Archive: 2021
Week 51: Christmas
Merry Christmas!
Ruining the fun of Wordle with strategy
Week 50: The blackness
The Gaelic for December is an Dùbhlachd, literally “the blackness”, and I can understand why. It’s bad enough in London. I know it’s worse up there.
Week 49: Giveaway
I took a few boxes to the local charity shop. We had a load of things sitting in the living room that we’d used in the old flat but which we don’t need or have space for here. It’s nice to have the space.
Week 48: Christmas intensifies
I had my birthday. I took the day off, or, rather, moved around my working days so that I had the day off. I didn’t do anything special.
Shameless
I occasionally get shameless emails saying something like, “you have a dead link on your website, why not link it to [generic article on spammy content farm] instead?”
Week 47: Crìochnaichte (a-rithist)
Or, in English, Finished (again)
Week 46: Nothing happens
It’s been a week in which nothing much happened, and that’s probably a good thing.
Week 45: Going out and staying in
The electronic radiator valves I ordered arrived and I fitted and programmed them. Although all our radiators were fitted with thermostatic valves, they were the kind that give you just an arbitrary number from 0 to 5. I wanted a little more control so that we could avoid heating the bedroom in the daytime, and, conversely, so that I could keep the office warm, and so that I could use actual temperatures instead of indeterminate units.
Week 44: A random walk from A to D
I finally borrowed a stepladder and replaced the dead garden floodlight (which wouldn’t have been particularly useful even if it had worked) with an LED light with a motion sensor. This came in handy the very next day when I arrived home after dark and had to lock up my bike. It’s a lot easier when you can see what you’re doing, and now that the sun sets before half past four, there’s a lot of darkness to arrive home in.
Week 43: Hebdomadary
It’s Hallowe’en and our next-door neighbours have really gone all out with the decorations: entire front of the house covered with spider webs; bats all over the front door; a skeleton, an animatronic groaning zombie, and a (hopefully fake) dead body in the front yard; a couple of pumpkins.
Week 42: Working to a deadline
I finished my entry for the Loopop mega contest (parameters: “make music using the provided samples and to share how you did it”) just in time for the deadline. Of course, I could have done it weeks ago, except of course I couldn’t, because the thing about this kind of music is that you can tweak it indefinitely, and it’s only the existence of a deadline that makes me able to say, OK, this is good enough, and publish it.
Week 41: Exterminate
I took out an old but familiar cardigan only to find some holes in the front. I wore it an awful lot over the past eighteen months, and it’s possible that I caught it on something, but it looks suspiciously like clothes moths to me.
Week 40: Christmas is coming
With a handsome 81 days to go before Christmas, I ordered the Christmas tree. I won’t say that threat of potential shortages was no part of my consideration at all, but it was more the fact that we got an email from the local Christmas tree supplier we’ve used previously to say that they had started taking orders, and I thought that I might as well sort it out now while there’s a good choice of delivery days.
Week 39: A long walk
I met a few university friends in Soho on Thursday evening. That was a delight. Soho seemed busy; I don’t know if Fridays are busier or if Thursday is the new Friday because so many people are working from home on Friday even if they have to be in an office the rest of the week.
Week 38: Panic stations
Several energy providers collapsed due to energy prices, and a problem with deliveries to a few petrol stations ballooned into panic buying and shortages, but I had a fairly quiet week.
Week 37: New(ish)
I’ve had what felt like a frustratingly unproductive week. I didn’t really get anywhere with work, and ended up writing off a couple of days entirely.
Getting an EM7455 WLAN module working on Linux
I bought a new (used) laptop, a ThinkPad T470s, and realised that a) it had a slot and antennas for a WLAN module, b) I could pick up one of those modules for £30 on eBay, and c) if I took advantage of Three’s free Data Reward SIM I’d have a convenient if limited connection when I can’t find WiFi, without having to tether my phone.
Week 36: Home alone
L– was away for most of the week, so I was at home on my own. I took advantage of the space and the warm weather to finish painting the banisters. (The paint goes on much more easily and dries better when it’s warm.) When we moved in, the banisters were a hideous shade of matte brown paint. I painted the bottom part before we moved in, but didn’t get round to the top half before it was rendered inaccessible by boxes of stuff.
Sonic Pi on Ubuntu 21.04
I went to a Sonic Pi workshop at the Peckham Digital “creative computing festival” yesterday, which meant that I had to get Sonic Pi running on my laptop first.
Week 35: A trip to the seaside
I did the bank holiday week backwards: I worked on Monday and Tuesday and took the rest of the week off instead. L— also had the week off, so we took a trip to the seaside for a few days, to Margate. I’d never been before, and it’s one of those places that has a reputation as being a bit arty, so it seemed interesting.
Week 34: View from a (fake) hill
I had a day off on Friday and, as the weather forecast was clement enough, I booked a ticket for the infamous Marble Arch Mound while entrance is still free and cycled into town.
