Weeknotes 242

A lazy weekend of downtime after wrapping up several weeks of extremely intense work. Yesterday it rained — gutter still drains! — and today there’s sunshine and a cool breeze blowing through my flat.

This weekend will be even lazier than usual because of the bank holiday tomorrow. I now habitually think of this as the last bank holiday before Christmas which is sort of alarming so I wish I didn’t, but it is, so I do.

I imagine standing braced against the wind at Ka Lae on Hawaii, a place I’ve never been and at this rate never will, squinting out at the Pacific stretching away and away and over the horizon, seven and a half thousand miles of deadly-indifferent nothing, terminating at the inhospitable ice of Antarctica. Like that, but for bank holidays.

The only thing I enjoy more than being at different temperatures is being at different times, so I’ll mention that I completed my first year at work.

It’s going okay so far. Like any job it has its fair share of annoyances and unnecessary frustrations, but all my officemates are lovely and so everything else is details.

I spent year one finding my bearings. Year two will determine whether I’m able to get anything done. See you next August.

That means it’s been a year since I bought myself a Studio Display. Whenever I buy something expensive I keep the packaging just in case I need to return it for any reason, so I didn’t immediately throw away the very large and sturdy box the display arrived in. Then the return window elapsed and I left the box to gather dust in the corner where I’d stashed it, and then it was now.

I’d also got myself into a similar situation with my new TV. The two burly guys who delivered it were unable to manoeuvre it around the corners of several narrow flights of stairs without denting up the box — which is fine, that’s what the box is for — and that poisoned my mind into allowing “keep the packaging in case I want to return it” to curdle into “keep the packaging in case I ever move out of here”. That’s absurd because my flat is small and the box is much larger than a person so for the past four months it’s really been living a better life in my home than I have. Stupid mind.

Anyway, two months ago I had a moment of clarity and bought a Canary knife for cutting cardboard. It’s really good. I did a few test runs on less intimidating packaging and prepared myself psychologically to deal with the two gigantic boxes blotting out the sun.

Yesterday I finally did it.

It took a lot more effort than I expected but it’s a relief to have the space back in my flat and my brain. Another tiny victory over unhelpful thoughts.

I still don’t know how I’d ever get the TV back down the stairs if I moved out, but that’s now firmly a problem for the future, and in the meantime I get to live my life to some degree. Friends assure me that professional moving companies must have some solution to this problem so I’m going to hang onto that flimsy thread of sanity for the moment.

I belatedly watched the second episode of Sunny. It’s moving slowly and I can’t decide whether I’m interested enough to get to the payoff. It’s possible I find mystery box shows an active turnoff these days; I understand I’ll get something fun later as a reward for several episodes of being bamboozled, but I need someone or something to care about now.

I had almost decided to brave the cinema to see Alien: Romulus but its reviews have been so universally tepid that I’ve chickened out. I’ll save it for the telly now that the flipping box isn’t in the way.

Off the back of Tekin’s post, Étienne pointed out a recent change which officially clarifies that git checkout is never going away despite having been replaced by git switch and git restore.

It’s mildly disappointing that checkout’s not even going to be soft-deprecated, e.g. made to print a reminder to try switch and restore instead. I guess there’s no harm in long-time users continuing to rely on their muscle memory but I don’t want generations of new Git adopters to learn git checkout and get stuck with it when better alternatives exist.

Concretely I find SQLite’s Code of Ethics pointlessly weird and exclusionary, but abstractly I respect the flex of saying “oh, who wrote our code of conduct? only God”.