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Paul Battley’s blog, publishing since 2002
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Week 223: Orange Monday 14 Apr 3:07 PM (6 days ago)

Orange Monday wiped about a year’s worth of contributions in value off my pension. On one hand, I absolutely do want to see an end to US global hegemony, just … not like this, and not this chaotically and precipitately.

By Wednesday, the US dictator had knocked all the tariffs down to 10% on everywhere except China, which he raised to 104%, and then to 125% later in the week. I’m not sure how any business could deal with such unpredictable price variation on imports.

When you use the cloud, you march to someone else’s tune. In this case, the marching band was GitHub, who decided to kill the cache API that a work project’s builds were using. We only found out because it stopped working: part of the process of this expiry involved a couple of brownout periods, short intervals of simulated death during which the to-be-killed interface would be turned off.

The first of these periods coincided with camelgate, a botched “security” intervention in which Cloudflare managed to block any URL containing “camel”, making it impossible to download one of the bild dependencies. This wouldn’t have been a problem if it were cached, but because I was using a new cache API, there was no existing cache.

The second brownout period was scheduled for Tuesday, so I allocated my afternoon to working on a fix. It wasn’t as easy as the notice predicted, as the cache was used only indirectly. A game of Whac-A-Mole ensued, as one by one I knocked out the places that referred to something else that used an old version of the API. In the end, I succeeded within the brownout period, so it should keep working when they turn it off for real.

However, I resent the unnecessary work. A few weeks earlier, I had to spend a couple of days changing a database over because Microsoft had decided, for their own reasons, to retire Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Single Server in favour of Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server. What’s the difference? I don’t know, and I don’t care. From my perspective, nothing except additional work. I resent having to use Microsoft products every day, but at least the old evil monopolising Microsoft put effort into backwards compatibility. It’s now considered normal and acceptable to make arbitrary changes and force customers to redirect their effort into vendor support.

(See also: buy a new phone to continue to have access to this service you depend on.)

I went climbing again at the bouldering wall. They do a cheap rate for locals on Wednesdays, so I blocked out a longer lunchtime in my calendar, worked from home, and wandered over there around midday. I’m already better than the previous week, which makes me think that whilst I might indeed have grown weaker, it’s more likely that I was just rusty.

I’m planning to do the same this week. I get enough double-booked meetings to know that no one pays much attention to whether I’m actually free or not, so I hope I don’t have to fight too much to keep it clear.

We had a few of L—’s university friends over for dinner on Friday. It was so unseasonably hot (21 C in the afternoon) that we were able to open the patio doors and eat al fresco into the evening.

The sunny spell finally broke over the weekend. I think the garden plants will appreciate it, even if I don’t.

Many links this week:

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Week 222: Line go down 9 Apr 7:37 AM (11 days ago)

I wrote in my diary last week, “Trump’s tariff madness. Is this the end of the US?”. And that was back on Thursday, when it was just beginning. It’s hard to understand what is going on in Trump’s mind, but we should maybe consider the most parsimonious explanation of all: he’s just a complete idiot with a child’s understanding of the world. He’s the man who bankrupted several casinos, and what are the world’s stock markets if not the world’s biggest casino?

I don’t feel nearly so smug about putting more money into my pension a couple of weeks ago. I hope it will go back up again before I retire. If not, we’ll have more problems to deal with.

I worked from home on Wednesday thinking that I had a full day of meetings. However, after some quarterly planning (that I wasn’t involved in) the Eye of Sauron has shifted its focus so those meetings were all cancelled. Then they were replaced with different ones, and I still ended up with a day full of meetings.

Thursday was pretty much the same: meetings all day, dealing with the jarring shift of priorities. I hope it’s going to settle down after this.

I went bouldering at the climbing wall for the first time in ages, and was shocked by how weak my upper body has become. One of my reasons to do it is specifically to avoid becoming enfeebled by age, so I’m going to have to make an effort to go a bit more often. It’s fun, even if I’m not very good.

My parents have been married 50 years and had an afternoon reception to celebrate. Conveniently for me and almost no one else, it was in central London so I took the Jubilee Line for half a dozen stops to meet family who had come from much further away.

On the basis that I’m not married now and even if we did get married I’d be approaching a century in 50 years’ time, it’s an achievement that I’m unlikely to match.

It’s pretty obscure. You wouldn’t have heard it. We went to a performance of L’Humanità Redenta by Antonio Draghi, a piece of music that had only been performed once before, in 1669. It’s a lovely piece, and it’s a shame it’s been forgotten for so long.

The weather has been unnaturally fine for longer than I can remember. The sky has been blue, and the days sunny. It’s not particularly hot, and the nights are very chilly, but seeing the sun every day brings so much joy. I’m reminded of how during my time in Japan even the winter was bright and cheerful, and so unlike the undifferentiate damp greyness I’m used to in England.

We watched Crá, an Irish-language murder mystery set in county Donegal. It’s a good watch, and it’s heartening to see something entirely in Irish in which the language is incidental. However, some of the actors had very stilted Irish, and the dialects and pronunciation weren’t all consistent with the setting. I know there aren’t all that many fluent Irish speakers, but there must be more than that!

Links:

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Week 221: Cell rejuvenation 2 Apr 10:56 AM (18 days ago)

I replaced the battery in my electric toothbrush. After ten years of daily use, the capacity of the NiMH cell inside had shrunk to the point that it could no longer make it through a single brushing.

I found a website with batteries for sale and instructions for replacement and for about £8, a lot of de- and re-soldering, and a little bit of careful hacking at the internal plastic, I installed a new, larger battery with 180% of the original capacity.

As long as the rest of the device holds up, it shouldn’t end up as e-waste for at least another 18 years.

A couple of years ago there was a bubble of popular discourse about how men think about the Roman Empire at least once a day, or something like that. I don’t. But I do often think about the Islamic Golden Age, a period of several centuries of enormous scientific and cultural achievement, and how it came to an end. There’s no single answer as to why: some attribute it to the depredations of Mongol invasions or the Crusades; others on droughts and plagues; some blame colonialism. The hypothesis that plays on my mind is that described by Chaney (2023):

A contraction in secular bureaucratic structures strengthened conservative religious elites who altered institutions to discourage the study of topics that undermined their societal control.

As I watch the US cut funding for science, impose ideological constraints on universities, and ban books that are slightly inconvenient to régime narratives, I find this hypothesis ever more credible.

We watched The Substance (2024), an excellent, grotesque, disturbing, and thought-provoking film. Demi Moore is great, as is the visual style and the soundtrack.

One-sentence summary: What if the Soulwax remix of Work It by Marie Davidson was a body horror movie?

I bought tickets for Interesting 2025 in May. See some of you there?

I’ve been practising for Okinawa Day on 28 June. I’ll be playing sanshin and guitar this year (though not, obviously, at the same time) so I’ve been taking my guitar to practices and using one of the spare club sanshins that are already there. That means that I haven’t had my sanshin bachi (a kind of big claw that goes on the index finger) with me, and I’ve been using a guitar plectrum instead. That’s not particularly unusual: many people do so. The weird thing is that, even though I can play guitar with a plectrum, I find it much harder to play the sanshin that way. I’ve always used a bachi, and something abut mixing the techniques makes me confused about which instrument I’m playing.

Links:

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Week 220: Boring grown-up stuff 26 Mar 2:24 AM (25 days ago)

I’ve been doing a lot of financial admin as it’s the end of the tax year. In one sense, it’s boring grown-up stuff, but I also find it reassuring to feel that I’m in some kind of control.

Having the UK tax year end on 5 April is the curious result of a series of historical oddities, but in many ways I’m glad it doesn’t match the calendar and that I don’t have to squeeze it all in around Christmas.

I spent time working out how much extra I could put into my pension, thereby helping my near future self (with a smaller tax bill) as well as my far future self.

I never had a job with a pension. My first few full-time jobs didn’t offer pensions, and at that time, they didn’t have to. In my second job in London, my employer offered a pension and contributions in theory, but the process to get it set up involved talking to a financial advisor who seemed more interested in getting me to sign up to a life insurance scheme, and it never happened.

There was a brief moment when I could have had a workplace pension, towards the end of my time at GDS, but if I stayed for less than some period – a year, I think – they’d cancel it and return the money. (Eventually: it took some of my colleagues years to get that sorted.) I knew I wouldn’t be there that long – and indeed I wasn’t – so I opted out.

It wasn’t until I was 40 and had my own company that I actually set up a pension. After about seven years of putting a significant proportion of my income into it, even with recent economic chaos, I’m now in a fairly good position. In fact, it’s probably better than if I’d been setting aside a standard amount every month since I was a boy.

I think it’s a ridiculous way to run a society, to force us all to gamble our future comfort to provide liquidity for the various schemes and devices that make up the late stage capitalist economic system, but I still have to do the best I can to live within this system today and in whatever world exists in two or three decades’ time.

We booked a holiday in a few weeks time using Byway, a travel agent who specialise in flight-free trips. Booking all the transport and accommodation is stressful and time-consuming, so I was very happy to pay someone else to do it – although I think it cost no more than it would have to do it all ourselves. We’ll be going by train (plus one bus leg) to Bordeaux, Bilbao, and San Sebastian, with a night in Paris on the way back.

I’m looking forward to it. Between the pandemic, buying a house, and renovating a house, we’ve only had one proper holiday away together in the past five years, when we went to Australia in early 2023.

I extended my contract. I’ve managed to find a balance that doesn’t involve spending all day in meetings, and I making some progress in getting some of the organisational things fixed, so I’m staying for now. In any case, my contract specifies no notice period at all, so I’m not trapped there if I change my mind.

We watched the last episode of Severance season 3. I find it very enjoyable from and aesthetic point of view, and I love the weirdness and depth of mystery. I have some theories about where it could go next season, but those would definitely be spoilers.

Links:

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Week 219: Exploding head 18 Mar 2:59 PM (last month)

We finally visited Phantom Peak on Friday evening. It’s all of ten minutes’ walk from our house, and we’ve both been past it enough times to be aware of it, but I had always been quite cynical. It was the recommendations from our next-door-but-one neighbours, who have been a few times (via discounted NHS staff tickets), and from Terence, who attended a play test, that prompted us to look into it. We managed to pick up tickets for less than full price, although they probably made it up on the 2 vegan hotdogs and 4 pints of beer we had between us.

It was very enjoyable. People have compared it to an escape room, but I’ve never done one so I can’t say anything about that. It’s busy, with a large set full of the cast and other members of the public. The quests aren’t particularly difficult, but the world and the set and especially the interactive artefacts are delightfully detailed and internally coherent.

You do have to give yourself over to the absurdity of the scenario, but it’s worth it. I’d recommend it.

It was nostalgic because it was also the same building that, back when it was Hawker House, (before that business was killed by pandemic restrictions) was one of the first places L— and I went on a date. I could still recognise a few features from its previous incarnation.

(Before that, the same building was a huge shop called What!!! that sold housewares, gardening supplies, and ugly yet inexplicably pricey furniture. I don’t miss that.)

I was woken by a loud explosion in the early hours of Sunday morning. But after realising that L— had slept through it, and that no one in any of the neighbouring houses was in the least bit perturbed, I was forced to conclude that I had imagined it.

I looked up the phenomenon. Whilst it’s not well understood, it has been recorded since the 19th century. It’s not much more than a curiosity, and doesn’t seem to portend ill-health or imminent death.

What is fun is the recently (1988) coined name: Exploding Head Syndrome.

I finally got a refund for my boat journey a month ago, when I couldn’t tap out because there was no power at the pier, and they charged me the maximum possible journey because technical problems are always in their favour by default. It might have taken a while, but I did get it back in the end.

There are two weeks left of this month and thus two weeks left on my current contract. I’ve been offered an extension, but that’s still going through various levels of bureaucracy and approvals. The question I have to answer is, do I want to? Working across three different projects and being responsible for things that I don’t have the power to change seems like a recipe for burnout. Conditions that are tolerable on a six-month contract with an end in sight aren’t necessarily so in the indeterminately longer term. The idea of just walking away and never having to touch Microsoft Azure again for the rest of my life is so, so appealing.

Capitalism makes sell-outs of us all, but only up to a point.

A few links this week:

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Week 218: Quinquennium 11 Mar 2:00 PM (last month)

Do you ever wonder how it is that there was a massive influenza pandemic in 1918–1920 that killed tens of millions of people and yet there are hardly any explicit mentions in the literature of the period? I don’t really wonder any more. Few people want to relive the period from 2020 to 2022 in any form.

I had gone out to Japan in January 2020 to work on a short project for a few months. The client had put me up in a brand new apartment in the centre of Tokyo with the most amazing automatic bathtub I’ve ever used, before or since.

It wasn’t even the first time I’d been in Asia during a SARS outbreak, so I wasn’t particularly worried, even when they announced a few cases in Japan (and not just on the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship in Yokohama).

But then, my client told us that they were stopping all work in Japan and booking us flights home. I arrived back in London on Monday 9 March, five years ago this past Sunday. Everything was still pretty normal. I went to a gig on the Thursday, and had a good time.

You might not be able to confirm this, but you can tell me if you haven’t heard it: I have it from two different sources close to government that the UK is going to be in French-style total lockdown from Friday.

Message I sent to a friend working in government on Wednesday 18 March 2020

By 18 March, there were rumours that there was going to be a “lockdown”, so L— and I went to our favourite bar (RIP the Full Nelson) for beers and vegan burgers just in case it was our last chance. It was very quiet that night, with only one other couple and their dogs. As we left, I said, “see you all after the end of the world”.

And it was, in a way. Cafés, pubs, and restaurants were closed from that Friday. The full “stay at home” directive was three days later. Things didn’t return to normal until early 2022, and it was never quite the same as before.

L— has been away all week at a couple of medical conferences, so I had another week on my own. I managed to avoid staying up too late. That’s always a risk when there’s no one to tell me it’s bedtime.

The sun came back to London last week, and we saw the first glimpses of a future beyond the cold damp greyness of winter. I went out without a coat on for the first time on Friday. On Sunday, I took my picnic blanket to the park, read a book, and had a nap in the sun. (It didn’t last, of course.)

I didn’t have any pancakes. Who has the time and energy to be making pancakes on a weekday, unless they’re being pestered by children? And I wouldn’t put eggs or dairy in them anyway, so I could choose not to eat pancakes any time I like, even if I were living in a place and time in which that were a prescribed Lenten fast, which I’m not.

The United States of America continues to stray ever further from anything even approaching normality.

It’s rather awkward that, under late-stage capitalism, my pension is entirely dependent on a global financial system built on scams and wheezes that can be blown up by a handful of guys who spend way too much time online. I am, of course, optimistically assuming that this same system will leave enough habitable planet remaining by then.

If only there were some kind of organisation that had the scale to shield us from the vicissitudes of market weather and provide a decent retirement to everyone. (I can hear a certain group of baby boomers screaming in terror at the Spectre of Communism while enjoying their own final salary pensions in their mortgage-free houses.)

Some links to distract and entertain:

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Week 217: A hostile foreign power 2 Mar 12:05 PM (last month)

On Monday, a few of my colleagues were listing their gripes with the Microsoft suite we have to use, and especially SharePoint and Teams. I jokingly told them not to worry, we’ll have to migrate away from it soon, because you can’t use software from a hostile foreign power. For context, Miro is banned in UK government departments because of its (now mostly historical) links to Russia.

A few hours later, the United States voted with Russia, Belarus, Israel, and North Korea against a resolution that condemned Russian aggression in Ukraine. It passed anyway, but reified what had previously merely been speculation: the US régime is explicitly on Putin’s side, something later reinforced by reports that they have stood down digital operations against Russia.

And then, on Friday, there was that press conference with Zelenskyy, Trump, and Vance. That was the moment at which I really felt that that was it: the world I grew up in is over.

The Great Satan was never your friend if you lived in the Middle East or South-East Asia or anywhere south of the Rio Grande, but now it’s clearly the enemy of Europe as well.

Disentangling ourselves from America is going to be difficult, but necessary. At least the rate at which Musk is dismantling their state capacity means that maybe they’ll be less likely to be an effective adversary.

Personally, I have never been short of reasons not to use Microsoft’s horrible software myself, but maybe geopolitics can do what universal opprobrium can’t, and remove Microsoft Teams from all our lives.

I had a Telegram account for all of a week. I signed up to join a group chat with some old friends. After a few days, I wondered why it had gone so quiet. I opened up the app to find that I was signed out, so I went to sign in, only to be told, “Phone number is banned”.

I’ve no idea what I did “wrong”. I’d not used it apart from that chat group, and no one else in there knows why. There’s no obvious means of recourse beyond emailing into the void, which has yielded no reply.

Proprietary platforms always suck. You’re a supplicant at the whims of a faceless company. (And that’s why I keep blogging, on my own domain, and you should too.)

Up until a few days ago, the people still working at 18F (a US government digital service inspired by the UK’s GDS) were just following orders from the régime as they expunged all references to diversity, equity, and inclusion from their documentation.

Well, now they’ve all been laid off, and the penultimate pull request stands as a lasting memorial: it deleted the words “welcoming” and “inclusive” from their code of conduct, took out the direction to “[t]reat other people’s identities and cultures with respect”, and removed pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity from the list of prohibited bases for harassment.

All of it for nought. Do it or get sacked? Maybe. Or do it and get sacked and leave a lasting record of your part as a collaborator.

There’s a lesson here about principles.

I’ve had to stop listening to podcasts at 1.5 × speed. Several people recently told me that they couldn’t understand me because I was speaking too fast, but it wasn’t until I slowed down a podcast to normal speed to check something that I realised how much it was warping my perception of normal speaking speed.

I hope I can relearn how to speak normally and stop gabbling.

I accidentally bought a ukulele-banjo aka uke-banjo aka banjolele. It was just sitting there in Deptford Market, in excellent condition (apart from enough fret sprout to draw blood, but that’s an easy fix) and only cost me £45.

A ukulele-banjo in its case

Ready for some window cleaning

Feel free to compare me to anti-apartheid hero George Formby if you must.

Aside from the frets, the resonator (the wooden dish that sits behind the drum to project the sound forward) is distorted from over-tightening, and the plywood has delaminated a bit, but as it’s not a structural part it’s something I can repair at my leisure.

Links of the week:

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Week 216: Reunited 26 Feb 10:32 AM (last month)

L— came back from her climb up Kilimanjaro (and down again, and then a few days of rest and recuperation in Zanzibar). I missed her and I was glad to welcome her home.

She had been out of mobile signal range most of the time on the mountain, and I’d told her not to spoil her holiday by looking at the news. Instead, with the help of friends, I made a list of all the things that had happened while she was away, that I could then summarise for her. My list was:

And that was just a fortnight or so. She wanted to hear it all, so I spent five minutes or so running through everything quickly. I think it’s probably better to hear it all that way, rather than as a drawn-out sequence of cortisol-spiking events.

I took part in a workshop on improvised counterpoint in early music, hosted by the director of the Cappella Pratensis, on Wednesday evening. There was a good turnout, which made for a satisfying sound when we all sang a four-part arrangement at the end.

I’m used to listening to early music, but not to reading it. The four-line staves with unfamiliar note shapes and arbitrary clefs (sometimes even changing the clef position between lines!) were a bit confusing, but I got the hang of them quickly enough.

Friday was a sunny and warm day (at least, until it rained later) and we both had the day off. We walked along the Thames to Somerset House for the Soil exhibition. It’s substantial and varied, containing art, science, ecology, and traditional practices. We bought our tickets first so that we could take advantage of the offer of 15% off at the café for lunch before going in. On our way back from ticket desk to café we tried to take the lift, got off at the wrong floor, ended up in the middle of the exhibition, and spent ten minutes trying to find the way out so that we could eat lunch. It appears that if you’re really determined and good at mazes, it’s possible to get in without paying.

In the evening, we went to a singular performance of a piece called L’Elisio at Guy’s Chapel (formerly part of the hospital, now in King’s College London). Actors repeated the testimonies of people who had been in comas using the headphone verbatim technique. This reproduces the cadence of the original testimony in a way that makes it seem like you’re hearing the original interview. It’s absolutely captivating. This was all interspersed with seventeenth century music (sung, and played on theorbo, violin, and viola da gamba).

Following a surprise cardiac arrest, Seb spent time during his recovery at St Thomas’ Hospital meeting fellow patients who had also spent periods in medically-induced comas. Many of their experiences were disarmingly entertaining, but always equally moving. The music complimenting these accounts is drawn from seventeenth century settings of myths involving the descent and return from the underworld or a brush with Death: darkly humorous and profound in equal measure.

The only thing that didn’t quite work was the attempt to conceal the identities of the interviewees: it’s no use using a false name if they repeat their own name in the recording!

On Saturday night I took the long route to Highbury and Islington (because, as every weekend these days, the Windrush line was closed) to see my friends in Mount Forel play, this time with new material. The sound was terrible (the mics were inaudible) but the music was good. They were supporting Sugar Horse, a much noisier band (with a lot more neck tattoos in their fanbase). I don’t mind heavy music, but on this occasion the change in tone was a bit jarring and I ended up in the downstairs bar chatting during most of the headliners’ set.

Some links, without much cheer:

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Week 215: Landlords in the realm of pure imagination 18 Feb 2:26 PM (2 months ago)

I spent Thursday in a windowless basement room and it was actually really good. We had an all-day in-person workshop for everyone on the three separate but connected things I’m simultaneously working on, and it was my first time to see most of them face-to-face.

Getting onto the Jubilee Line at Canada Water is a nightmare in the morning, so I took the boat from Greenland to Westminster, and spent a pleasant and productive half an hour reviewing code. On my arrival, however, the power was out at the pier, so the machines didn’t work, and I couldn’t tap out to end my journey. One of the people working at the pier unhelpfully told me to walk to Embankment to tap out. I didn’t have time for such a wild goose chase – it’s not that far, but at least ten minutes each way – and nor should I have to. I’ve been charged a punitive maximum fare of £17. I’m in the process of claiming it back.

The activity I organised went even better than I could have hoped, and got people talking and coming up with ideas that I hadn’t considered. That was what I wanted to get out of that session, but I didn’t expect it to work so well.

On the other hand, my position on AI did not go down well among the prevailing boosterism. “How can AI help with sustainability?” My answer, approximately, “don’t use it, the energy and resource demands are terrible”, was not what anyone wanted to hear. Nor did they appreciate being asked what, concretely, they expect an “AI chatbot” to actually do.

I introduced a few people to the CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a publication produced by the US around the time of the Second World War to instruct sympathetic workers in Axis countries in ways to undermine their governments. (A note for any confused readers: the US was opposed to fascism at that time.) I explained that some of the meetings feel like they take their inspiration directly from the principles within:

  • When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible – never less than five.

  • Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.

  • Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.

  • Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.

  • Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.

I had a good chat in the pub afterwards, and it was reassuring to know that others share my frustrations.

L— made it to the top of Kilimanjaro and back down again, and I got to speak to her for the first time in a week. It’s unusual to be out of touch for so long in this hyperconnected world. You might assume that a mountain has a good line of sight to cell towers, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. They go up on average, but via a lot of ups and downs and there’s often rock in the way. We were able to exchange the odd message, but some took days to get through.

I’m old enough to remember when “Death to America!” was a rallying cry against the Great Satan and not the actual policy position of the reactionary nihilists who are now dismantling its state capacity. I’m going to have a lot to explain to L— when she gets back after a fortnight away from current affairs.

The sun was out on Friday for what felt like the first time in living memory, and I cycled down to Deptford.

I picked up a couple of albums by Téléphone in the market. I was surprised to find them there, but delighted: we used to play a cover of Un autre monde in my band when I lived briefly in Alsace, and it brought back good memories of playing at fêtes du vin.

After that, I met a friend for a pub lunch at the Dog and Bell and we chatted for hours over a couple of beers.

I made it to Tate Britain in time to catch the Turner Prize exhibition on its last weekend. I was a little underwhelmed by most of it, although I really liked Claudette Johnson’s portraits. (She didn’t win.)

I’m often thinking about the motivations behind the AI push and one idea keeps coming back to me: the tech plutocrats want to extend rentierism to thinking itself. Knowledge workers don’t need to pay anyone else to just use their brains (although Adobe and Microsoft try hard to wedge a monthly subscription into that process). But if you insist that all work now requires an AI assistant, you can become a landlord in the realm of pure imagination.

We should resist this.

I’ve bookmarked a lot this week:

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Week 214: I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it, Bob 11 Feb 1:53 PM (2 months ago)

I had a short week of work as I travelled back from Brussels on Monday. The train left a little late and arrived 20 minutes behind schedule, but that’s on time by British standards so it wasn’t really remarkable.

The departure lounge in Brussels is larger than last time I was there, but they still don’t have a café or bar there, just a Duty Free shop where you can pay the same price for goods as you would at home, except that what you would have paid in tax and that might have supported the public good now goes to the vendor’s profit margin instead. Great work everyone.

L— has gone off to Tanzania to climb Kilimanjaro. She’s climbing with a big group of women. They’re taking the Lemosho route, which is about a week up and down, and she’ll be away for a fortnight in total.

In the meantime, I’m home alone. It’s OK, I know how to look after myself, but I do miss her.

I cooked a load of rice and side dishes in a big batch on Thursday night, and ate banchan-style for the next several days. I was craving a bit of variety by day three.

Going to fewer meetings has been a big success. I’ve still tried to do the important and useful ones, and no one has complained about my absence from the others.

—Looks like you’ve been missing a lot of work lately.
—I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it, Bob.

I went to a one-year-old’s birthday party. Obviously, at that age he has no idea about the calendar or a concept of a year, so it was mostly a party for the adults.

I started tagging bookmarks about the US with “coup” this week, so that’s all going well.

Apropos of nothing, it was the aftermath of an attempted coup that broke up the USSR in 1991.

I’ve been looking at where I depend on US services, on the basis that they can no longer be considered reliable. Just ask the International Criminal Court how well putting all their documents in Microsoft’s cloud is going now that the US has imposed sanctions.

Multiple sources in the prosecutor’s office said Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform is critical to its operations and suspending access would paralyse its investigations. “We essentially store all of our evidence in the cloud,” one said.

People used to say that “The cloud is just someone else’s computer”, but now it’s more like “The cloud is someone else’s computer, in the control of a rogue state run by a volatile mad emperor”.

My computers run Linux. My phone runs GrapheneOS, a non-Google version of Android. I still have a few documents in Google Drive, but almost everything else could be recreated if needed. Domain names are probably a weak spot, as anything that’s not a country-specific TLD is probably within the reach of the US régime.

However, the UK government and military are completely dependent on US providers, so there’s a limit to how much one can insulate oneself from that wretched empire.

Links, some of which aren’t about politics:

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