorder box via some antennae wrapped around your trunk.
Older entries can be found in the archive.