• Sunday, 13 Aug 2023 10:42 pm

  Weeknotes 7 August

  Out running with Striders on Monday and Wednesday, which felt positive. Still impressed with how much better I feel after spending a little time small-talking with folks. The running probably helps. Resolve to get involved in cross-country this winter; resolve to get good & clarty.
  

  Ran home from some errands in Hartlepool on Friday, and attended the Durham parkrun the following morning. I should have given myself a bit more time to recover.

  

  Slept in on Sunday and took the motorbike down to Ellerton Park for a bit of open-water swimming. The Big Lime Triathlon's coming up next weekend and I hadn't done any swimming since Castle Howard a few weeks ago. I struggled for the first 10 minutes or so, but found my rhythm eventually. Not going to have that sort of luxury at the Big Lime: 10 minutes in I'll hopefully be more than halfway done. I'll go back down to Ellerton sometime this week for a bit more practice.

  Reasonably productive at home, as well: installed a new overhead light in the office downstairs, to replace an awful old chrome thing that got molten hot when you left it on for more than half an hour. One of the lights upstairs has stopped working, though, and I can't figure out why. You win some, you lose some. I'll call an electrician this week to come have a look at it.

  

  Sam's been hard at work sorting out projects as well: she's laid a bunch of wood flooring and re-installed architraves and skirting boards in the hallways. It's been on our list of things to do for years, probably, at this point, and she's been smashing through it with zeal. It looks incredible and goes a long way towards making the house feel ours. I guess that's what middle-class people say when they undertake home renovation. It makes a difference, I promise.

  Otherwise: all quiet. We've been very slowly making our way through The Last of Us, the TV series. Bella Ramsey is such a good actress. I'm impressed, as well, at how each episode builds on side characters from the games—Ellie and Joel are almost background characters in the dramas of the game's NPCs. They've done a really fantastic job with it.

  On the reading front, I've been making my way through Eragon, a book I read back in high school. After a series of slightly more difficult books I wanted something easy and sort of nostalgic. I remember thinking, back when I first read it, that it was good but not compelling enough to prompt me to pick up any of its sequels. It continues to be uncompelling, but I no longer think it's any good, either.

  

  Running Motorbike Reading

• ---

  Sunday, 9 Jul 2023 10:19 pm

  Weeknotes 2 July

  Started the week on a high note: I took the day off and we finally cashed in a spa day we received two Christmases ago. Visited the Bannatyne in Durham—maybe less of a spa than a "health centre", which functionally just means that it has a wading pool and a sauna and a jacuzzi and a bunch of treadmills and erg machines and a cafe that sells smoothies. I didn't bother with the treadmills and erg machines but after our couples massage—not quite the sports massage I used to receive off old Japanese women at the local onsen, but a welcome relief nonetheless!—I sat in the sauna for maybe longer than I should have and did a few halfhearted laps in the single 15m lane tied off at the end of the pool. We then ducked into Durham for a late lunch at a pan-Asian place called Zen. Uninspired name, absolutely fantastic fare. I rarely find more than 2 or 3 things on a menu that I really crave, but this single piece of laminated card was a who's-who of Charles's All Time Greatest Hits. I made Sam write an IOU for a return visit at some point.

  Unfortunately, the week took a bit of a turn for the worse thereafter. Hay fever (or a mild cold; not sure) rolled in on me on Monday night and didn't let up for a few days afterwards. I struggled to see through itchy eyes and serial sneezing fits and skipped out on an exercise or two midweek, but was back on form by Thursday or Friday. My bike's developed an awful ticking noise when applying force to the left pedal, and I can't locate the source. It's been an annoyance.

  At the weekend we took a trip up to Polmood with a couple of friends for a weekend off the grid. They'd brought their dogs and we were keen to see how Ghyll would get on with them. They weren't much bothered with Ghyll, being 9 and 13, and Ghyll got the message eventually. By the time we were ready to leave, Ghyll was quite content to potter around the garden on his own—an unfathomable situation just a couple days prior, when just the sight of a dog would send him into tail-wagging hysterics. Proud of him!

