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w/e 2022-02-13

The drug adventure continues but has thankfully eased off, with only one or two fairly sleepless nights this week, so hopefully the drugs and my body have come to some kind of arrangement.

§ I’ve been freelancing for about twenty years and the initial new project fear of, “I don’t understand anything, I’m not getting anything done, this will be a disaster,” has never really gone away. However, over the years, I have just about learned to convince myself that, based on all this experience, this fear is unfounded and things usually work out. The fear still happens but I’m able to push it down so it doesn’t get in the way too much.

I’m over that hump on the current work project, so this week made more actual progress. I wonder how many decades of freelancing one has to do before the fear goes away entirely.

§ The past couple of days I’ve been doing some updates to Django Ditto. After all these years someone else is using it now and finding the rough edges. Like, apparently Twitter’s downloadable archive of tweets changed format in 2019. So I’ve been updating the code to also import data from that into the database.

As ever, there are some surprises. For example, there are numbers which, in data fetched from Twitter’s API, are integers but in this downloaded archive are represented as strings ("23" instead of 23).

I also can’t find anywhere in the otherwise comprehensive amount of data that indicates whether the Twitter account is protected (private) or not. You can see if and when the account has been switched to or from protected over the past six months but if it hasn’t… nothing about its current state. Odd.

§ We’ve had a very nice man in to tile the floors of our porch and our utility room / downstairs toilet recently. We were replacing some vinyl flooring with 15cm red-brick-colour “quarry” tiles and I naively thought it would take a couple of days. It took nearly seven in the end. It looks great! But I had no idea. All that getting things level, and cutting, and getting more things level, and grouting, and cleaning… So much time.

§ We have a Kenwood filter coffee machine that’s been in this house long enough that I don’t think anyone knows how long it’s been here. We hadn’t thought to descale it in the two years we’ve been living here and it probably hasn’t been descaled before that. This week it gave up in disgust, pipes hardened like fatal arteries, and coffee stopped dripping out.

We tried putting descaler through but it was obviously too blocked for that to make much headway. But, in an effort worthy of a more mundane The Repair Shop, we managed to get the thing apart, pull the rubber and plastic tubes off the metal heating pipe, and drip some clear vinegar inside it. Much hissing and steaming. A few goes of that, then we managed to put it all back together and it seems like liquid now flows through. It’s a money-saving miracle! I am quite surprised.

§ We’re still enjoying TikTok, often rounding off evening TV viewing with a “quick” bit of TikTok (it is never quick). I’m not sure my favourites have changed much recently, so I am always up for recommendations, ideally funny (but not mean) or educational (but not boring). Here are my faves:

§ That’s all.