Weeknotes 118

I’ve had COVID all week, feeling confused & congested and testing positive for 11 days straight. Nothing has happened.

Oh! Except yesterday I got my first negative test result, and again today, so we celebrated by jumping on a train with our bikes and visiting RHS Wisley. It was sunny and breezy and felt like spring.

The flowers were beautiful and I think the fresh air did me good.

I’m basically better again. The brain fog has lifted and, apart from a lingering cough, I can breathe easily. I feel very lucky to be healthy.

A few different free trials expired so Nat & I decided to bite the bullet and split an Apple One subscription rather than sign up for stuff piecemeal. I like it so far — it’s relatively cheap and gives us way more storage space than we were paying for separately, which is the main thing I care about when photos & videos are becoming both larger and more frequent.

I’m not entirely confident it’s good value for money but I do like not having to think about details, and the vague serendipity of having access to all the things by default is nice. I never found Apple Arcade compelling enough to pay for but, now that it’s just there, it’s been fun to dip into it to play The Spirit of The Mountain. And as someone who’s never tried a streaming music service I’m enjoying wandering around the Apple Music catalogue with an astonished look on my face like a defrosted caveman in a department store. How am I going to operate my VBR MP3s now?

A consolidated subscription is definitely a tax on the lazy but, well, it’s a fair cop.

We binged the rest of Severance in time for this week’s season finale. I had that sinking feeling throughout that they would run out of ideas and not know how to end it, but the finale stuck its landing and retroactively affirmed that the rest of the episodes were good actually.

The whole thing is well-written which is a novelty and a relief. The comedy occasionally puts a toe over the line of being too broad, but they don’t overdo it so the weird tone survives intact. The performances are basically perfect too: Adam Scott’s wrong Tom Cruise face is compelling, and Britt Lower has an impressive physicality which makes her character feel real. Worth watching I reckon.

I have a busy month coming up: in a week my team arrives in London for a few days, then immediately afterwards I’m off to California for a week, and then I’ll be in Portland for RailsConf in May.

I’m excited but nervous. All of this feels like an impossible amount of travel and human interaction compared to the preceding two years of padding around my flat and occasionally looking out of the window. The plan is for it to invigorate rather than destroy me.

I recorded a video to show my teammates what I know about setting up Git commit signing with GPG and a YubiKey on macOS. Pretty niche, but if you want to hear my ill voice talking about cryptographic signatures, here it is:

As Nat said this week, “anything can be content online”. Really makes you think.