Weeknotes 234

Hello you, goodbye Q2. ▮▮▮▮▮▮▯▯▯▯▯▯ 50%.

It got hot during the week but it’s a pleasingly cool 19 °C today, the light drizzle precipitating a medium petrichor waft.

I’ve made it to the end of June while maintaining the Monday, Wednesday, Friday & Sunday gym routine, which feels like a achievement for someone so inherently lazy. At the time of writing I can’t yet claim to have closed my rings for an entire month — the cursed Stand ring doesn’t care how early I completed today’s workout — although it’s reasonable to assume it’ll be in the bag by tonight.

I might ease off slightly now because my insistence upon pre-breakfast exercise is causing me to gradually accumulate sleep debt. But I must grudgingly admit that being more active is making me feel better so I’d like to keep going in some capacity. I’ve also finally lost 1kg so it’d be silly to give up now.

Thank you to Dan for reminding me of the classic forum thread of angry bodybuilders arguing over the discrete mathematics of working out every other day, and to Phil for sharing a similar disagreement between football fans, which I enjoyed enough that I don’t regret briefly unblocking Twitter to read it.

Both examples produce an undercurrent of dread if you stop and think about the innumeracy involved, so just don’t do that and it’s amusing instead.

Last Sunday I cycled over to Josh & Katie’s for a pizza party. We sat on the patio in the evening light, taking turns to spread toppings on dough and slide it into the outdoor oven to be baked in what seemed like mere seconds. A real novelty to me, and I was impressed by how easy, tasty and therapeutic it was.

Then I met Chris after work on Wednesday for beers at the local taproom. The omnipresent threat of exercise kept me mostly on the alcohol-free varieties but it was good to chat and unwind.

Thursday lunch was a work potluck for which I made my favourite easy dessert, the chocolate torte from Blue Moon Café in Sheffield (RIP). I’m forever grateful that I summoned the courage to ask their chef for the recipe in… records suggest February 2013?… so I can wheel it out whenever I want to get maximum benefit for minimum effort. It was a hit as usual.

Here are the hurried photos I took of the café’s laminated recipe card over a decade ago:

I make the “2 shots of coffee” version, although I use 2–3 teaspoons of instant espresso in a little water rather than brew it fresh. Over the years I’ve tried different varieties of dark chocolate and found that the cheaper kinds (e.g. cooking chocolate) work better for whatever reason.

I also tweak the quantities a bit. I use half a packet (about 200g) of digestive biscuits — they’re usually vegan these days, but it’s worth checking — and in my opinion two tablespoons of vegetable margarine is closer to being correct than two teaspoons.

Let me know if you try it!

My teammate described one of the other potluck desserts as “sweet focaccia”, which is a phrase I’d like to see gain traction as a multipurpose exclamation of triumph or frustration.

And finally to the Battersea office in the blazing sun yesterday for a Pride Month celebration. There was plenty of tasty vegan food and a couple of great live performances, and it was genuinely heartwarming to see so many people relaxing and having fun being themselves. 🌈

I tried to read my new gas meter and, well, the display doesn’t show anything at all, so I can’t. Thus concludes the brief historical period during which I had no gas-related problems.

I finished rewatching the first season of House of the Dragon. The performances definitely became less subtle as the melodrama ramped up, but it was still enjoyable and I’m glad I went back to it. Emma D’Arcy does an excellent job of continuing the character established by Milly Alcock; I’m not yet fully sold on Olivia Cooke.

Then I rewatched the first episode of season two and it made a lot more sense when I could remember the story and identify the characters. I’m hoping I can keep the details balanced precariously in my mind for the rest of the season so I don’t have to do any more rewatching.

Do I want to play Still Wakes the Deep? I love narrative games, I love horror, and I thought Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture was mostly very good, but the reviews aren’t great so I’m a bit hesitant.

I expect I’d like it. Maybe I’ll wait until it goes on sale so my expectations are appropriately lowered.

In that spirit I bought Twelve Minutes on sale: it has better reviews and how far wrong can you go for eight quid? I’ll probably play it tonight.

After many challenging years I finally got sick of the perpetual wonkiness of the selenium-webdriver gem, which is too complicated and second-class and smells of Java. I’d tolerated it until now because of the convenience of having a headless browser installed automatically, but I couldn’t get it to work at all inside a Docker container and the process of trying to even understand why it wasn’t working turned out to be more involved than I had patience for. Enough is enough.

So I switched to Cuprite which has the significant advantage of actually working, even though it only supports Chrome & Chromium and you have to install that browser yourself. Annoyingly it does have a careless bug which makes the whole contraption silently fail if you call #attach_file to upload a file with a relative path (such as that produced by, say, #file_fixture), so I did still waste a bit of my time, but the simpler architecture meant I could get to the bottom of it relatively quickly and I haven’t had any problems since.

I’ve also started using Pkl to write configuration files. It has a more sensible syntax than YAML and benefits from being an actual programming language with a type system and standard library and everything, which makes it much easier to avoid silly mistakes and to have bits of configuration which are computed from other bits. I like it so far.

Only a few days to go until the UK general election. The race is on between Rishi Sunak and this lettuce from my local supermarket.