Day: 7 January 2024

Weeknotes #50: new year: on-time and delayed

AI says this is engaging and provides a personal touch to the update of my week’s activities.

Week commencing Monday, 1 January 2024

Cardboard glasses, 40-years old and used in a school play
Glasses from a school play

Quantified Self

  • This week: Stand 6/7; Exercise 4/7 and Move 5/7. (71%). Morning walks: 0/4 (bank holiday). Office days 0/5. Plant diversity: not tracked. Total steps: 53,300

Life

  • Happy New Year! I wonder what 2024 will bring? My New Year’s Eve party, mentioned last week, ended much later night than I predicted. It was a lot of fun but meant a sleepy Monday.
  • For my post about link rot, I calculated that I was entering my 29th year of writing things on the internet. This site starts about 25 years ago but there are references to older material in Elsewhere: Wayback When which, itself, contains link rot.
  • One of the first channels I subscribed to on YouTube was Tom Scott’s Things You Might Not Know. His 10 year streak of weekly videos came to an end this week. Simon Willison wrote about the power of streaks. Although this is weeknote 50, I am only 29 weeks into the current streak. Can I keep it up for another nine and a half years?
  • Wednesday, an over-running meeting turned out to be useful even if I missed my class.
  • Thursday, an afternoon on a train to the Isle of Wight to deal with a plumbing emergency. Turns out, afternoon trains are quieter which means it’s easier to get a table and the WiFi is speedy due to under utilisation. I was more productive on the journey than I thought I would be.
  • There was a leak. It wasn’t mine but it was running through my bathroom. I arranged for the emergency plumber, thanks to a lovely lady who answered the insurance emergency assistance line. Not sure if it will be covered because the broken pipe was upstairs. A stressful afternoon was resolved by 10pm. And I met the neighbours.
  • Friday’s after hours return was exactly 3 hours door-to-door. The fastest yet and shows how wonderfully efficient trains can be when they are able to run to the timetable.
  • Not much sleep. Up at 5:30am Saturday for a day trip to Shrewsbury to help pack-up Christmas. So early that Vauxhall bus station was full of the Friday-Night-On-The-Towners heading home. Trip was productive.
  • While in Shrewsbury, I found a pair of cardboard glasses that I had to wear in a school production of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. That was 40+ years ago. And the sellotape still holds.
  • My return trip delayed which proves that the comment above, about efficient trains, jinxed everything.
  • The first ‘Crazy Coqs Presents’ of the year was the music of Annie Lennox and the Eurythmics. Wonderful start.

Media

  • A version of Mickey Mouse is now in the public domain in the US. How does it work with the different copyright laws in Europe?
  • Mr Bates vs The Post Office is a wonderful bit of drama and really highlights the miscarriage of justice.
  • Listened to the first couple of podcast episodes of Death of a Codebreaker, the story of a GCHQ employee found dead locked in a bag in the bath of his flat. Bizarre story. I am intrigued how they will pad out the remaining episodes.
  • The Crunch & Roll episode featuring The late night Funster brought back memories of Piccadilly and Signal radio.

Archive

Going forward, I have decided to drop this archive section. My original intent was to make it easier to find the items referenced in my weeknotes when inevitable link rot happens. I intend to ensure all the links are in the archive but I felt this section makes reading notes harder than it needed to be (and it’s a lot of extra work to add it when the Wayback Machine can take care of creating a snapshot from this post alone). I’m sorry to future me for this decision. I wrote more here.

Curns’ Ad Links for 7 January 2011

Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain Movie Poster
Brokeback Mountain

When other people write things better than you should you not write about them? Should you give up altogether, or should you plough on, regardless? And if this is your only dilemma very late on a Saturday night then should you worry about it at all, and shouldn’t you go to bed?

This is the position I find myself in after having returned from seeing Brokeback Mountain. Tom wrote about it very well yesterday, and let’s face it, approximately half the known world has an opinion on it (that’s a scientific fact, honestly, it is).

Suffice to say that it’s a marvellous film and you should go and see it at once.

2004 In Pictures

I don’t think it’s such a bad idea to mark the passing of time. I am, ultimately, sentimental. So, although I am not going to write a great deal about 2004, there is one thing that has fascinated me this year: some of the pictures of the year.

In January 2004 I acquired Treo 600 mobile ‘phone. This was the second ‘phone I had with a camera on it and it certainly isn’t the best mobile phone camera on the market. However, I took a few photographs and then, towards the end of the year, I realised that I had a photographic record of much of the year and it had been created unintentionally. It was quite a shock to look at them and put the year into context. Sure, many of them were taken with friends after a few drinks but I don’t think that matters too much. It certainly sums up a lot of the year!

A couple of days ago, I sat down to review the pictures. There were 265 of them. Some are blurred and useless, some pointless and some I really don’t want to show anybody else. However, I thought it might be an interesting idea to get the pictures down to a collection of 100 that sum up the year and I can keep as my Moblog memories for 2004. It’s a filtered collection limited by the technology (the pictures are very low res) and by the photographer (I am not keen on holding my phone and pointing it at people) but I think it does represent 2004 quite well.

Click on the image for the larger version and, if you want to read the captions, see 2004: A Review in my gallery.