Archive: 2025
Week 260: The Blood on Santa’s Claw
Most of the week consistent of either getting ready for Christmas, doing Christmas stuff, or recovering from Christmas and eating leftovers. At least all the indigestion is a distraction from the increasingly fascist turn of politics abroad and at home.
Week 259: Pre-Christmas
I had a much-needed haircut. My hairdresser had to go back to Malaysia for a few weeks, and after 15 years of getting my hair cut by the same person I’d rather wait than go through the hassle of trying to find somewhere new.
Week 258: A day in the Cotswolds
In positive news, no one tried to kill me this week.
Week 257: Near death experience
As I crossed the road at Holborn at the weekend, I was nearly trampled to death by a horse.
Week 256: 0x30
There’s something pleasing to me in the fact that my 10016th weeknotes coincide with my 3016th birthday (in base 16 if that’s not clear).
Week 255: Books aren’t waterproof
I met some old colleagues from my time at the Ministry of Justice – ten years ago now, in those halcyon days before Britain decided to punch itself in the balls – for dinner at Tokyo Diner in the West End.
Week 254: Bridge-building
I spent Monday making and fitting a bridge to the mandolin I’ve been repairing. I’d originally intended to use the laser cutter for the outline, but there were no times free so I did it by hand with a coping saw and carving knife. It probably didn’t take much longer, because the part that takes ages is setting the height. If it’s too tall, it’s difficult to play. But if it’s too short, it won’t even make a clear note. And once you’ve made it shorter, you can’t make it taller again.
Week 253: We’ve won by mistake
In my dreams, I met a crow who could talk. I don’t remember what they said, but they were friendly.
Week 252: Poltergeistgärtner
On three successive mornings we woke up to find that someone or something had moved the waterlilies out of their tub and into the middle of the back garden.
Week 251: Fixed
The washing machine repair was booked for Wednesday with the company to which LG contract out warranty jobs. They said they give a window the day before, and they did: 07:00–11:00. I’m not a morning person, there are very few occasions when I’m up before seven, and I did not relish having to get up at a stupid hour.
Week 250: We are the washing machine preservation society
I’ve been having some computer troubles that distracted me from writing this week’s notes. It’s not sorted yet, but of course I have other computers. You should always have at least two computers so that you have one to debug the other one when it won’t start.
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.
Week 248: Demobbed
You might think that being freed from the time pressures of work would give me plenty of free time to write my weeknotes, but no. I have a long list of things to do and I’ve been working my way through the list steadily, and so these are late as usual.
Pennies (update)
Back in 2019, I did some comparisons on the historical value of coinage to show that the penny was by far the most worthless UK coin ever. Since then, inflation has made the situation worse, and a pound is worth about ⅘ of what it was in 2019, so I thought it might be interesting (/horrifying) to update the table.
Here’s what each of the previous smallest coins was worth in 2024 pounds (the latest data available) at the time it was withdrawn from circulation:
Coin Year withdrawn Face value £1 in £2024 Value in £2024 Half farthing 1870 £1⁄1920 £129.1 6.7p Farthing 1960 £1⁄960 £31.06 3.2p Halfpenny 1969 £1⁄480 £22.2 4.6p Penny 1971 £1⁄240 £19.06 7.9p Halfpenny (decimal) 1984 £1⁄200 £4.34 2.2p The value of £1 in £2024 is the real price taken from the Measuring Worth calculator.
A penny today is worth less than a quarter of a penny was at the time that the decimal halfpenny was withdrawn in 1984. It must be time to get rid of 1p and 2p coins.
Week 247: Folk festival
This was my last full week of work before my contract ends at the end of the month (plus one day, but that’s for next time). I’ve been trying to tie up loose ends, write down things that were in my head, and make sure that I’m not the single point of failure on anything.
Week 246: Summer’s last stand
I took Wednesday off to take part in the protest against Trump’s visit. I avoided the milling around at the start and took a direct route to join the head of the march around Piccadilly Circus, so I didn’t really get a good sense of how many people were behind. It felt smaller than last time, but it was in the middle of a working day, so you wouldn’t expect a huge turnout. The Met deployed 1600 police, which seems rather a lot for a peaceful march and rally.