  

  As for us hairless bipedals, Saturday morning found us taking a briefly soggy walk up Worm Hill—at last. Worm Hill is a big symmetric triangular thing that sits right in the frame of Polmood's front door, crowned with a crumbing surveying tower and with no established paths to the top. We've always wanted to climb it—it dominates the Tweed Valley looking north from Polmood—but never managed to get round to it until now. It was a shorter walk than I'd thought, and the views from the top were lovely—especially up Stanhope Glen (once the rain'd let up).

  

  Saturday afternoon Sam and I drove up to Fruid Reservoir to do a bit of test open-water swimming. I thought that I'd found my open water legs (fins?) swimming in Lake Sir John growing up, but for some reason swimming in Fruid (just like swimming in the marina last weekend) has got me absolutely petrified. We're talking inconsistent breathing, shaking hands, terror both up and down my spine. Not Fun. Anyway I think it's probably just a question of exposure, so I paddled around for half an hour in the shallows, and then climbed up onto the shore and ogled wetsuit-clad reflection in the car windows. What a cool, adventuresome guy. A return to Fruid on Sunday morning proved more fruitful: twenty minutes of solid swimming (mostly breaststroke with some crawl thrown in for good measure) with only minor panics along the way. My main obstacle is putting my head in the water. Only two weeks until the Castle Howard triathlon, too, so I betta getta move on.

  

  What else? I lost one of two bolts holding the instrument panel to the forks on the motorbike, so I took the remaining one down to Hartlepool to match and buy a replacement. The guy at the hardware store probably thought my buying a single bolt a little odd, but the instrument panel's rock-solid again. I rode halfway up to Newcastle but got lost along the way, and had to race home against my phone's dying battery.

  Read a bit more of Why Nations Fail, but as I close on the last chapters, I'm not sold on the purpose of the book qua book. The central message of the book is pretty straightforward, and it's addressed in the first couple chapters; the rest of the book is historical evidence that props up but doesn't really add to the thesis. I feel like the authors could have trimmed it down and published it as an essay on a smarty-pants website. But I suppose that wouldn't have been very prestigious.

  I've been reading the book using the Books app on my computer (and my phone), and I'm not sure that I'm sold on the experience. The sync between the two is flaky at best, and while Apple hardware has some of the best screens available, there's no beating physical paper (or e-ink!) for long reading sessions. I can feel the pattern on the screen burning in to my eyes after like 15 minutes. Got a couple books waiting for me at the Peterlee library, though, so it'll be back to paper soon enough.

  

  Polmood Scotland Swimming Motorbike

• ---

  Sunday, 2 Jul 2023 6:44 pm

  Weeknotes 26 June 2023

  Trying something new this week. Inspired by Phil Gyford's weeknotes, I'm writing some of my own. I got into a good swing of monthnotes last year, but for some reason I've found it hard to build a rhythm in 2023. It feels like each month is too jam-packed with stuff to write about, and so inevitably I waffle and procrastinate until we're two weeks into the following month and the previous has been all but forgotten.

  So I'm breaking it down into weeks. We'll see how I get on.

  This week was quiet round our end, plenty of time spent with Ghyll in the evenings. We've had an uncommon run of nice weather—great big puffy clouds scattered across vivid blue skies and the thermometer hovering around twenty degrees—so I've taken Ghyll out for a few walks to a nearby field for a run around. He always comes back foaming at the mouth and panting his heart out. And then he sleeps well.

  

  Not to say that we haven't had a bit of rain, though—and all the attendant allergies rainy weather entails. I'm useless on the first (and sometimes second!) sunny day(s) after a spell of rain, wheezing continually into a soggy handkerchief and squinting at the computer screen through itchy eyes. When I try to explain this to people, I feel like I'm astrologising: "No, it was sunny yesterday, and then the rain fell last night, and we've had a bit of wind, and the moon's waning... atchoo." As much as the dust was annoying during a dry spell earlier in the summer, I think this is annoying me more. Good for the plants, though.

