Weeknotes 220

Welcome to spring. It’s official. 🌱

On Tuesday I went to Alice, Phil & Russell’s party again, this time to celebrate their 148th birthday. It was good to see everyone and the pencils were top-notch as expected.

I made another subject access request for the X-rays from my latest hospital visit. Sure enough, the new one (5 March) doesn’t look much different from the old one (13 January). That’s not great is it?

Conversely, I went back to the foot specialist and he said it’s all fine and I can take the boot off since the pain has subsided. His platitude that fractures heal “first clinically, then radiologically” is plausible enough to stop me thinking about it too much, plus his opinion is more convenient for my needs, so as of Wednesday I’m back in a normal shoe.

I cycled to work on Wednesday and Thursday. It felt so liberating to be back on the bike and I was relieved to shed my temporary identity as a bus commuter. A bus is a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Now if I leave my flat one minute later than planned I arrive at work roughly one minute later than planned. The continuity!

I had a nice vernal equinox on Wednesday too. It was seventeen degrees and sunny in London. My teammates & I walked to Club Mexicana for lunch and stopped off for bubble tea on the way back, chatting and laughing in the sunshine.

I tried the first few episodes of 3 Body Problem. So far it’s dull, low-rent and lifeless; the main characters have zero warmth or chemistry even though they’re supposed to be old friends, and the various nonsensical mysteries are taking too long to reveal themselves with nothing interesting happening in the meantime.

I’m mildly curious where the story’s going but I don’t know whether that’ll be motivation enough to watch the rest. What a dud. Watch Contact instead.

Still: Rosalind Chao and Kevin Eldon, together at last.

The travel insurance policy I bought a decade ago has automatically renewed every April even when I should’ve cancelled it (i.e. in 2020) because at £90 it was just about affordable enough to be worth having. I’ve never made a claim on it but it’s reassuring to know I’ve got a basic medical safety net when travelling to the U.S. in particular, so it has some value at least.

This week they emailed me with a casual reminder that it was renewing soon and would cost £140 this time. A quick phone call later and that’s the end of that. No more free money for them.

I wasted some time because I wasn’t aware of this change in Rails 7.1. I support the principle of making acceptance tests as realistic as possible, but in practice it’s not worth making TDD more difficult, so overall I think Rails is making the wrong trade-off. Fortunately it’s easy to override the new default and reinstate the previous behaviour.

Now I’m on holiday. See you in BST.