Week 245: Infinite variations
I put on a CD of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (Hewitt’s 1999 piano recording, for those who are interested) while I was making dinner. After I had done all the preparation, cooked all the food, and was about to serve, I realised that it had been playing for an implausibly long time. I took a closer look. The player was restarting the final track every time it reached about a minute and a half into it, but in a way that wasn’t jarring, and wasn’t obvious unless you listened out for it.
Week 244: Vexillomania
England’s racists have gone mad for flags. An England flag on a church tower or a historic castle signifies one thing. Flags on cars and houses during a football tournament signify another. But you don’t have to pretend that a shaky red cross painted on a mini-roundabout or a tatty nylon flag (£14 for 6 from AliExpress, I checked) on a lamppost signifies anything other than exclusionary xenophobia …
Week 243: Loft conversion season
As summer comes to an end, loft conversion season begins here in south London. From our back garden alone I can see two houses tented in scaffolding and polythene while they have the roofs ripped off, and there’s another one down the other end of the road.
Week 242: The end is nigh
L— was away for most of the week at a course in Rotterdam. I wasn’t just stuck on my own at home: I had so many things on that I had to cancel my plans on one night in order to get some needed rest.
I decided not to renew my contract beyond the current quarter, which means I have about five weeks left on the job. There’s a lot that I’ve enjoyed about the work, but there’s a lot more that’s frustrating and I’ll be glad to be finished with the bureaucracy, Teams calls, and the annoyance of logging into the Microsoft Office suite several times a day.
Week 241: Jackpot
On Monday morning, I read that my client is banning Slack and forcibly migrating all chats to Microsoft Teams. I don’t love Slack – it’s hard enough to keep up with the four different kinds of places I have to check for replies and mentions – but I like Teams even less.
Also on Monday, I got kicked out of Teams calls four times, one of which was while I was in the middle of speaking. Great bit of software.
Week 240: Fifteen-second loop
I spent 52 minutes on the phone to Eurostar to cancel some tickets, for most of which I was listening to the same fifteen seconds of hold music over and over. (I timed it somewhere around the twentieth minute.)
The serendipitous digital audio player
I like to listen to albums, and I like to listen to them all the way through, from beginning to end.
I own a digital audio player, a kind of modern iPod. I have fitted it with a 256 GB microSDXC card for storage, which is enough for over 500 losslessly-compressed albums.
However, this leaves me with a couple of problems:
Week 239: Just one small detail
L— got a flat tyre cycling home – the first time in at least seven years – in an inconvenient location nowhere near public transport. Her bike is a Brompton, so I attached my bicycle trailer and rode the fifteen minutes to Burgess Park to pick it up while she rented a Lime bike to get home.
Week 238: Unbalanced
I picked up 2 kg of rice from the no-packaging shop on Tuesday, along with a few other things, and with all that in one pannier my bike was noticeably unbalanced as I cycled home. That’s OK: I’m used to cycling with a one-sided load. What I’m not so good at is manoeuvring the bike when I’m walking it. I stopped off at Lidl to pick up a couple of things, and as I pushed my bike towards the stands it fell over.
I really should just have let the bike fall, but instinct took over and I grabbed it and wrangled it upright again. I won, but at what cost? My leg and shorts were covered in muck from the tyre, and my leg was gouged by the pedals. They don’t call those grippy flat pedals “shin tenderisers” for nothing, but at least it was a meaty bit and not the actual shin.
Beep to get your attention (but not if you’re on a call)
Want to get a script on Linux to play a sound to get your attention, without embarrassing you if you’re in the middle of a call? I have found just the trick.
Japan Week Manchester tries to exploit performers
According to Manchester City Council, Japan Week is
Week 237: Please consider the environment before replying to this email
DD33
Fifteen years after my first time and two years on from my last time, I tackled the Dunwich Dynamo for the fourth time.
Week 236: A lot of cycling
L— was away for the week at a couple of conferences in Nottingham, so I was home alone. By the end of the week I even figured how to hang up a Signal video call on Android on my own! The buttons disappear off the screen after a few seconds, and it’s not an environment that lends itself to experimentation to work out the user interface, but I eventually did: tap on the video, and the buttons (briefly) reappear.
Adding a Lilypond custom language for easy sanshin transcription
Week 235: Tonioque ce proscateur
I was woken unreasonably early again on Tuesday morning when, at six o’clock, a neighbour’s burglar alarm went off in response to a brief power cut. It was 31 C in the bedroom, so I gave up on any more sleep and got up and showered instead.
