last night i went to bed with a migraine and this morning i woke up with a slightly less bad migraine then decided to come into the office. this is going to be a brief one.
monday, as usual, choir. going over "No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)" and "To The Moon And Back". we're in phones away going over the entire setlist mode at the moment. i had been worried that we'd get everything down in time but we're truly getting there. tonight a subset of us are practicing Murder On The Dancefloor. i'm hyped. come watch us yeah?
tuesday: back to back meetings all day. just one more meeting bro, just one more meeting, just one more then i swear we’ll be on the same page, i just need one more meeting bro, just let me have one more meeting
wednesday, took Kettricken to the vet for a routine, 6-monthly checkup. i'd thought it odd timing. so did the vet, they had no idea why their reminder email went out then. she hates being taken to the vet. i hate causing her distress. sorry :(
Sophie was away friday/saturday. i stayed at home and worked on her secret birthday project. which might become a secret christmas project jesus fuck i'm running out of time
it is the season of ending and decay and i really do not want it to be.
and why he ourple
i have switched from Firefox to Floorp.
this isn't a bit, that is the actual name of a real browser. it's a fork of Firefox. it has some nice customisation features built in like being able to move the tab bar around and being able to use userChrome.css like Firefox could before 68 (yeah you can do that with an about:config flag still but that's not the point). using the theme colour from the website in the toolbar like Safari does isn't even a Floorp feature, it's just straight up a Firefox addon.
none of this is the point: i just don't trust Mozilla any more, and i do not trust Google. it would be nice if we weren't putting all our collective energy into capitalism-eating-itself-plagiarism-surveillance-and-climate-change-hockey-stick-machines but oh well
my mother-in-law (who is very nice) visited this weekend. we went to the Tower of London, then saw Operation Mincemeat, the musical about Operation Mincemeat, that one time MI5 stole a corpse, dressed him up as a marine officer, and dropped him in the Mediterranean with a briefcase full of fake plans for the Spanish to responsibly return to the UK and definitely not show to the Abwehr.
genuinely one of the funniest and most moving plays i've ever seen. i cried a lot. the Fortune Theatre is not built for 6'1" girls. but they do have an order-drinks-online-and-deliver-them-to-your seat thing. 10/10 go see it
everybody has a different idea of what "the Origami project" is. or, everybody is using different words to say the same thing. or, everybody knows what everybody else wants "the Origami project" to be and is lying to me about it so they get what they want from it. or, all of the above. TK too spicy rewrite this para
Origami is the design system for the pink newspaper website. there's a new version of it coming any year now. i am to test its components and fix any technical issues with using them in the pink newspaper website. or, i am to come up with a proposal re: the pink newspaper website's old weird CSS that is consuming the design system for us to work on. or, i am to work with the design system team and the design team on the things they want to improve about the wholesale design of the pink newspaper website that may or may not be related to the new version of Origami.
god, i don't know. i think i'm doing all these things? for the time being at least, i'm lifting up logs and finding woodlice and then taking a flamethrower to the woodlice. most of my job for the last few years has paying down eight-year-old tech debt caused by a bunch of people coincidentally all with my deadname. again, not a bit; i'm talking about three people who are not me whose code i am very excited to be deleting.
let's get the not particularly humble brag out of the way:
i spent friday afternoon driving supercars around a track.
not these ones tbh. i was too excited and forgot to be taking photos or video of the actual cars or driving
so for christmas my parents got me a Virgin Experiences voucher to go abseil down the big red spindly sculpture thing in Olympic Park. except when i tried to book it it was was no longer available. i was able to exchange the voucher for another Experience, and looking down the list it was like:
wine tasting
massage
supercar track day
bottomless brunch
and so there i was on friday, in a portakabin on a disused airfield just outside Hemel Hempstead, learning how to not crash several hundred thousand pounds worth of car. then an instructor drives three of you round the track in a normally-fast BMW, going slow to teach you each corner, then going fast, then doing everything wrong on purpose so you know what not to do, then going really fucking fast to make sure you're suitably terrified by the time you get behind the wheel.
and then they call you up one by one, sit you down in a stupidly fast car, and let you at it, with an instructor in the passenger seat extremely calmly talking you through which cones to aim at, which corners to cut, when to brake, when to floor it. i drove:
a Toyota Supra done out in the exact colour scheme and decals as the one from The Fast And The Furious (2001). great car, but i was a bit too nervous on my first few laps to get much out of it.
a Subaru Impreza WRX STI. got in it slightly disappointed, as the instructor wanted to put me in an Audi R8, but that was occupied. i was not expecting it to go as hard as it did. very fun in the corners.
a Lamborghini Gallardo LP540. honestly not as fun as the Scooby, felt a bit too abstract, and it was LHD so i didn't trust my proprioception.
supercars are not like other cars. you might think you've driven fast. floor it in a supercar, it genuinely feels like you're going to fucking hyperspace. like you are being willed forward by God Herself. like your soul has some inertia and needs a second to catch up to your body. it's a visceral, intensely physical experience. 11/10 i need to go back there i don't even care
and that was just day two out of a run of four busy days.
for a little while back in 2018/19 we would occasionally pack up our laptops, leave the office, and go work from the 6th floor bar at the Tate Modern, mostly as an excuse to leave the dinge of One Southwark Bridge. last year we tried it again unsuccessfully; the Tate is somehow way more popular than pre-pandemic, and there were massive queues for the bar and a sign saying "no laptops". we ended up in the terrace at the Anchor pub instead, which was fine, but not what i'd been going for.
i'd had a little revelation that right on our doorstep was a venue that ticked all of my boxes: The Barbican Centre. which ticks the additional box of being my favourite place on earth (lmao when i wrote this i forgot the background of ghost.computer was the pixel art Lauderdale Tower. what a nerd kara). so thursday we went and tried it out, a few of us grabbing a table on the lakeside terrace, and it went pretty well! a little cloudy and windy but worth trying again.
after that was London Synth Club, at the Walthamstow Trades Hall & Institute. which is basically a working men's club except with pride progress stickers on the bar and "terfs are weird" stickers in the ladies' loos. great venue, great vibes.
