Archive: 2025-03
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.