w/e 2023-06-18
A bit of a come-down early this week after that fun couple of days with loads of friends.
That was followed by a couple of days preparing for a party here – every March this place, as a holiday home, hosted a birthday party for Father-in-law and family friends, but that last happened before Covid, and so before we moved here. This year it was resurrected as a summer barbecue and it all went smoothly. Of course, I spent most of it hiding in the kitchen doing the washing up, which was definitely fine.
Before that I did some more scything, mowing two 34-metre-long rows, which works out at nearly 100m2/hour, faster than the previous week’s but still much slower than strimming.
This was supposed to provide some meadow-free space on which the above partygoers could park but, in the end, it wasn’t required. All good practice for some reason I guess.
§ I’ve done very little computer stuff recently, other than minor maintenance, such as manually sending some daily Pepys emails when Buttondown’s RSS automation decided (again) to stop working. This never happened with Feedburner.
Today I thought I’d tweak the contents of the <title> tag on one page of one of my sites. Not a big deal. I wanted to check it before putting it live – if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my career, and it’s probably the only one, it’s to always check everything even if it must be fine.
Of course, Docker refused to start. Then refused to rebuild the site’s container. Then refused to restart. Then took an age to rebuild the container again, over today’s verrry slow 4G internet connection.
90 minutes later I got it all working and successfully realised I’d cocked up this simple change causing a fatal error. It’s all working now though.
Sometimes I’m a 10÷ developer.
§ I was sad to see that “Rufus” (Roger Squires) passed away, because back at BERG some of us would spend a week’s lunchtimes working on Monday’s Guardian cryptic crossword which was often set by him. Monday’s crossword is the easiest of the week but we’d often be cursing Rufus.
I haven’t tried a cryptic crossword in ages but, in his honour, yesterday I started last Monday’s and finished it today (admittedly with the aid of a thesaurus and the “Check this” button) something I haven’t managed on my own for a long, long time. Of course, everyone says (spoilers) that one was ridiculously easy but whatever.
I should attempt more, especially if it pauses me from endlessly cycling through Mastodon, Bluesky, Facebook, MetaFilter, Reddit, email, RSS feeds, Slack, FaveJet, forums, internet window shopping, etc, etc.
Today I tried one from later in the week and couldn’t solve a single clue. Let’s be positive and say that it’s excellent there’s so much room for me to improve.
§ Wildlife highlight of the week was sitting in the garden reading, while a blackbird and a robin flew and hopped around, seemingly calmly, very close. Only a metre or two away at some points. All while three or four very chatty housemartins swooped overhead, occasionally stopping under the eaves for a loud chat before swooping off again.
§ I cleaned the car. I thinned out the extra apples on the apple trees. That’s about it. Have a good week.