Week 234: Awakened with a start
The week started with a bang when we were both jolted awake in the middle of the night by the sound of something crashing to the floor. To mitigate the heat, we’d had the windows open on both sides of the house. An unusually strong gust of wind blew open the shutters, overcoming the magnetic catch, and knocked the little USB fan off the windowsill. No damage was caused, but it did give both of us a shock, and it took me a while to get back to sleep with all the adrenaline.
Week 233: There are no winners in a pickled egg eating competition
Hot, isn’t it? It is at least nice and cool in Peckham Levels: all that repurposed car park concrete makes it a kind of ersatz cave.
Week 232: Did you hear the news?
It was a big week for Things Happening. On Thursday, a plane crashed shortly after take-off from Ahmedabad in India to Gatwick in the UK (not actually in London, but nearish). It hit a student hostel, killing all but one of the 242 people on board, along with eight people on the ground. But that was soon overshadowed in the news cycle.
Week 231: A bit of a round ball
I was on a call with a few colleagues when one of them said, “that was a bit of a round ball, perhaps.” At least, that’s what I heard. I was wondering whether it was some kind of sports expression well known to football enjoyers, like “a game of two halves”, until someone else echoed him and said, “not a ramble at all.”
Week 230: Wailing and gnashing of teeth
After a long bank holiday weekend (very relaxing, Monday was the first time in weeks that neither of us had had to get up for work or some event or other) I sat down at my computer on Tuesday morning, opened Slack, and was greeted by much wailing and gnashing of teeth, because the SSL certificate on a live service had expired.
Week 229: How long is too long?
What’s the maximum length of a domain name? If you search, you’ll get answers in the range of 253 to 255 octets (≈ characters). Don’t be fooled. The maximum length of a domain name that can be handled by several online platforms, including Microsoft Azure and Heroku, is actually 64 octets, as I found to my great inconvenience on Monday.
Week 228: Not actually an island
If I told you that I went to a fair on Saturday, bought a jar of chutney from the WI, drank real ale, and watched morris dancers, you would probably form one impression in your mind. The reality was a little different: we went to the Nunhead Cemetery Open Day, and wandered amongst the stalls and the dead in a crowd of the living that contained a sizeable contingent of goths. The dancing came from the Black Swan Border Morris, resplendent in black and purple and a lot of tattoos. We headed to the Ivy House for lunch, where I had that pint (Here Comes the Sun elderflower pale ale from 360 Degree Brewing Co.) and watched a repeat performance from Black Swan who had also made their way to the same pub.
Week 227: Donostia and back again
We arrived in Donostia on Sunday and, after checking in, went for a walk. We ended up in the San Telmo museum. The architecture – a modern concrete structure grafted onto an old convent – is interesting, but the content is varied and fascinating. The exhibition on dictatorships was particularly moving.
Week 226: Journey to the Basque Country
I’m writing late this week because we’ve been on holiday by train to Bordeaux, Donostia (aka San Sebastián) and Bilbao.
Week 225: Entering my corporate era
I woke on Monday to hear that the Pope had died. I don’t follow that team closely, but he seemed fairly liberal for a pope. That might seem like a qualification that practically negates the original statement, but of the previous two incumbents I remember, one was close to Ronald Reagan, whilst the next had actually been in the Hitler Youth.
A letter to my MP about trans rights
After seeing the way that politicians and organisations have overreacted to the recent Supreme Court judgment and interpreted it the most anti-trans light possible, I decided to send a letter (a real one, on paper) to my MP. Please feel free to use it as inspiration and to write to your own representative.
Week 224: Oligarchic Space Dildo
I found a convenient zero-waste shop in Peckham. There are a few around, but none of them are anywhere I go regularly, so I’m delighted to find that I can take a short stroll from the office and get refills of beans and grains and pulses and all that good stuff.
Week 223: Orange Monday
Orange Monday wiped about a year’s worth of contributions in value off my pension. On one hand, I absolutely do want to see an end to US global hegemony, just … not like this, and not this chaotically and precipitately.