  

  Sam prompted me late last week to start training in earnest for my triathlon at the end of July, so this was my first full week of Serious Training. You might say that's a bit late—and I would too!—but I have been doing sort of triathlon-adjacent running and cycling for the past few months now. I think I'm in decent shape. The training plan that Sam has subscribed me to has taken it out of me, though. Only got a single (blessed) day of rest this week; difficulty sleeping has not made it any easier. Here's hoping that it gets easier over the coming weeks; if not, well, pain is temporary etc etc.

  Sam spent most of Friday cooking up some goodies (quiches, breads, rolls) to sell at the church fair that St. Luke’s held on Saturday afternoon. The baked goods sold well (thanks in small part to my own zealous cake-eating); Sam’s disappeared almost instantly. I’ve heard tell of people who come to the St. Luke’s fairs exclusively to pick up one of her famous quiches lorraine. It was nice to catch up with folks I hadn’t seen in a few months, too; though when asked how I’d been and what I’d been up to, I struggled to come up with an answer. I don’t want to be the kind of person whose go-to is “work has been busy,” but what have I been doing for the past few months? Going out for runs? I guess I cycled the C2C back in May—and we went to the States. I’ll lead with that next time.

  Afterwards, I took my first open-water dip in the UK in the Hartlepool marina. I'd swum in lakes back in Canada before, but almost exclusively on calm days at the end of summer when the lake'd be nice and warm and the sun would heat the top 10 cm of water to bathtub temps. Nothing quite as choppy as the marina turned out to be in a high wind. About halfway across the channel between two docks, a group on a dinghy came sailing up to me and told me that I wasn't permitted to swim in the marina. Strava's Global Heatmap misleading me again!—oh well, I paddled over to one of the ladders and climbed out. I must have been a bit of a sight to the locals in the marinaside beer gardens: some soggy, bearded Canadian crawling up out of the waves and wandering off down the promenade. Defeated, I stripped out of my wetsuit and ran a contrite 6k down to Seaton Carew and back, making good time in defiance of Hartlepudlians giving me the ol' up-down-up in my skintight triathlon suit. A long shower and a couple beers in the evening put me back to rights.

  

  Woke up Sunday to a high wind, regretting a promise I made to a buddy of mine to head up to Newcastle for a bit of running. I struggled to get out of bed and strongly considered being an absolute flake, but with some effort managed to pull together my running gear. Then I grabbed my backpack, my boots, jacket, and helmet, because I was back out on the motorbike for a ride up to the Toon—that's right, I'm back on the YBR after my catastrophic encounter with a roundabout last November. It was easier than I remembered it being! I think that, in some lizard-brain-type way, I'm mentally readier for the speed and the full-body way that you operate a motorbike, after riding my bicycle so far over the wintertime. Bombing down Bargate Bank into Lanchester going 65 kph in the slipstream of some Vauxhall Insignia with nothing but a juddering steel frame under you really girds the loins, it turns out.

  Anyway, my friend in Newcastle talked me into an impromptu half-marathon through Gosforth and Heaton and back across the Town Moor, under a sky threatening at times both sunburn and a solid soaking. We did a good job of keeping a steady pace, and Strava reckons that I broke my PB in the half-marathon. Given that we didn't get rained on in the end, I reckon that's a decent result. I never thought I'd be the sort of person able to wake up early and knock out a half-marathon and then get on with the rest of my day, but here I am. Quietly proud of myself.

  

  Triathlon Monthnotes Ghyll Motorbike

• ---

  Monday, 31 Oct 2022 12:00 pm

  October 2022

  Struggling to account for October. It went by in a blur and punctuated by the full stop of Daylight Saving Time coming to an end and the darkness descending on us like a black wing at 4pm.

  State of the Browser 2022

  Took a trip down to London to attend State of the Browser 2022—the first real conference^[1] I've ever attended! And it blew my expectations out of the water.