Synth Club is a scrappy little event put together by this guy Ben from the EMOM scene, one part meetup, one part open mic night. buncha synth men (plus me) with their synths talking about synths for several hours, puncuated with short live sets. i did a little set on a tiny but surprisingly versatile Eurorack system built into an Ikea TAVELÅN box. got some very loud industrial techno/garage(?) out of it. somewhere between SOPHIE & Modeselektor vibes? good shit; went about 47% to plan, which is about par.
still trying to find any photos or video of the set. surely someone in the room had some
my old friend Ed lives in the area; i texted him an invite not expecting anything (i had never successfully invited anyone to a live performance i've done? so i eventually just kind of gave up inviting people). he turned up! with his best friend/ex Emma, who it turned out is a member of the Trades Hall. we had a lovely evening!
saturday we met up with my parents, my brother, and his partner, in Leicester, and spent the day wandering around, doing lightly tourist things, my dad reminiscing about his uni days, the "kids" (the under-35s) doing silly things on the playground equipment and injuring ourselves (okay tbh that was just me).
we ended up at The Marquis Wellington pub at my suggestion, which it turned out was my dad's local. it's changed a lot in the last thirty seven years apparently.
and then at last, sunday. i went climbing for the first time in a few months. inspired by how weak i felt on the monkey bars in Leicester, i only managed 45 minutes before giving up. and now i ache even more. it's perfect timing though, i go on holiday next week so i'm just on time to have my rekindled habit entirely broken by the change in routine. love my brain, it's great here.
then in the evening was our movie night, we watched Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (1966) from Piers's list, a stressful movie about horrible people, which was actually incredible.
i fixed the rss feed url, you're welcome all you rss nerds.
i left my fan at the studio on friday. today was the hottest day of the year. i was surprised by the rain but at least surely it would make the heat more bearable. did it fuck
i had an angry couple of days on wednesday and thursday. i don't know why. i'm sorry everyone, you didn't deserve it.
good news: my work private health insurance covers shooting me in the face with lasers to the tune of twelve and a half grand. bad news: they have some specific laser shooty face people who are not the people who have been shooting me in the face with lasers for the last five years. i will miss you
good news: the end-to-end tests on the financial times mobile app actually caught a bug in the new content pipeline. bad news: it took me four (4) working days to figure out that that's what the e2e test logs were trying to tell me. worse news: it's in a really annoying part of content pipeline that i don't like how it's written. better news: oh wait that means i get to rewrite it, cool
oh wow it’s actually joever, didn’t see that coming.
we’ve been trying to diagnose a Weird Problem at work, the kind you’d see in breathless Medium posts or SCP containment reports. me, Ivo and Rowan had each spent a few days trying to understand what was going on before getting burnt out, and the CDN support engineers were clueless.
on tuesday i got everyone together around the breakout area table in the office, trying out stupid things like editing the CDN config live to add more logging and point it to a temporary app i wrote and deployed in five minutes to log full request details we weren’t getting from the CDN logs themselves. by the end of the day things were pointing to the WAF as the culprit. the next day we narrowed it down with the help of a WAF support engineer to the WAF's CDN loop detection (crucially not the CDN's CDN loop detection, which we'd already configured our way around).
the support engineer told us we had an "interesting" architecture, which is support engineer for "what in god's name are you doing".
thursday was a bit of a piecemeal day, but I did manage to crank out a 1600-word internal work blog post, a crash course in Splunk. might syndicate it here, because apparently a technical blog post is on brand for me now.
another community dermatologist appointment for the Chronic Skin Problem. she'd told me this was a supervision session, and her consultant dermatologist would be sitting in and might be able to offer better advice. what she didn't tell me was there would be three more (trainee question mark?) dermatologists, and that they'd spend the next twenty minutes basically doing a table read of an episode of House. which was great in terms of getting me treatment, not so much in terms of anxiety.
i ended up with some downtime in Herne Hill on the way to the appointment, so i grabbed lunch (a chorizo and anchovy pizza) and ate it sitting on a log in Brockwell Park, then worked on the Splunk blog post for a bit.
at the studio i have two larger Eurorack cases, both 6U by 84HP, that stand together to make one bigger 12U case. except, sometimes for a live set i want to use a case bigger than the portable techno groovebox, i can’t possible take both big cases out with me, and half of a 12U system is not a 6U system, it’s a bunch of modules designed to work together with the half you’re not bringing. my studio’s default state is a mess anyway without me having to rearrange all my modules every few weeks and leaving half of them on the desk.
12x84 ≈ 9x110. one single bigger case, slightly wider, with the modules curated to (hopefully!) fit both the studio and live set use cases.
soldering all 800+ power header connections on the bus boards took three hours and all my stocks of solder
as for the old cases: hey do you want a free Eurorack case? one is still available, the other is Alex’s dangerous new hobby.
friday i went to the local hipster brunch cafe for avo on toast, then saturday on the way home from Kensington Palace we grabbed olive bread and blue cheese for lunch from Whole Foods in Kensington, then went to the local rooftop bar for drinks. living my best bougie life.
we were planning to go to the other rooftop bar in Peckham, but as we walked out of the stairwell they were blasting music loud enough to immediately trigger my apple watch "loud environment" warning. look lxds i love Crazy In Love as much as the next girl but i also love having a) ears and b) conversations.
