Tom Stuart

Properly cool at last. On Tuesday I woke to tantalising petrichor waft and visible evidence of overnight rain, and so then, yes!, it rained properly on Thursday. I was able to work from home on Monday and Friday because my flat was a habitable temperature. Please let it continue for now. Another ridiculously busy week on the (trauma)...

I realise you’re sick of hearing about this, but I’m sick of experiencing it, so take it: I hate the heat. I can’t sleep, I can’t think straight, my brain doesn’t work properly in general. I’m flustered and irritable and short-tempered. At least I have an office to go to, which I did every day this week. It’s slightly too cold in there but...

Hello there. Three gyms. Onion smell by the treadmills. My weight’s fluctuating a lot but the overall trend remains gradually, haltingly downward. I’m approaching the halfway point of Redemption Ark and the pace is at last picking up. Threads connecting! Events occurring! It now seems more likely that I can finish this, even...

How can it already be August? Unrelatedly: how can it still be summer? Another sweltering week. It’s such a relief to have an air-conditioned office building to work from. Oh, except the building was unexpectedly closed all week so I had to work from home. The heat made me sweaty and grumpy at an uncomfortably busy time. I...

It’s been nice and cool this week. I’m bracing for next week. Three gyms. Numbers all over the place, and not in a good way. I slid back into Redemption Ark as mooted. Although its ratio of exposition to narrative remains unfavourable, events have begun to move slightly faster (i.e. at all) which is helping to hold my...

An exhausting week at work, back-to-back with a largely exhausting week of travel, has left me drained. I’ve spent the weekend slowly recharging with no commitments or activities and I’m almost back to normal. Three gyms, back in the rhythm. No net progress but I’ve shed the holiday weight like it never happened; an adipose...

Significantly cooler this week. Not in London, which continues to push the boundaries of fitness for human habitation, but in Iceland where I spent five nights on holiday. Zero gyms, but lots of stomping around on mud and rocks, so that’s the same. I saw waterfalls, walked down into a volcanic crater, swam in a hot...

Cooler this week, thank goodness. My brain mostly resumed normal operation and spent an uneventful few days trapped inside my body which was itself trapped inside an office. Three gyms. I’m still only, like, half a kilo down from a month ago. The pace is frustrating but the trend is still in the right direction and everything feels...

Boiling. Hate it obviously — I’m not ridiculous. Most of this week has been submerged in the woozy fever dream of being uncomfortably hot all the time. Can’t think clearly, can’t sleep properly, can’t do anything of substance, just sheltering and surviving. If we’d been intending for anyone to keep living on this planet after all the...

Happy summer solstice. ☀️ Two days in the office, then three days off to burn some leftover holiday before it expired. I was exhausted so I spent the time catching up on chores & admin and otherwise silently recharging. It was mostly too hot to do anything. I did make it out on my bike to Mr Bingo’s shop on Friday morning to...

Rainy and cool, the sun breaking through. I rode in on Monday despite the rain and got fully drenched. A busy week but nothing to show for it weeknoteswise. Three gyms. I’m still really enjoying There Is No Antimemetics Division and could happily spend a lot more time in its world but there’s only an hour and a half left. That likely...

June! Cooler at last, even raining most days, escalating to wild sheets of water blowing down Bishopsgate on Thursday. I’m sleeping so much better. Three gyms. Another kilo down. I tried to watch If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and unusually had to stop halfway through. It’s probably a good film but I found it so...

I spent much of the week, including the bank holiday, hiding from the sun. I slept horribly on several occasions when it got up to 33 °C during the day and didn’t cool down much overnight. The sleep deprivation made me irritable and unfocused so I wasn’t particularly productive despite working from the air-conditioned office every day. It was...

It’s too warm for me, sorry, and the planet hasn’t even become uninhabitable yet. Every day in the office this week, which has been good for mind and body; come for the air conditioning, stay for the vibes. I’m busy but in a relatively peaceful way. Three gyms. Another kilo down. I got to the end of Children of...

A week of weird, indecisive weather. Sunny most days, but I’ve seen hail and (I’m pretty sure?) snow too. Three gyms. Holding steady. On Thursday morning I rode to Battersea again, a shorter route from Peckham this time, and back to Bishopsgate for lunch. That’s the last trip for now but I think I’ve converted myself into a...

Another four-day week. I spent the bank holiday Monday blissfully doing nothing. Now I just have to hang in there until the next one at the end of the month. Three times at the gym. Down another kilo this week. I’ll take it. I’m ready for Children of Strife to be over, but at this pace it’ll take another week and a...

A sunny bank holiday weekend. Wahoo. Three gyms. A man reading his phone, one-handed, for an hour on the treadmill. Six and a half hours of Children of Strife left. No statistically significant progress on weight loss this week. The routine is still making me feel better so I’m sticking at it. The short ride in on...

Another week of beautiful spring weather and relative peace, with five days spent in a particularly quiet office thanks to the tube strike. Otherwise, nothing doing. Three times at the gym, diligently staying off the snacks. I’m slowly, noisily losing weight, about another kilo and a half down, and feeling better for it. To...

Afternoon. It’s a glorious sunny weekend in east London and I feel fine. ☀️ Three gyms. I’ve made a concerted effort to avoid snacks and otherwise eat sensibly and, oh look, I’m already a couple of kilos down from last week. I think the longer, brighter days, as well as the removal of various sources of work stress, are really...

Alright? It was 25 ºC on Wednesday! First ride of the year in only a T-shirt. (And trousers.) Three times at the gym. Exercise is currently losing the battle against the twin indulgences of Easter backlog and anxiety-induced snacking. Still, it’s better than nothing and I want to keep the habit alive so it can at least attempt a...