  I don't think I could ever live down in London but I sure as heck love to visit. There's a deep-down part of me that gets a secret thrill out of riding the subway, born probably in the Metro in Montreal on the one day a year I'd ride it with my dad to Île Notre Dame to see the Formula 1, the Yellow Line doglegging off the side of the map and the well-worn doors around the Jean-Drapeau metro station blustery and smelling of cigarettes. People moving anonymously through their day, looking conspicuously at anything but each other. Hell of a time. I love to be a silent particle in a crowd of people all heading off to somewhere or other with purpose and élan. I love the sense that there's something happening everywhere. I love a good city, and I love a good subway.

  Enough about the Chyube—The State of the Browser 2022 was held at the stunning Barbican Centre, a massive architectural statement indicating just what heights Brutalism can rise to when you let it converse with nature a little bit. Unmistakably 1970s but feeling fresh and modern and well-built, capable of outlasting us all, already half-overgrown. The conservatory in particular was worth the visit.

  

  But the talks were the star of the show: a heady dose of web standards and JavaScript conservatism, which is just about the only conservatism that I can stand. When you spend too much time on Twitter, it feels like every question posed is answered with a hefty dollop JavaScript—a new build library or a new framework or a new metaframework eking out a soupçon of performance for only an extra megabyte or two. JavaScript is where the conversation happens.

  But it was good to get together with 150 or so other folks to spend a little time coming back to terms with how powerful the browser has become in the past few years. I wasn't around for the Bad Old Days, but browsers have become eminently more capable even since I started in 2017. To hear from Bruce Lawson that early Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator actually implemented entirely different specifications was absolutely wild. Andy Bell, Michelle Parker, and Jhey Tompkins both covered the modern ways that developers can leverage modern CSS to build robust interfaces that scale across a broad range of devices. Sophie Koonin and Alistair Shepherd both presented on creative approaches to design leveraged by modern APIs, and Henri Helvetica put our work into the context of the environmental and performance impact that an overreliance on JavaScript can yield. We capped off the day with a couple of heady stouts from a nearby pub, the kind of exciting beer that you really only get in the city.

  Cycling

  Started the month out with a bang by going on a big 30 km loop near Lanchester with maybe a little bit more vertical than I was strictly ready for.

  Humbled, I took to eBay to find anything in the way of bike components that could plausibly make climbing easier. I came back with a new chain, a derailleur with a longer cage, an absolutely minuscule front chainring, and a new freewheel (which didn't end up fitting: oh well). A bit of wrenching (and copious cleaning) later, my bike felt more capable, slicker, more tightly coiled. Ready to spring up a hill with nary a sweat broken.

  Spent the rest of the month chasing distance around the notoriously flat part of Northumberland just north of Newcastle. Enjoyed a cannoli in Morpeth; cycling really is about the finer things in life. In November it'll be back up into the hills.

  Motorbike

  At the beginning of the month I rode the bike down to Hartlepool for some candy at the shops, and while I was in Asda, some kids strolled by and tried to steal the bike. I'd put the steering lock on to prevent just such rascals from touching my stuff but, unperturbed, they put all of their weight into the handlebars in an attempt to break the steering lock off and make off with it. Japanese engineering won out in the end and the steering lock made the bike un-make-off-able, but a bent handlebar was the reward for my foolishness. I rode home safely but with arms all skew-whiff.

  Nevermind—lesson learned, and anyway we're resourceful folks. We found a replacement set of bars on eBay for pretty cheap, so off with the old and on with the new. Too late, we found that the holes for locating the switches were all in the wrong place, but we took a chisel to the pegs on the switches and made do. I suspect that the handlebars are generics but made to spec for one of the knockoff YBRs coming out of China.

  While we had the bike in parts, we did an oil change as well: remarkably easy, and ery clean inside: Yamaha builds bikes like tanks.

  

  Music

  Saw Destroyer and Bon Iver; I've written elsewhere about that but suffice it to say that I wish live music was a regular part of my life. Maybe when we've got a bit more time.

  Health

  After having blood drawn regularly every six months for the past 8 or 9 years while monitoring my thyroid hormone levels, I was finally put on a light course of thyroxin, and it's made a massive change for the better. The skin on my face has always been a little bit dry and flaky, and it's been getting worse with time; before being medicated I could barely go a full day after a nice hot exfoliating shower before my forehead started to litter white specklets on the pillowcase. But now, it's two or three days before I start peeling. It's not perfect, but it's a definite improvement.

