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.

Speaking of not remembering, I realised this week that it’s been so long since I went on the Underground that I no longer remember which side of the escalator you’re supposed to stand on. I’ve seen pictures of signs that say “stand on the right” so I’m prepared to believe that’s correct, but I don’t have any kind of internalised feeling about it. I think it doesn’t help that I spent the first couple of months of last year in Tokyo, where they stand on the other side, so I don’t even have a physical memory of standing on the right.

It’s almost exactly a year since I came back from Tokyo when the project we were working on was cut short by the spectre of COVID-19. At the time, Japan seemed like the risky place to be. Now, it seems that the opposite was true.

I reverse-engineered a circuit from a YouTube build video and a parts list because I was interested in how it worked. With a few clear shots of both sides of a 2-layer circuit board, it’s not much work to deskew, overlay where a thumb was in the way, and trace out the circuit. The hard part is the judgement in how you lay out the circuit. I was looking at one section and wondering why it appeared to be bypassed entirely by a short-circuit, until I managed to reorganise it into a topologically identical arrangement that made more sense.

And then I discovered that the circuit was already available! But I still enjoyed the exercise, and it wasn’t wasted because the latest revision wasn’t available, and the published layout was rather unconventional (it had been made by a third party in, I suspect, the infamous Fritzing). And the designer had promised to publish the circuit of the latest version at some point when they had time, so I was able to share it back and have a discussion about the design.

I finished a track that I was working on. Now I need a name for the project – a band name, effectively. I thought I had a great one, until I discovered that there was a “tech/extreme prog metal” band already called that.

Just imagine how easy it must have been to come up with a band name in the 60s or 70s! Almost as easy as buying a house! Now both things seem impossible.