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2025-10-13

Week 249: To done

I started my first week of no work in a flurry of activity working through items on my to do list. I got up, dressed, polished the frets on a ukulele, took electrical waste to the electrical waste bin at the library, took the old bulbs and batteries to the recycling bins at Tesco, posted a parcel for L—, did the shopping, and it still wasn’t even midday on Monday.

I have ordered this year’s Christmas Tree. I’ve also had my first mince pie of the year, as they already have them in stock in Lidl.

In order to sort out my CDs I wanted to buy a couple more 18 L Really Useful boxes (they’re the perfect size for holding about 90 CDs). I checked the local shops that might have them, and cycled down to B&M on the Old Kent road. It’s one of the saddest shops I’ve been to: it looks run down inside and out, not helped by a desolate overgrown car park in front, bounded by a collapsing wall. And after all that, they didn’t have any in stock.

But I checked, and Argos also sell them. I didn’t go through all the hassle of ordering and paying online, I just walked in and ordered using the terminal. Within about thirty seconds, they called me up to the counter to collect.

This caused consternation among the other punters stuck in a queue waiting to collect their online purchases. One complained to the person who was serving me, who explained that there was a separate desk for online purchases and in-store purchases.

And the moral of the story is that purchasing online is slower than just turning up at Argos.

I have catalogued all my CDs in MusicBrainz, and with a bit of scripting I was able to dump a CSV file (with the sort order name for artists), assign albums to boxes with approximately 90 per box but without splitting an artist across boxes, and print out an index sheet for each.

I then spent a few hours sitting on the floor moving everything around to its correct place. It was a useful exercise, because I discovered a couple of CDs I hadn’t catalogued or even ripped, and because I now know where they all are.

I disassembled a couple of palettes for wood, and removed all the nails. Once the wood has dried properly I’ll plane off the splinters, and then I’m going to make boxes for our Bromptons. They will just be simple four-sided carcases that make it easier to stow them in the cupboard under the stairs.

Thursday was forecast to be warm and sunny, so I planned a day walk. I took the train down to Uckfield in East Sussex and walked a circuitous route to Buxted along a route that included the footpath once infamously blocked by notorious criminal Nicholas van Hoogstraten. Through the trees I caught a glimpse of the massive copper dome atop his gaudy and never-finished palace.

I had intended to walk via Blackboys (Wait! It’s OK! Despite appearances, it refers to a wood, as in French bois) but found my way blocked by hundreds of cattle making their way up the road to the pasture, so I turned back and took a shortcut to Framfield for lunch. I ended up walking 16.5 km in total, which was plenty anyway.

The train line to Uckfield doesn’t have much traffic: it’s a single track with one train per hour (the same train) in each direction. That made the unusual pedestrian crossing across the railway cutting a little less worrying than it might be elsewhere.

There’s an old 13th century church at Buxted with an even older – well over 2000 years old – yew tree in the churchyard. The tree is older than the church, older than England, and older even than Christianity itself. Yew trees must have had a religious significance long ago to end up in the grounds of so many establishments of this young upstart religion.

This time, I remembered to bring a spare T-shirt, so I washed myself with some wet wipes and changed so that I didn’t stink all the way home.

The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey is the best thing I’ve read all year. I bought it on the strength of a staff recommendation in a bookshop, and I absolutely loved it. It’s a mysterious, dystopian, alternate history (although nothing so trite as “what if Germany won the war?”) and I’d thoroughly recommend it to anyone who enjoys that kind of thing. Don’t read any reviews beforehand; it’s more fun if you go into it not knowing anything. I finished it in a day and a half, and I missed it when it was over.

I gave blood again for the first time in a couple of years on Friday. It was the first time since I had had to stop due to low iron levels. After a lot of tests, it turned out that there was nothing wrong with me, except, perhaps, giving blood more frequently than I could replenish my stores of iron. I’m taking iron tablets and I’m going to donate less frequently and hope that that keeps everything balanced. I had to answer all the first time questions again, but it was otherwise uneventful.

As I was at the donor centre in the Westfield shopping centre at Stratford, I treated myself to a vegan boba tea and bought a load of new socks to replace my worn-out pairs.

I realised later that I can go all the way to the blood donor centre and home again without ever crossing a road. But that’s just a corollary of being able to get to the underground station without crossing a road. I could get to Edinburgh or Paris or Tokyo without crossing a road, either.

The Online Safety Act is not going great, is it? After 25 July, a number of websites introduced age verification for users in the UK. Discord’s system requires users to upload their ID to a “third party service provider”.

On 3 October, Discord revealed that said “third party service provider” had been hacked and images of the IDs of 70,000 users leaked.

Meanwhile, I can’t even see innocuous pictures of ukuleles on forum posts because popular image host imgur is no longer available in the UK due to the onerous requirements of the OSA. They already ban explicit content, so it does seem to be that compliance is the part that is too much work just to support one dismal peripheral country.

I imagine I’ll just be routing all traffic through a server in another jurisdiction before much longer.

No links this week. Must be a good sign that I’ve not been spending much time on the computer.