Week 33: Back to work
I started a new part-time contract on Monday. It’s going well so far, and it’s reassuring to have some money coming in for the first time in a while. It’s all remote, although this time it’s not because of the rona, but because the client is in the US. The work I’m doing is mostly on my own, so the time difference doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Week 32: Green vitriol
This post is a day late because I decided to have an early night last night. I regret nothing.
Week 31: Harvest
I have picked a lot of blackberries.
Week 30: Spontaneous hardware failure
I finished fitting all the skirting board in the living room. All that remains is some painting. It’s a relief to have done it, but the biggest improvement comes from not having 3m lengths of the stuff sitting on the floor any more.
Week 29: Hot
It was so hot for most of the week that I spent a lot of time in a state of horizontal lassitude. The house is better than the flat was, thanks to not having floor-to-ceiling glass on one side. It would be better if we had something other than just curtains, that could block the direct light and still allow air through. We have a plan to fit shutters (and even know who is going to do it) but that will take a few weeks to get sorted.
Week 28: Cùrsa air-loidhne
I spent three days this week on a beginners’ Scottish Gaelic course for speakers of Irish. It’s a good idea for a course: the languages are very similar, so you don’t really start from the same point as an English speaker would, and it’s more a case of learning what’s different than of learning from the ground up.
Week 27: Blood, sweat, and skirting boards
I gave blood again, for the 34th time. Each donation is a US pint (it’s one of the rare occasions when the UK is on the receiving end of cultural imperialism), so that makes about 16L over my lifetime, approximately three adult humans’ worth. It’s also enough to run a shower for two minutes, or fill one fifth of a bath. I don’t know which would be more horrifying. Probably the shower. It was my first donation under the new, significantly less homophobic blood donor rules, which is a good change to see in operation.
Week 26: Boxes everywhere
Our sofa was delivered on Monday morning. I managed to clear enough space to be able to wrangle it out of the box and screw on the legs. The box the sofa came in was the size of a double coffin. Written on the side was the message, “please keep the packaging in case you return the product for any reason”. As if. Where? Not having a spare house to dedicate to the packaging, I folded it up and, once we’d established that we were happy enough with the seat, took it to the reuse and recycling centre. Well, it would hardly fit in a wheelie bin.
Week 25: Goodbye bin juice
We moved house today.
Week 24: Welcome to the money pit
It’s the eve of Midsummer. All the daylight is helping me get plenty of work done on the house, but once again it’s pretty much all I’ve done.
Week 23: Painting and decorating
It feels like all I’ve done this week is painting and decorating our new house, but there’s been a bit more than that. We’re still living in the flat for another couple of weeks, so at least it doesn’t matter that it’s still a mess.
A list of items found in the loft of our new house
- Two headboards for a small child’s bed
- A wooden table in two parts, both too large to fit through the access hatch
- A bag of cat litter, opened but mostly full
- A pet crate suitable for air travel, large enough for a medium dog or an ocelot or a lynx
- Several old curtains, never in style at any point since the house was built
- A bolt of heavy brown cotton cloth
- A single plastic place mat
- A box containing a hoarded collection of plastic bags
- A 1 Real coin from Brazil, worth about 14p
- The cardboard box in which an MFI kitchen unit was shipped
- An IKEA desk top
- Three legs for the desk top
- A square wooden frame of unknown purpose, also too large for the access hatch
- A double futon mattress
- A canvas-covered shelving unit
- A roll of carpet, with no dead body inside
Week 22: Completion
As of Friday, we are now homeowners. We still owe the greater part of it to the bank, of course, and taking everything into account I personally actually own about one fifth of a house at the moment, but it’s still a greater level of control over my life and living conditions than I’ve ever had before.
Week 21: Exchange
I think the past week has been more eventful than the whole of 2021 up to now.
Week 20: Progress at last
Our house purchase is moving rapidly ahead. After weeks when it seemed like it was stuck on some inscrutable detail of negotiation, everything has finally been unblocked. The last sticking point was, it seems, something about indemnity in case the land is found to be contaminated. As it turns out, this can be sorted by the simple expedient of paying £265 for an indemnity policy. Would we like to do that? Yes we would, especially as getting this sorted will save us five figures of stamp duty if we complete the purchase by the end of June.
Week 19: Package to America
Week 18: Pop goes the shamisen
I took out my shamisen from its case to find that the skin had torn. It’s the inevitable fate of any shamisen: the body is a wooden box with a skin stretched very taut and glued on. Eventually, the stresses, exacerbated by climatic variation, get too much and one day you open up the case to see this:
Week 17: Corona speedrun
On Monday, I had my hair cut by a professional for the first time in months. It’s definitely an improvement. I’ve been getting my hair cut by the same person for a decade or so, so we know each other pretty well by now. It’s one of those little things that feels like putting down roots, and something that I’ve missed.