  Maybe more importantly, though, my tolerance for cold has absolutely skyrocketed. I spent most of last winter wrapped in multiple sweaters, under lap blankets, hauling the duvet around the house, trying to hold onto the little warmth I seemed to generate. Ghyll's put an end to my duvet-carrying days (he'd love to sink his fangs into it & tear it to shreds), but no matter: I can get by with a t-shirt and jeans even when the wind gets up and the mercury drops. I feel superhuman in my ability to manage the cold now. When Sam, who runs notoriously hot, complains of the cold, all I can do is to repeat to her the advice she liberally doled out last year: put on another sweater. It feels like a superpower; it feels unfair.

  The *waves hands* state of things

  The government had a bit of a Moment midmonth, and the economic instability that it wrought has stuck with us well into Sunak's prime ministership. We're glad that we're on a fixed-rate mortgage and a fixed-rate energy tariff, but the general cost of living means we're being a little tighter with funds than we'd be otherwise.

  We didn't put the heating on all month, though, which we both consider a real victory.

  ---

  1. By "real conference" I mean something somewhat more structured than an after-work meetup of likeminded WordPress developers.

  Monthnotes State of the Browser Cycling Motorbike

• ---

  Friday, 30 Sept 2022 10:45 pm

  September 2022

  Well, there’s September; 3 months left in 2022. Where has the year gone? After like 8 weeks of solid sunshine, the rain has arrived and the muddification of the country is under way.

  Ghyll update

  Is Ghyll growing older, more responsible; is life getting back to normal? That feels like a bit of a trick question. He’s definitely bigger—he can get his full snout over the lip of the countertop now—but it feels like his growth is slowing down… a little bit.

  

  Sam and I have found our routine; she takes him with her most of the time but on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings I’ve got him to myself (the ladies of the St. Luke’s sewing circle don’t rate excitable puppies, somehow). A lot of the time I struggle to balance work with giving Ghyll the attention he craves; I usually err on the side of the latter and make up the work after hours. I don’t know if it’s sustainable but it’s routine, which means it’s one fewer thing to think about. Ghyll has a bit of quiet time while we have dinner, and then we take him out for an hour’s walk in the dark. Our obedience coach says that we should feed him dinner, biscuit by biscuit, while we walk, to encourage him to stick close while he’s on the lead. That’s alright for shorter folks but I’ve gotta bend just about in half to reach down to him—jumping up must not be tolerated.

  (I call her our obedience coach since dog training is, as everyone will tell you, mainly about training dog owners rather than the dogs themselves.)

  I still struggle with him being mischievous as well. When he jumps up on the counter or nips at my hands my blood pressure goes through the roof and I don’t have any good techniques for dealing with it short of leaving the room or closing my eyes for 20 seconds. I imagine I’ll get better with time.

  Handiwork

  Had a productive couple of weekends around the house; while I haven’t gotten back into the habit of 30 Minutes of Chores since getting Ghyll, Sam and I did manage to sort out a couple of items that had been bothering us for a while. We installed a new light on the front of the house, so you can find your way in the dark months ahead, and we replaced a missing nut on the Yamaha that prevented us from riding (safely).

  

  Speaking of the Yamaha, we’ve taken to riding it reasonably regularly. It still struggles to get up to 60 mph—the gearing is just too short for that—but it’s good riding down to Hartlepool.

  We also replaced the speakers on my 2015 MacBook Pro. I’d stubbornly neglected to fix them for months, daunted by iFixit’s lengthy guide—but in the end, the fix wasn’t nearly as complicated as I’d thought. Clear speakers and a dustless interior (not to mention the free battery replacement I got when I purchased the computer back in 2020) have given this computer a new lease on life.

  Outdoors

  The hot weather’s finally broken so I spent a bunch more time in running shoes or on the saddle of my bike in September. Not much to be said about running; I probably need new shoes but I’m going to try and get another 150km out of my Hokas before they give up the ghost.

