hello! it's time for weeknotes (somewhat on time, this time!) fulfilling week, tackled tooling challenges at work, was a successful birthday grillmaster and knocked out a bunch of personal tasks. I feel like I'm making progress on personal stuff, even if I'm a little overwhelmed.

miscellanea

• Liquid Glass dropped at WWDC this week. I hate it. every time computers get more powerful, we throw away significant chunks of processing power with trivialities like this. I can't wait for my poor phone to choke on the reflections and refractions all the Liquid Glass layers
• watched Space Force. in the episode MAD (BUFF) CONFIDENCE, an energy drink company sponsors a military robot wars competition. I wondered if this was possible and legal, and seems like someone else wondered too. found a Law StackExchange question with no responses
  • funnily enough, the US military parade on Saturday was sponsored by 22 corporate sponsors. how life imitates art
• caught the Elizabeth line a lot this week
  • the USB ports in the Class 345s are installed upside down. that’s definitely… a choice
  • looks like the Elizabeth line WiFi functions on an allow list instead of a deny list. I can access my email, but almost all hyperlinks I click through to are blocked. it’s barely usable without workarounds
• Coventry got a very light rail system this weekend! it looks incredible and I can’t wait for it to be expanded
• saw a few signs around declaring that some train stations are Secure Stations, where stations are designed to reduce crime and improve public safety. it's an interesting concept

musings

• the guitar riff in Tame Impala’s Let It Happen is so clean I could probably eat off it. it’s so good
• it would be useful if the London Underground announcements included info about the last service, for example. "The next station is King’s Cross St. Pancras, for St. Pancras International. The last Northern and Piccadilly line services have departed for this evening. The last westbound Victoria line service at two minutes past midnight." that little bit of additional information would make travelling at night infinitely easier and safer
• although I don’t appreciate how difficult streaming has made media preservation, I quite like the fact it allows showrunners to tell the story they want to and removes the incentive to extend a show in perpetuity
• run out of internal storage on my Mac, meaning none of my music is available locally. I need to upgrade soon
• tried to watch the US remake of Utopia, to compare it to the original series, and it’s SO BAD. HOW IS IT SO BAD? it was absolutely tasteless with no buildup. I’ll probably grit my teeth and suffer through every second of it, like I did with the animated Velma series
• need to invest in a UPS, increased storage capacity and redundant network connectivity for the homelab

misadventures

• played Guilty as Sock! on Monday night with friends. it was hilarious, and went off the rails incredibly quickly. I can recommend it to any group of 3 to 6 people
• added some memes to lsr.sh, for easy reference
• spent some time on Monday reviewing outline for book with Josie and Mario. gave a lot of feedback and we’re moving towards building an incredible resource for technical teams
• spent Wednesday out and about
  • went into the office on Wednesday, and had two pints after work. the drinks in Slough are ridiculously cheap! Wetherspoons has children’s activity sheets. I, of course, nicked one and did some colouring and made an origami bunny.
• after that, went into central London for an algorave that’s actually in July. managed to do rock karaoke, where I belted out Common People
• spent Thursday chasing my tail with Python tooling. it was frustrating, but I ended up switching my type checker to Pyright, as Mypy proved impossible to configure. I can’t wait for ty to make it out of beta.
• started writing an outline for another blog post about how I write blog posts on Sunday. pretty meta, honestly!
• reviewed some CfPs for OpenInfra Summit, as I’m on the CI/CD track. contributed to the meeting on Thursday
• didn't feel too great this week. I got invited out to somewhere cool, but I just couldn’t bring myself to leave the house. I didn’t have the energy
• got CI pipelines at work down to 5 minutes on Friday, good win before the weekend. I got ice cream after work, and Ollie came to keep me company too
• got around to doing some household chores on Friday afternoon, namely replacing the button cell in my kitchen scale and watering my poor, undernourished plants
• went to Cambridge for the weekend for a friend’s birthday. was appointed grillmaster, and managed cook sausages and burgers on a gas grill.
  • it was my first time grilling, but everyone seemed to like my cooking!
  • checking the group chat, nobody seems to be suffering from food poisoning
• was supposed to do a writer’s room for my comedy set on the 26th, but pushed it to next week given I felt a little terrible (again) on Sunday
• looking forward to getting more done next week, I have some tasks I need to tackle and I'm excited to knock things out