Weeknotes 315

A busy but largely unstressful week. It’s already getting appreciably lighter in the mornings, orange buildings rising through a clear blue sky.

Three gyms. I’m enjoying the escalating pace of Revelation Space even though it’s taking me forever to get through it.

Back in November I started paying for Audible again on a promotional “99p/mo for three months” trial membership, thinking I could stash the resulting three audiobook credits until some future need arose, but when cancelling it this weekend I discovered that unspent credits will evaporate when the membership ends and I’d therefore better spend them now.

So I speculatively dropped a credit on Redemption Ark in the hope I’ll still have an appetite for Inhibitor action by the time I finish my current helping. For the record I also bought There Is No Antimemetics Division and preordered Children of Strife for the end of March, and I’ve already got Shroud waiting in the queue. I should be set for a while.

The semantics of Audible’s various membership levels (Standard, Premium Plus, Premium Plus with 2 credits/mo, Premium Plus Annual, Premium Plus Annual with 2 credits/mo), and how they interact with what you’re allowed to buy during the membership and which benefits do or don’t persist when it ends, are truly baffling. What if books, but too complicated?

I suppose they’re intentionally trying to discourage exactly my behaviour, which is to use their service for free to listen to a backlog of books I’ve already bought and only sporadically pay for a brief (usually very discounted) membership to restock my queue when absolutely necessary. But I’m not going to stop doing that, because my listening rate of less than three hours per week can neither sustain nor justify a continuous membership, and so the war for content between consumer and provider must continue.

Amazingly I’ve been told my £113 will be refunded, although it hasn’t showed up yet.

I cycled to Black Cat yesterday and treated myself to their chana masala with a spice bag on the side, which was delicious but turned out to be about twice as much food as I’d expected.

On the ride home I thought about how grateful I am that Black Cat has continued operating in some form; my life in Hackney would be poorer without it and similar ventures. As a punter it’s easy to forget that a café/restaurant/bar/bakery/shop isn’t a place at all, it’s a process which must be continuously renewed and by default won’t happen without the repeated daily commitment to keep it going. And so I’m glad that various processes continue, for now, to support me and my stupid lifestyle.

In a similar vein I popped into the local taproom to try their new AF IPA, which turned out to be hoppy and refreshing, although not quite competitive with my current faves.

IKEA’s new Matter devices don’t seem to be properly stocked yet but I did manage to get a scroll wheel BILRESA to see what it’s like.

It’s a bit weird. In the IKEA Home smart app it can only control other IKEA devices, which crucially includes Sonos speakers, and that works well apart from the physical challenge of rotating a featureless glossy surface. In the Home app it shows up as nine separate switches — three user-selectable modes, each with “rotated clockwise”, “rotated anticlockwise” and “pressed” events — which receive multiple presses as you keep rotating the wheel. That’s not useful for really controlling anything with the wheel but I’ve set up the single-, double- and long-press of one mode to control some HomeKit devices and it’s fine.

Anyway, for an amazing £4, who’s complaining? I expect the simpler and, incredibly, even cheaper dual button BILRESA will be the better product.

Alice said:

there is a massive difference in people who can sew a garment and it looks good when you’ve finished it, vs it STILL looks good when you’ve worn it for a year. For most people going from zero to “can sew a garment” is hard to imagine but once you get to “can sew a garment” you realise… oh there is another 10 years of learning here and to most people they won’t even be able to see the difference.

Just as she presumed, that’s massively applicable to software development isn’t it? It’s relatively easy (or perhaps, these days, literally effortless) to learn how to write code that basically works, but it then takes forever to learn how to build something that’ll continue working in the face of entropy, and a lot of people aren’t able to see the difference.

I saw Predator: Badlands and thought it was a really fun silly romp of a blockbuster. It’s got impressive visuals, great sound and music, and — like Prey before it — is just much better than I’d expected. I somehow enjoyed the Weyland-Yutani stuff even though it didn‘t interest me at all in Alien: Earth.

All I’ll say about The Traitors for now is that I find it annoying when contestants believe their profession has any bearing on their proficiency at a random guessing game.

US public holiday tomorrow! A little oasis of calm.