• weeknotes #4: gaslit by apple maps

  May 24, 2021

  1.hello from the surrey hills

  • we are camping and it is raining, a lot
  • i just barbecued some smoked mackerel fillets and oh my god. then they got rained on and we ate them in the car
  • last time we came here apple maps navigated us to a dead end seven miles away and then said “you have arrived”, very clearly nowhere near the pin on the map
    • imagine being gaslit by apple maps
    • this time we got it to give directions to the pub in the village
  • we put a kettle on and almost immediately ran out of butane. and then it got rained on
  • i love it here

  2. i sold a lens to a friend of a friend

  • i basically never sell anything apart from to CeX
  • the whole deal was struck via twitter dm, it was very civilised
  • i spent half an hour scouring the office for a box of the right size that i hoped might have been abandoned on March 12th 2020
    • eventually i found an amazon box for a logitech mouse. thanks gallal

  3. did another minecraft “speed”run

  • with gallal and rowan and luke and chris
    • i’m on my phone can’t be fucked with hyperlinks sorry lads
  • i tried to solo the nether again and died, a lot, this time
  • next time we’re instituting a “no villages” rule so most of the group don’t spend their time camping
    • im not salty i just died a lot okay

  4. my small eurorack case is dead

  • idk what happened one day it just didn’t turn on
  • i tried taking it apart and it turns out epoxying the power supply to the case isn’t helpful maybe
    • i broke the bus board clean in half. lol
  • i can rebuild her. stronger. faster. I have the technology

  5. i am trying to write this on my phone and wow is it bad

  • who even wrote this blog app

• weeknotes #3: business horoscopes

  May 16, 2021

  content warning: wild animal injury

  1. been watching the Fast & Furious films with friends

  • once a week, on a sunday afternoon
  • we sync up the films, hit play, and pretend we’re mst3k via Slack
  • they’re actually pretty good, even the bad ones
  • also i’m spotting how much of an influence they had on the Need For Speed franchise in the early 00s
  • speaking of which:

  2. i’ve been playing a lot of Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2005)

  Hi, I’m Josie Maran, and I play Mia in Need For Speed: Most Wanted. Make sure you do all your racing in the game. On the streets, drive safely and responsibly. And wear your seatbelt 😉

  • that unskippable opening video is burned into my brain
  • last time i played this game i didn’t let myself like pink, and cute things, for some reason. so this time i’m making my cars look as cute as possible

  3. i’ve also been playing a lot of Minecraft again

  • we (me and Rowan and Luke and Chris) did a multiplayer “speed"run on the latest snapshot version with the new cave generation datapack
    • turns out snapshot versions are not at all optimised and it was extremely laggy
  • to spice things up a bit we had secondary goals we could pick up, silly stuff like “place a live fish in the End”
  • i was racing ahead to get to the end first and do as many goals as i could while the others were doing pointless things like preparing for the dragon fight
  • but when i went through the portal the lag hit hard and i fell into the void and lost all my stuff
    • including my fish in a bucket i was going to free into the End. can i get an F in chat

  4. i went to a technical leadership workshop

  • it was okay. it was exhausting.
  • a lot of it was things like:
    • “if i wanted to be a good tech lead and still wanted to code, i would simply no longer want to code”
    • “here is how to lead an engineering team well: *list of engineering practices the Financial Times does anyway all the time*”
    • one hour of Business Horoscopes (“StrengthFinder 2.0”)
  • i’m glad i didn’t pay for it myself

  5. Kettricken (my cat) caught a bird

  • she’s never done that before
  • it was terrifying
  • i was getting dressed, i couldn’t do much about it
  • i could hear this awful screaming, getting louder
  • she walks in, i assume she’s injured or something, i look down and there’s this mess of feathers in her mouth. still screeching
  • she runs away from me into the living room and drops the bird. it’s a female blackbird
  • it plays dead but it’s still breathing, heavily
  • Sophie locks the cat in the bathroom
  • the internet says to take it to the vet so it can be put down humanely. there’s another option. it probably won’t survive itself.
  • it suddenly leaps up and scurries into the corner.
  • we can’t bring ourselves to do anything about it.
  • we let it go.
  • i’m not sure we did the right thing.

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