w/e 2025-01-19

I was in Essex all week, returning to my normal life in misty Herefordshire yesterday. I’d already forgotten, until I returned, that I have such exquisite taste and refinement that my headphones rest on a stand now. I surprise myself sometimes.

§ I forgot to mention last week that the main room we had redecorated before Christmas showed some mild signs of damp in one corner. A guy who deals with damp and plastering came out to look and measure and said it was a little damp, not terrible, and might be fine if we just left it – there’s no obvious signs of problems outside, other than sealant that we’re having repaired soon anyway – or it might become a problem.

We decided to deal with it, rather than be constantly worrying whether there’d be damp coming through the newly-decorated walls. So he came back and stripped the two external, just decorated, walls back to their solid brick.

Then this week, while I was away, they returned to put up a membrane, and then cover it with insulation and plasterboard. It’s all become much more of a palaver than planned but at least that room will be warmer than before. I’m trying to resist the urge to learn more about internal insulation and how we might have done it differently if we’d started with the aim of adding insulation.

§ I forgot to mention last week that we collected our patio chairs and table that we’d taken to a local firm to be coated a couple of months ago. They were covered in flaky green paint, and now:

They are very jolly indeed, and a cheery sight when seen through the window on a flat grey day like today.

§ Over the past few months work for my client has involved writing scripts to import, update, merge and delete data based on a couple of very large CSV files. It’s only been a few days of work over that time, but it was pleasing this week to actually run the processes on the live database successfully. [touches wood] Always a bit nerve-wracking that kind of thing. FWIW, these two blog posts by Adam Johnson were invaluable:

• How to implement a “dry run mode” for data imports in Django
• Django: unit test a management command

§ Following on from last week’s struggles to improve how I publish Python packages I realised that the tests running in GitHub Actions weren’t working correctly: If there was a failure for a particular combination of Python and Django version, then all of that Python version’s environments were displayed as failing.

I spent hours over three days trying to fix this. I eventually concluded that it’s currently impossible to have two matrices (Python versions and Django versions) in a tox configuration in a pyproject.toml file and have GitHub Actions work correctly with it (the config seems fine running tox on my laptop).

It might be possible and I just haven’t figured it out, but I exhausted everything I could think of, creating a repo to narrow down this specific issue, to no avail. So, back to adding and using a tox.ini file like an animal.

I hate this stuff. The days, weeks, I’ve spent struggling to get “ops” stuff working for my websites over the years. I like putting websites together, which can have its own struggles, but an eventual success is more satisfying. Unlike “now my tests work” or “now my site deploys more efficiently” or “now I use a different configuration file format”.

§ I went to see A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg, 2024) this week and really liked it. A bit more interesting than I expected, based on the contrast between the two cousins and how they see each other and themselves. Kieran Culkin’s character is a bit like his Succession character but without the wealth and so much entitlement he’s just erratic and surprisingly charismatic, with much of his blunt speaking surprisingly winning people over.

§ I watched the recent season two of Everyone Else Burns this week and enjoyed it. It’s not cutting-edge but it’s also a little more unusual and surprising than I originally expected. Good fun, and Sian Clifford’s character was a nice addition.

§ We finished watching season one of Counterpart which I wasn’t aware of until some friends mentioned it recently. I don’t know how I missed it give how just right it is. A decent thriller, a weird parallel-world setting, good performances, not dumb. Thumbs up. J. K. Simmons is great in his role, but I won’t spoil anything by saying more.

§ That’s all. May your week be free of devops.