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.

Wednesday didn’t go to plan. The idea was that an old service would be pointed at a firewall, which would redirect it to the new service. I asked beforehand, would it handle SSL? Crickets.

Well, as you might have guessed, it did not handle SSL, so, instead of a seamless redirect to the new service, visitors were treated to a certificate error. Usually, in this decade, thanks to initiatives like Let’s Encrypt and their influence on competitors, setting up SSL is easy. However, because this is Enterprise IT, where nothing just works, it’s not that simple. I had to get someone from a central team to issue a certificate. This took two hours. Two hours for a process that takes seconds out in the non-enterprise world. What were they doing? Multiplying long primes by hand using pen and paper?

It all got done in the end, after several hours, but what a palaver. Never work with children, animals, or Enterprise IT. (Actually, that’s not fair: I enjoyed working with children decades ago, even if I wouldn’t have the energy these days.)

A wall covered with a street art painting of a gull's head, beak open, tongue sticking out

Brighton gull

Nonetheless, I made it down to Brighton on Wednesday evening, on a very crowded train, for Brighton Ruby. I checked into my hotel, dropped off my bag and went out for dinner and drinks, which I somewhat regretted the next morning.

The conference on Thursday was good. I always enjoy it. It’s easy to get to, I know that I’ll always meet some old friends, and I like Brighton.

I stayed two nights to maximise networking opportunities (that’s my official designation) and ended up with a free day in Brighton on Friday. My hotel was near the beach, and this year’s conference swag was a themed beach towel, so I took a refreshing dip in a mild and clear sea before checking out. I wandered around town for a few hours, bought an old slide whistle in Snoopers Paradise (sic, shouldn’t there be an apostrophe in there?), and caught the train back to London. (In the rear first class carriage that is always declassified on Thameslink, naturally.)

Terrorism is just an aesthetic category now. The word used to mean something, but now it’s just any kind of protest that the government doesn’t like. It’s very embarrassing that a bunch of protesters on bicycles got into an airbase – breaking through security that had been subcontracted to Serco! – and spray-painted an Air Force jet, but it’s property damage, not terror. Conflating criminal damage with terrorism and officially designating Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation devalues the term. It’s a long time since the Son of a Toolmaker was a human rights lawyer, isn’t it?

Re the title, at a bar after the conference, someone mentioned a pickled egg eating competition. I questioned what victory meant, considering that even if you won, you’d have to have eaten multiple pickled eggs. Pablo delivered the immortal formulation you see above. No actual pickled eggs were consumed, thank God!

A few links for the week: