Archive: 2026-09
Week 299: Tree walk
L— and I met an old friend on Tuesday night for some drinks (al fresco at The Rake near Borough Market) and a lot of chat. We had several years to catch up on. The lesson is that if you haven’t seen a friend in ages, even if that’s because they live far away and don’t come to London for work any more, and you’re thinking of them, send them a message.
Week 298: Drawing blood at Lidl
My frustration with typing on my keyboard reached a tipping point, and I decided to buy a new one.
Week 297: You don’t get fit by watching sport
If you’re finding working in programming dispiriting, I can wholeheartedly recommend packing in the whole employment thing and spending time working on a project in a new language, for yourself, especially if it’s not web programming.
Week 296: This kanji does not exist
Sanshin notation uses kanji as a form of tablature: each glyph corresponds to a unique position on a particular string on the fingerboard. However, some of the characters used to indicate less-common positions higher up the neck use kanji that aren’t used in normal language.
Week 295: Turning Javanese
I spent a lot of time programming in Java last week. I had never really used it before: its surge in popularity in education came a few years behind me, so where later years had classes in Java programming, mine were in C and C++ (and also in assembly language for the mind-bending two-register Harvard architecture PIC 16F84).