Archive: 2022-10
Week 95: Up the wall
I went bouldering for the first time on Friday and it was fun. A climbing wall has opened in the local shopping centre, in what used to be a combination Dorothy Perkins and Burton clothes shop until Arcadia Group itself went for a Burton a couple of years ago. After walking past it a couple of dozen times, I thought, maybe I should try that. I know a few people who are or were into bouldering – my brother, some former colleagues – but I’d never tried it. A combination of the convenient location and the feeling that I ought to do something to preserve muscle tone as I get older pushed me into giving it a go. I booked an introductory lesson on Friday afternoon; as I was the only one, it ended up being a one-to-one lesson, which was great.
Week 94: Blank tape
My plan was to use the new OpenAI Whisper automatic speech recognition system so that I could record my blog post while walking, transfer it to my computer, convert it to text, and then probably edit it a bit because natural speech is usually more chaotic than the written word. I went out for a walk, and recorded everything I wanted to say. I got home and uploaded it to my computer, and found that I had recorded almost none of it, thanks to the audio permissions in Android. It captured a few seconds at the start and end, but in the middle where I’d switched to a different app before putting my phone away, it had recorded nothing but ten minutes of silence. It gave me a chance to rehearse what I wanted to say, perhaps. And it was a lovely day for a lunchtime stroll along the river. And it was so blustery that I was sceptical about how well it would come out, but even so, I was hoping for more than that.
Week 93: Overcomplication
My talk at LRUG didn’t go nearly as well as I’d hoped. I had prepared my talk in plenty of time. I had my slides set up to show on the monitor, with notes on my laptop. I had a remote control. I felt calm and ready.
Week 92: Plumbing
Week 91: Sad salad pesto
After a recent run of successful 3D prints, failure paid me a visit. I started the print and began cooking. When I came back to check, the printer had melted a huge block of plastic all around the nozzle instead of building up the desired object. The culprit was a loose bearing on the Y axis. I sorted that out and then went through the long and tedious process of tuning the bed height. Apart from a little time and filament wasted, however, no other harm was done.