Weeknotes 22

Today, after several weeks of inaction, I revived my starter and made some dough.

While I don’t think I’ll ever be good at baking bread, I have at least become comfortable with it, so the process is now familiar and relaxing. Instead of staring at a recipe and agonising over the details I can just potter around enjoying the methodical execution of something simple and not worry too much about the results.

It remains to be seen whether I can successfully bake this dough tomorrow morning while also doing my job.

I finished onboarding this week. On Friday I deployed my first tiny pull request to production and nothing broke. I don’t yet know what next week, or indeed any future week, will bring.

The back pain persists and makes it difficult to think about anything else. But the pain continues to slowly be improved by exercise, so each day I can think slightly more clearly.

I can’t face Twitter at the moment and am still stuck indoors so I’m grateful for the human contact afforded by the various Slack workspaces I share with friends. One of them mostly consists of people saying “Morning” to each other every day, as if we’re all going about our own business in a rural village and cheerfully calling over the hedge. I like the reassuring routine of it.

This is probably exactly what Americans imagine British people’s Slack channels to be like. They are right.

My work computer, a brand new MacBook Pro, has started crashing every time it wakes from sleep. At first I thought the hardware might be faulty but a lot of people have been having the same problem and it appears to be caused by a wonky GPU driver in Catalina.

This is obviously annoying. I use the laptop in clamshell mode which makes it extra awkward to reboot when it dies. I’m also in the habit of hitting ⌃⌘Q to lock the screen every time I step away, but that puts it to sleep and guarantees I’ll come back to a dead laptop.

To make the situation more bearable I have: changed the “Lock Screen” keyboard shortcut to ⌃⇧⌘Q so that I don’t habitually trigger it; set my “Turn display off after” Energy Saver preference to “Never” so that the monitor stays on and keeps the computer awake; made a blank screensaver in Quartz Composer; made an Automator Quick Action to start the screensaver; and assigned the ⌃⌘Q keyboard shortcut to my Quick Action in the Services menu. So now when I hit ⌃⌘Q my screen goes black but the computer is still alive when I come back to it. To avoid giving all my money to Bulb I shut everything down at the end of the workday and boot up again in the morning.

Sort it out Tim Apple.

I was woken in the middle of the night by my electric toothbrush falling onto the floor of the bathroom. Another day I went into the bathroom and found the toothbrush noisily vibrating on the shelf all by itself. Either everything I thought I knew about the physicalist nature of the universe is wrong (i.e. my bathroom is haunted) or the toothbrush is faulty. I will keep you posted.

Two weeks to go.