Week 16: Street crossing on the river
We went to Stratford-upon-Avon with our support bubble friend for the weekend, taking advantage of her brother’s vacant house there. By coincidence, Friday was Will’s birthday, but there wasn’t much sign of it. Unsurprising, really, in the circumstances. It made a pleasant change to have some different surroundings to walk around, and that was all we really wanted. The mission objectives were achieved.
Week 15: Approved
The big news this week is that we have been approved for a mortgage at last. After five weeks in which it felt like I was being asked one pointless question per week, I sent a sternly worded email asking why it was taking so long, and whether the fact that I kept being asked so many questions that were irrelevant to our situation indicated some deeper misunderstanding.
Week 14: A tragic event
Tragedy struck this week. On Monday, I bit my cheek so badly that it’s been miserably painful and I’ve found it hard to eat all week. It’s only today, Sunday, that it has perceptibly begun to heal. Usually – and I do mean usually, because I do it very often – it heals in a few days, so it must have been especially bad this time.
Week 13: In person
As predicted, Monday was an absolutely glorious day. I cycled over to St James’s Park to meet up with some friends to chat over some beers in the sunshine. It was so good to see them in person after such a long time. I never thought of myself as particularly gregarious, but I’m really not a hermit. I definitely need a lot more in-person social activity than I’ve had over the past year.
Week 12: Stuck
It’s not even been a week, but already I can’t even remember a time before the Ever Given was stuck across the Suez Canal. It’s probably not much fun if you’re involved in global shipping or the running of the canal, but from here it’s been a welcome diversion.
Week 11: Remembering Aaron
We’ve been watching Lupin this week. It’s excellent and compelling. It’s a bit like the recent BBC Sherlock Holmes adaptations in the way that it updates the old Arsène Lupin stories to a modern setting – and in the way that it’s probably more entertaining than the original books.
Week 10: A tiny guillotine in my heart
It’s been quite a week politically. Monday was International Women’s Day; by Wednesay, a serving Metropolitan Police office had been arrested for Sarah Everard’s kidnapping and murder; on Saturday the same Metropolitan Police were filmed manhandling women who had turned up to a vigil for her on Clapham Common.
Week 9: Stand on the right
It feels like it’s colder than it usually is in March. Is this what the future is going to be like now that the North Atlantic Current has been disrupted by climate change? Or is it just that I haven’t actually been in England at this time of year since 2019 and can’t actually remember what it’s like? At least it’s been sunny, and I have a hat and a warm coat.
Week 8: Historically inaccurate number plates
We finished watching It’s A Sin. It’s very good, it’s beautifully put together, and it’s emotionally powerful. I think I cried after every episode. It’s really worth watching.
Week 7: Tired of pretending otherwise
The weather has gone from snow to spring in the space of a week. It’s been very pleasant over the last few days. I haven’t even needed a heavy coat!
Week 6: One kiloday
I killed an old Yamaha toy keyboard. I was trying to retrofit a MIDI input to a PSS-100 by emulating the keyboard matrix. I had mapped everything out, it was all going well, then I decided to look for a place to pull 5V off the board. My probe slipped, I accidentally bridged two contacts on the power transistor, heard a click, and now nothing works. It’ll either be easily fixable by replacing some passive components, or I’ll have managed to kill the ICs. As the power supply is now putting out 0.5 V instead of 5 V, I have some hope that it’s a power supply issue.
Week 5: Free music I never asked for
I’ve had a quiet week. I explored some of the streets in the area that I’d never visited before. Most of them turned out to be rather dull cul-de-sacs full of identical little 90s houses that nonetheless all cost way more than I’ll ever be able to afford. I didn’t find anything interesting, really. I ended up in one council estate that’s almost completely fenced off from the surrounding streets: every time you think you can see a way out, it’s barricaded off. I don’t really understand why that’s the case. Maybe it’s a relic of a bygone fad in town planning.
Week 4: Give it a rest
My right elbow was a bit uncomfortable at the start of the week. I’ve been using a finger trackball (currently this massive trackball) instead of a mouse for a decade and a half specifically to avoid this, but sometimes the only solution is some actual rest. I spent Monday and Tuesday consciously taking a break and doing things that didn’t require much of my arms, and especially that weren’t in front of the computer.
Week 3: What do whales drink?
I finished assembling my DIY NeoPixel Monome grid – someone else called them “neomonome”, which I like. The solution that actually worked for soldering them together was to print a task-specific jig onto which I could screw the boards before soldering short wires between the edge pads. This worked perfectly: all the boards ended up soldered exactly lined up, and the whole thing lies perfectly flat.
Week 2: The means of production
I feel as if I’ve spent the past week doing nothing but modelling enclosures and 3D printing them.
Week 1: Christmas is officially over
The tree is gone, the decorations are down, and Christmas is over.
Week 0: As Dijkstra intended