w/e 2024-10-13

I’ve been in Essex all week, briefly visiting the hospital every day. I don’t know what else to say about that.

§ One benefit of being here is that there’s a nice swimming pool 20-25 minutes walk away, so I usually go there every other morning or so. Back home the nearest pool is 25 minutes’ drive away, which feels like a much bigger hassle to get to than the same amount of walking (unless it’s raining).

A good chunk of my recent TikTok feed has been demonstrations of efficient swimming technique and so I’m trying to put them into practice. The first time I tried it was a mess because I had so many TikTok tips swirling around my head that I was trying to do all of them at once. So this week I’ve been alternating between improving my pull – the correct arm shape and pulling all the way to my hip – and my breathing – exhaling everything before taking more in. It’s very hard to tell with physical positioning whether I’m doing anything right, without anyone to watch, but I think I’ve improved very slightly.

Another benefit is being able to catch up with my oldest friends D and S, the latter of whom happened to be back in town visiting family and saw me from a taxi yesterday. Good chat today, much of it about aging parents.

§ This week I found that the task on my slightly neglected ooh.directory which fetches RSS/Atom feeds was frequently timing out. I assumed that – as has happened before – this was due to one or more sites taking a long time to finish responding, and requests not timing out. But, after adding more debug logging, that didn’t seem to be the case.

After further poking I found that some pretty simple database queries were taking up to 20 seconds to complete. Then I realised the queries were almost instant on my laptop, with an identical set of data. If we skip over a lot of scratching my head and trying this and that, the answer turned out to be: increase the server’s RAM from 2GB to 4GB.

I have zero interest in running servers and this kind of thing really sucks any pleasure out of making websites. I usually hope that if the server is very short of RAM, or disk space, or whatever, that it will become very obvious. I guess taking 20 seconds to do a simple query is very obvious in retrospect, but it was far too subtle for me several days ago.

§ I finished re-watching the first two seasons of Parks and Recreation. I’d remembered that the first short season wasn’t that great, but I still enjoyed it. I’d forgotten how much suddenly changes at the end of season two with the arrival of Chris Traeger and Ben Wyatt, and the departure of Mark Brendanawicz. Quite a relief really; Mark and Ann were such a strangely dull couple for a comedy like this.

I’d also forgotten quite how delightful April’s gradual discovery of happiness is over the course of those two seasons. More interesting and much more convincing than The Bear’s Richie’s change of character.

§ That’s all.