Week 222: Line go down
I wrote in my diary last week, “Trump’s tariff madness. Is this the end of the US?”. And that was back on Thursday, when it was just beginning. It’s hard to understand what is going on in Trump’s mind, but we should maybe consider the most parsimonious explanation of all: he’s just a complete idiot with a child’s understanding of the world. He’s the man who bankrupted several casinos, and what are the world’s stock markets if not the world’s biggest casino?
Week 221: Cell rejuvenation
I replaced the battery in my electric toothbrush. After ten years of daily use, the capacity of the NiMH cell inside had shrunk to the point that it could no longer make it through a single brushing.
Week 220: Boring grown-up stuff
I’ve been doing a lot of financial admin as it’s the end of the tax year. In one sense, it’s boring grown-up stuff, but I also find it reassuring to feel that I’m in some kind of control.
Week 219: Exploding head
We finally visited Phantom Peak on Friday evening. It’s all of ten minutes’ walk from our house, and we’ve both been past it enough times to be aware of it, but I had always been quite cynical. It was the recommendations from our next-door-but-one neighbours, who have been a few times (via discounted NHS staff tickets), and from Terence, who attended a play test, that prompted us to look into it. We managed to pick up tickets for less than full price, although they probably made it up on the 2 vegan hotdogs and 4 pints of beer we had between us.
Week 218: Quinquennium
Do you ever wonder how it is that there was a massive influenza pandemic in 1918–1920 that killed tens of millions of people and yet there are hardly any explicit mentions in the literature of the period? I don’t really wonder any more. Few people want to relive the period from 2020 to 2022 in any form.
Week 217: A hostile foreign power
On Monday, a few of my colleagues were listing their gripes with the Microsoft suite we have to use, and especially SharePoint and Teams. I jokingly told them not to worry, we’ll have to migrate away from it soon, because you can’t use software from a hostile foreign power. For context, Miro is banned in UK government departments because of its (now mostly historical) links to Russia.
Week 216: Reunited
L— came back from her climb up Kilimanjaro (and down again, and then a few days of rest and recuperation in Zanzibar). I missed her and I was glad to welcome her home.
Week 215: Landlords in the realm of pure imagination
I spent Thursday in a windowless basement room and it was actually really good. We had an all-day in-person workshop for everyone on the three separate but connected things I’m simultaneously working on, and it was my first time to see most of them face-to-face.
Week 214: I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it, Bob
I had a short week of work as I travelled back from Brussels on Monday. The train left a little late and arrived 20 minutes behind schedule, but that’s on time by British standards so it wasn’t really remarkable.
Week 213: A weekend in Brussels
Ten meetings in one day (to the tune of Four Seasons in One Day by Crowded House) on Tuesday marked what must be the fullest extent of meeting culture. I’ve started working out which events I can get out of by identifying the ones to which I’m invited as “optional” (although finding out is a multi-step process) and adding a label that lets me filter them out. Perhaps that will improve things.
Week 212: Suspicious barcode
Over the sea in the west, a notorious criminal returned to the imperial throne after a brief interregnum. At the coronation, his pet oligarch performed a Nazi salute. Twice. The newly-crowned emperor immediately used his powers to announce a swathe of cruel diktats and to release his supporters from the prisons where they were serving their punishments for violent insurrection.
And that was just Monday.
Week 211: I killed David Lynch
I woke up on Monday to the radio telling me that the gullible rubes running this very unserious country have announced that AI is to be “mainlined into the veins” of the nation, a policy based entirely on the latest eructation from the Tony Blair Institute. I didn’t know that the TBI had any ideas apart from ID cards, but I’m beginning to wish they hadn’t.
Bullseye
The slang term for a fifty pound note is bullseye, but I’ve never actually heard anyone use it, and why would I? You can’t actually spend a bullseye anywhere.
Week 210: Back to work
Starting back at work was a bit of a shock after two weeks off, but at least my first few days weren’t too strenuous. I worked from home on Monday and even managed a lunchtime nap. I needed it, as my sleep pattern had diverged significantly from normal working patterns over the holiday.
Generative AI is the end of knowing things
Do you know what a pink fairy armadillo looks like? It’s a small mammal with whitish fur, big scaly claws, and a squirrel-like face from which a flat cloak of armoured scutes extends all the way to its hindquarters.
Week 209: Squared
Happy new year! It’s a numerically interesting one: