Weeknotes 18 (May ’20): Digitising those cds was totally worth it

  • A couple of weeks ago I started getting spam in Spanish and at the same time my Gmail spam filtering became way less effective. I have no idea where the Spanish stuff came from, but I suspect Babbel may have something to do with it, even though I was trying to learn French with them. Gmail seems to be catching almost all the Spanish stuff, but also quite a few legit emails. It’s an interesting process to watch.
  • I’m noticing far more people out and about on my daily (or less frequent) exercise. As always, the people who are least aware are the ones staring at their phones. I think they get into ‘normal’ mode, but also, just, people on phones.
  • We live near a coffee shop that trolled me on Twitter a few years ago. They have a few ‘ironic’ signs in their window that I found offensive, and they decided my expressing that opinion on Twitter was fair game for a bit of a fight. It became the last straw for me in terms of my Twitter experience and I walked away, and I haven’t bought anything from them since. Now, they are open for take away coffee and have a long line down our road most days. I am almost tempted to open a competing coffee stand along the line of the queue. This is a horrible insight in to my mean and bitter side, isn’t it.
  • I have digitised about 250 cds over the last week or so. I threw myself into this project thinking it would be obvious what to do with them once they were digitised, but I have discovered this turns out to be an utterly non-trivial and messy world of expensive kit and systems that suddenly stop working with other systems. I am currently toying with the idea of building something to plug into our amp using Raspberry Pi.
  • I am not convinced by the apparent Government policy of hinting at changes before announcing them.
  • I am also not convinced that the best use of Boris Johnson’s time was giving an interview to the Sun.
  • This morning I remembered Brexit and started to cry.
  • Running continues. I am trying to manage the pain that occurs in my left achilles, leg and glutes, so trying to take it very easy indeed. And I am having a mini experiment with Runkeeper. Strava is entirely focussed on sharing, which I don’t care for.
  • I have a test suite for an app that fails in different ways at random. I am going to solve the bloody thing this week.
  • Still doing PE with Joe every weekday morning. He’s not exactly Mr Detail, but I am so pleased he turns up every day. Not easy for him, either, I’m sure.
  • And having to think very hard about goal setting and progression in taekwondo at the moment, as our normal markers are a bit up in the air. We’ve arrived at some ideas for May, so here’s hoping they work for everyone.