Weeknotes 6

Time passes.

Someone at the gym asked me to spot them. I had no idea what that involved but in the moment I panicked and said “yes” out of a misplaced desire to be helpful. This instantly trapped me in the life-threatening situation of being responsible for a person’s safety without any knowledge of how to ensure it. I suppose that technically they were trapped in a life-threatening situation too but, crucially, I was the one who felt mildly uncomfortable.

Let’s not talk about how I chose to interpret that responsibility, but having since looked it up I now know that my interpretation was glaringly inadequate at best. Fortunately nothing bad happened but with any luck I will never see that person again.

We watched Long Shot. I thought it was going to be pretty silly but it was actually only a little bit silly and also kind of charming.

We finished Cheer. I did warm to it as I became more invested in the personalities of the individual kids, and the final episode is impressively gripping, but I remain neither uplifted nor inspired by the terrible behaviour of the terrible adults.

This week I wanted to archive some large files somewhere safe and used that as an excuse to try Amazon Glacier for the first time. The low cost is nice, but I also rather like the sedate pace of it: for example, to get a list of your files you initiate an inventory-retrieval job, configure the vault to publish job notifications to an SNS topic, subscribe an email endpoint to that topic, then receive an email hours later telling you that your inventory is ready and can be downloaded. This slow cloud experience is pleasingly reminiscent of James’s Postal Inter.net.

In hindsight it would’ve been easier to store objects in S3 with the Glacier storage class rather than using the perverse Glacier API directly, but that would also have taken the fun out of it and I’m not currently in any kind of rush.

I persisted after last week’s disappointment and eventually found some no chicken kievs in stock on Wednesday. I bought a pack and they were delicious. Today I tried to buy more but they were out of stock again at the two M&S branches I visited. Nothing else in their Plant Kitchen range is regularly sold out so their no chicken kiev manager must need to increase no chicken kiev capacity at the no chicken kiev factory.

“Hey Siri, what’s on my calendar today?” “You’ll need to unlock your iPhone first.” Literally useless.