Weeknotes 321

Happy March. Come on, spring. 🌱

Gym: three. Shroud is plodding along, sometimes literally. It’s strongly reminiscent of Children of Ruin in certain aspects. It’s passing the time but I’m not finding it especially gripping.

There are so many more bikes on the road now that the weather’s slightly nicer and the days slightly longer. I find it a little unnerving to be stopped at the lights with, like, twenty other cyclists. When it’s just me and a couple of other bikes it feels effortless to slip around cars and stay out of their way; when there are this many all at once, we’re always on the brink of becoming some kind of coordinated obstruction. I know I shouldn’t worry about simply using the road as intended but, as always, my priority is to remain inconspicuous and not accidentally piss anyone off.

A week of work visitors meant I had lots of meetings, lots of lunches and a couple of dinners out: a team meal at Rosa’s on Tuesday night, then tofish & chips with Tyler at Unity Diner on Wednesday. All very good, and the drunken noodles came with a more moderate quantity of raw chillies this time.

Ultimately I’m exhausted.

Murray’s editorial flailing indirectly led to me making a donation to the charity supported by Vim, and my employer double-matched it, so that should belatedly cover my lifetime Vim licence.

After several days’ wait I got my AWS Lambda memory limit increased but still couldn’t launch the recommended CloudFormation stack because of a different boring problem (“python3.8 is not a supported runtime”) so I gave up on migrating my conference talk videos from Glacier to S3 and downloaded them from Glacier directly via the usual rigmarole.

A quick check of the 27 video links on my talks page revealed that eight of them were fully dead, mostly due to Skills Matter going away. (I’d forgotten I already rescued my RSpec talk and moved another to YouTube for bandwidth reasons.) There are three more in a half-dead state since the video pages themselves are locked behind a login wall on Vimeo, but the embedded versions still work fine so I’m not going to mess with those yet.

Anyway, the upshot is that Do Mix Your Drinks, Thinking Functionally in Ruby, Relational Algebra & Arel, TDD Fishbowl, Seating Arrangements for Lunch, WTF is BDD?, Hello, declarative world and Automatic differentiation in Ruby have a new home on YouTube and all the video links are working again.

Who cares about me pointlessly curating a museum of my own cack? Nobody, but now I’m free to stop thinking about it.

I was sad to see that Rob Grant died. I stopped watching Red Dwarf decades ago, and I suspect some of the bits I watched haven’t aged well, but it was definitely a formative part of my childhood and, like Hitchhiker’s and Dirk Gently, gave me an appetite for a sprinkling of nihilistic melancholy in my comedy.

Likewise, I felt a little emotional watching Tori Amos’s recent performance of Cornflake Girl. Time passes.

Wrapping up this maudlin triptych: while digging through old backups in search of conference talk materials I uncovered an MP3 of a song I haven’t listened to since my friend (?) Noele put it on a mixtape in 2003 but which has been on repeat in my subconscious ever since.

In the brutal light of 2026 it feels like a magical piece of ephemera from the fabric of another life entirely. As far as I can tell it was never actually released and I can’t find any copies of it online, so in the spirit of cultural preservation, here’s Jacob’s Stories’ Unfinished Idea no.208 for posterity.