w/e 2022-11-13

This week I’ve mostly been listening to Dry Cleaning’s recent album, Stumpwork, which I think sounds a bit more relaxed than their previous. Almost tuneful, a little more jangly.

It’s so good to meet you, but not here,
Not here obviously.
I’ve seen your arse but not your mouth.
That’s normal now.

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§ Great, thanks Django, for logging me out after I submitted this nearly completed post but before you’d saved it. One of these years I’ll learn to not write directly into a web-based form.

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§ A slow, unproductive start to the week as my mind was filled with several fairly inconsequential things whirling around, including continued agonising over whether to move web hosting in order to save a pretty small amount of money.

And then I realised that a third-party Django app I’d been using in $new_project hadn’t been saving some imported data as accurately as I’d assumed. While I issued another in a series of pull requests fixing errors in it, I also decided to just write my own code to replace it. Which cheered me right up! It’s not quite done yet, and has pushed $new_project ever further from launch, but at least I have code I understand, that’s nicely formatted, and with many more tests.

It’s the middle of November and today I’ve been outside in the sun, shirtless like a lanky Poldark, raking up more leaves from areas of the garden I’d previously neglected. Twenty wheelbarrows full this time.

I feel I should have made the most of these few weeks when, not only am I a field away from any neighbours, but I’ve had the house to myself. Maybe learn the drums or the trumpet? But it’s not like I’m short of things I want to do but don’t manage to fit into each day.

In the past seven days I’ve had not one but, you guessed it, two nice conversations with people over coffee, one at home, one at a neighbours’. Amazing. A social whirl.

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§ I’m hoping that either Twitter really, properly dies, or else it somehow goes from strength to strength and everyone flocks back. Because, as I said over there, the worst outcome will be if it limps along under that guy’s control, and everyone I follow is split between there and Mastodon, so I now have two places to keep up with.

Several times I’ve seen long-term Mastodon users comment how nice it is, and how all these newcomers must abide by the communities’ conventions. Which reminds me of the mid-1990s internet, unfortunately for Mastodon, because look how that turned out.

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§ If you ever despair over how long it takes to make a change to your company’s website, just think of MetaFilter, where it took this tiny organisation two weeks to make the text on a banner slightly bigger. It’s fascinating (and very frustrating) to watch the place at the moment, while it attempts to organise fund-raising to help it survive, and maybe even improve in the future.

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§ TypePad appear to have got their RSS feeds working again, three weeks after they moved servers. Phew.

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§ I’ve spent several evenings this week on holiday in 1980s France, watching four of the six films in Rohmer’s ‘Comedies and Proverbs’ series:

• The Aviator’s Wife (1981)
• A Good Marriage (1982)
• Pauline at the Beach (1983)
• Full Moon in Paris (1984)

They were all OK, the high point being the middle portion of the first one, when Anne-Laure Meury brings it all to life. I had also entirely forgotten about jelly bags which were very popular among girls at my school.

I do wonder whether the same films would hold up, for me, if they were in English – maybe the lengthy conversations about the nature of love and relationships, between often disagreeable characters, are only interesting because they’re in French.

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§ That’s all. One more week here alone. Can I hold it together? Tune in next time to find out!