  Preparations for the Coast to Coast next year proceed apace; it’s far off so there’s not much of a sense of urgency, but I’m enjoying being out on the road enough that you’d still find me there even without a goal. I’ve started riding with a buddy from Newcastle and I’m enjoying the sense of companionship that you get riding bikes: in a pair you feel much more protected against negligent BMW drivers, and it’s nice to be able to chat on the flats.

  

  My Schwinn, however, might not be the optimal bike for undertaking the challenge, however. The gearing is a little high, and the frame a little bit small (well, compared to the Fuji Espree I had in Japan, which was downright enormous). I’m considering trying to install a rear cassette with better ratios for climbing, but I’m limited by the old Suntour ARX derailleur I’m running.

  I know I’m not going to care about any of this for the next couple of years, but someday I’ll look back on the Schwinn with fondness.

  Reading & writing

  Spent the entire month reading I Am a Strange Loop, and I’m still not finished. Some books just don’t resonate with me for the first 100 pages or so, and I have to force myself to sit down with them. Most of the time they click and I race through the remaining pages, but this one isn’t, for some reason. Hofstadter is clearly very smart; the analogies he uses are clever and insightful, and the questions he’s trying to answer are clearly important ones—but something feels so low-stakes about the whole thing. The knowledge of how my sense of consciousness arises feels like it could have no possible material impact on my life. Maybe that’s closeminded of me. At any rate I’m nearly finished. I think I’m gonna go back to fiction for the next one.

  Slowly getting back into the swing of writing on the blog again; I’m torn between trying to write web-development-related stuff (most of which boils down to: you don’t need Next.js for your blog) and writing personal-type stuff. The former is ostensibly what other folks’d want to read; the latter is what I’ll want to read, 10 years from now. I’ve been thinking about the past a lot lately so I’m leaning more towards the latter. Whereas a potential web-dev audience is ephemeral and totally non-guaranteed, myself-as-audience will almost certainly be here years and years down the line (barring some personal catastrophe).

  The past-ward thinking probably has a little bit to do with moving all of my Everything You Have Heard is True blog posts over to CraftCMS. (Backstory: when I first moved to Japan I wrote a weekly blog called Everything You Have Heard is True where I went a little bit overboard writing about everything that was new to me.) Blogger’s been rock-solid for the 10 or so years it’s been since I started that blog, but I don’t trust that it won’t up & vanish on me one of these days, so I’ve been moving those posts over to this blog, one by one. I’ve even configured AWS S3 to store the pictures and written some clever code to automatically display responsive images on the frontend (blog post to come).

  Miscellanea

  Got an Apple Watch SE midmonth; Sam’s had a Series 7 for 18 months or so and I was eventually overcome with jealousy at the surfeit of personal statistics that Apple Watches opt you into: how long (and well) you’ve slept, what your resting heart rate is, that sort of thing. As a bonus, it’s been a great GPS watch for tracking runs & bike rides. Very stoked with it so far—though I think the benefits only really accrue over longer periods of time.

  

  Early in the month we also got news that the Queen was very ill, and then got news that she’d died, after which the media went maybe a little bit overboard. I think that we’d culturally jumped the shark when Wilko made its website all black & white and put up the big RIP QUEENIE banner. The Queue was a real Thing That Happened and it felt very British, but the media went a little bit overboard with that as well. I don’t think that I really subscribed to any of it as it was happening, since the monarchy has nearly zero impact on my life as a Canadian living in the North East; but a great many people were sad about it, and, as I saw it put somewhere, the death of the Queen was the real end of the 20th century.

  Shortly thereafter, the British economy took a bit of a tumble on the announcement of a poorly-thought-out tax budget produced by His Majesty’s Government. The cost of living was already going up without a weakened pound, but as of writing, £1 will yield only $1.11 USD. In real terms my salary’s taken like a 20% hit over the past couple of months—which is probably an inauspicious start to a winter of interest rate rises. Labour, who have produced what looks like a viable economic plan in the past few days, are poised to take massive parts of the country back in the event of an election. Now we just need the election.

  Monthnotes Ghyll Motorbike Apple Watch

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