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Week 273: Ill communication
I spent the whole week with a horrible cold. My nose kept running. My throat hurt. But the worst part was the lack of sleep: I slept fitfully and not very much. Four hours on Wednesday night felt like a luxury by comparison to the preceding days, and it wasn’t until about Friday that I felt actually rested.
Monday was the worst. I took the day off because there was no chance of getting any work done. I managed three days of work; they might not have been my most productive ever, but I did at least finish off the thing I was doing.
In Surrey Quays shopping centre, I saw teenagers queueing up to scan their eyeballs with one of weirdo Sam Altman’s weird World (formerly Worldcoin) iris-scanning orbs. I wonder if we’ll ever hear the outcome of the ICO’s enquiries (that post has since been scrubbed off their website), and I wonder whether scanning the irises of minors into your massive database is actually legal. I would have assumed not, but perhaps it counts as “innovation” and thus benefits from some kind of impunity.
I hope the approximately £5 worth (at current prices) of oddball cryptocurrency is worth giving their iris scans to Sam Altman forever.
It doesn’t feel like the kind of thing that happens in a society where things are going well.
L— and I went out delivering leaflets for the Green Party in advance of the local elections. We tried on Friday night, but after about ten minutes it started raining hard and we had to call it off. It was sunny on Saturday morning, so we finished off the rest of it. The hardest part was getting to letterboxes in blocks of flats where the developers have blocked off the post boxes inside the locked entrance. Must be hard to get anything delivered when you live there. The second hardest thing was deciphering the unreasonable house numbering scheme perpetrated by developers when building housing during the London Docklands Development Corporation era.
On the way, we saw a fox brazenly eating off the road in the middle of the day, only moving reluctantly to allow the occasional traffic to pass. On closer inspection, its irresistible meal turned out to by a grey squirrel, squashed flat into a pancake of flesh and fur by passing cars. The fox eventually pried the sheet off the ground and carried it away to be finished off in peace somewhere else.
It’s a bit gross, but hey, that’s the circle of life in the city.
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Week 272: It’s a long way to Heilongjiang
I’m writing this sleep-deprived, having come down with a nasty cold at the weekend that has kept me awake for the past two nights. I hope it won’t be too incoherent as a result.
Week 271: Dislocation
I’m exceptionally late to write this up. Even though I was assiduous about writing my notes on paper last week, I’ve had too many busy evenings to sit down and transcribe them. I’m finally doing it, more than halfway to next week.
Week 270: Foot soldiers of Yankee tech imperialism
It’s hard to focus on work sometimes when there’s so much war going on. It’s not helped when the end of our fixed mortgage term is coming up and we have to remortgage while the future is complete chaos. I did some work with spreadsheets trying to work out what the various deals will actually cost us, what the effective cost is when you count in any upfront fee, and how they work out with overpayments.
Week 269: The bombings will continue until peace improves
It’s been so long since I last went to Shoreditch that I had to think about my way around from the station. I was on my way to the Strongroom to see Mount Forel play live in the UK for the first time in nearly a year. I only caught a bit of Interlaken’s set before, but they sounded pretty good and I wish I’d heard more.
Older entries can be found in the archive.