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.

Unfortunately, debugging is much harder than it used to be. A few years ago, you could enter the appropriate text into a search engine and find an answer. Nowadays, search engines don’t work, and the internet is full of factually inaccurate slop churned out using generative AI in order to get a few pennies of advertising revenue, consequences be dammed.

Anyway, after trying various things I think my graphics card is faulty, so I have thrown money at the problem. We’ll see whether I was right in a few days.

I arranged for our washing machine to be repaired. It has about a year left of its five year warranty. As the front panel rotary encoder that has been playing up for a while has deteriorated to the point that it takes a full revolution to change the setting by one step, this seemed like a good time to do something about it.

I called to make the claim. They asked me if I could share my phone camera to demonstrate the problem. Sure, I’ll try, I said. The link didn’t work on Firefox. No problem, they have a website where I could upload the video. The video was too big for the parsimonious 10 MB upload limit. How about WhatsApp? OK; I uploaded a video with apparent success, but they didn’t receive it.

Finally, I used ffmpeg in a terminal window on my computer to transcode the video to a lower bitrate so I could upload it to the website. I don’t know how normal people manage. Perhaps they all have Chrome as their default phone browser and everything just works. But I’d phoned them in the first place because all the online systems seemed a bit onerous compared to just talking to someone.

It was a bit pointless, really, because they sent someone round the next day who asked me to demonstrate the problem again. He made a call to order the part and left again.

For the first time in too long, I went to the dental hygienist. I don’t mind the procedure itself, but I can’t stand the water trickling down the back of my throat despite the assistant’s best efforts with the suction device. Perhaps if I don’t wait so long it won’t take so long next time!

Thursday is now a quiz night at the Waiting Room. We had just gone for food and a drink, but as the quiz was on we joined in. We did pretty well, especially considering that we were just two compared to some teams of four and six, but we made a tactical error in our choice of joker round (which gives you double points for that round) as the amount of points per round was very uneven. We’ll know for next time.

We watched One Battle After Another at the cinema on Sunday. Even though I’ve read the book, and even after I’d seen the film, I still didn’t realise that it was based on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. They made a few changes. It’s a great film, though, and it doesn’t hurt that the revolutionaries fighting against the state are even more obviously correct in the current political environment.

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