Hello. Happy Easter. 🐣 Well, that’s a quarter of 2026 already gone. Have you? Did you? Could you? Same. Thrice gym, albeit on a weird compressed Tuesday–Thursday schedule thanks to sleepless nights at the beginning of the workweek and a bank holiday at the end of it. I stopped getting up at 5:30am to go to the gym before...

I had the entire week off. Bliss. I spent it taking care of various bits of business and exposing my addled brain to sunshine as much as possible. The weather was in general worse than last week but it still had its moments. On Wednesday I’d intended to ride to Tooting to visit Next Door Baker but it turned cold, windy and even...

Beautiful spring weather this week. I took Thursday and Friday off work and went out in the sunshine instead. On Thursday I had a sunny ride to Hackney Central and ate lunch at Black Cat. On Friday I popped out for a morning coffee with Marina, then my home broadband died so I cycled to Cambridge Heath for lunch at...

Three gyms. Prawn cracker on the gym stairs. A man reading a paper book, two-handed, on the treadmill. Three and a bit hours of Shroud left. On Monday I braved the Northern line and met Chris L in Kings X for AF beers — including my first ever Radler, which is not an experience that I can see catching on, but neither is it one which I...

It’s rainy and grey outside, thinning out the fair-weather cyclists, but brightening and warming a little nonetheless. There have been some good sunsets. I had to open a window one (1) day this week. Three gym visits. Shroud is becoming a slog, just one weird alien after another with no real narrative momentum. I’m past the halfway...

Happy March. Come on, spring. 🌱 Gym: three. Shroud is plodding along, sometimes literally. It’s strongly reminiscent of Children of Ruin in certain aspects. It’s passing the time but I’m not finding it especially gripping. There are so many more bikes on the road now that the weather’s slightly nicer and the days slightly...

Wassup. Three gyms. Chicken bones on the gym stairs. It’s actually quite helpful to have bullied myself into this Monday/Wednesday/Friday pattern because it’s eliminated any need to make a decision when I wake up groggy at 5:30am. Shroud is intriguing so far, although as always I’m having to push through the discomfort of...

More rain, more daylight. Saw a nice rainbow from the office. Serenity now. Three gyms as per. I finished Revelation Space. It was entertaining after a slow start, and the story’s scope became gratifyingly epic towards the end even as its mechanics went a bit off the rails. (██ █████ ██ aren’t enough to explain why everyone...

A rainy week with a little more daytime. Stress levels holding steady, but with some light on the horizon. Three times at the gym. Two and a half hours of Revelation Space remain, which (to your relief) means I’ll finish it next week. I saw my first Waymo on the ride to work. A grim-faced man sat in the driver’s seat, hands...

Hello February. Another week of work leaving no energy for much else. I hope for a future in which my job ceases to be an exhausting zero-sum battle and settles into a calm, methodical drumbeat of productivity. It’s unclear how and when that transition will occur, and yet… I hope. It is, however, clearly getting lighter...

Last full week of January. Sunrise is creeping towards 7am, sunset towards 5pm. We’re going to make it, for now. Gym thrice. Seven hours of Revelation Space remain. I got my £113 back! Yesterday I considered popping to Mildreds for brunch, but a) their Dalston location has disappeared from their site with no...

A busy but largely unstressful week. It’s already getting appreciably lighter in the mornings, orange buildings rising through a clear blue sky. Three gyms. I’m enjoying the escalating pace of Revelation Space even though it’s taking me forever to get through it. Back in November I started paying for Audible again on a...

Hello. I’m still writing 2025 on my cheques. Seriously though: almost all the dates I write are in ISO 8601 format, so the muscle memory for immediately typing 2025- is strong. At least with dd/mm/yyyy (or, god forbid, mm/dd/yyyy) your brain gets a fraction of a second to warm up before having to pick a year. It’s become cold...

Happy new year! 🥂 I had, for the most part, a calm and restful week. The car rental people incorrectly charged me £113 for returning the car late, despite their inability to accept the car at the agreed time at their new location, but I’m hopeful that’ll sort itself out now that I’ve told them. Otherwise: no stress. The...

Where did 2025 go? The year passed in a bit of a blur. In my last yearnotes I said I wanted to avoid burning out and keep my job in perspective. I think I did avoid burnout, just about, but work has still been stressful and all-consuming in a way that makes it hard to remember what else I’ve done with the time. I’d hoped...

Happy Twixmas. I booked my Christmas rental car three months ago so it’d all be sorted by the time I visited my parents in December. The main reason for doing it so far in advance was to make sure I could get a car from the rental place that’s a ten-minute walk away so it would be easy to collect and return. Unfortunately that...

Welcome to the shortest day. Hang in there. More cycling than usual this week (35 km) but only two gym visits. I don’t have a good excuse; I’m just strung out by various obligations and it’s the most I could summon the energy for. I hope January will be quieter so I can get back into the rhythm. A character in Revelation Space...

Hello. On Thursday afternoon I started feeling grotty so I stumbled home from the office and missed the Christmas party. I spent Friday in bed and had to bail on meeting Joe at the pub. I’m a little better today and it seems likely I’ll be well enough to go back to work tomorrow, which is what life is all about. I don’t...

Monday, Wednesday, Friday at the gym. Isn’t it amazing what humans can achieve when we put our minds to it. I finished Piranesi. It’s basically perfect. I found the prose so captivating that I didn’t really mind what happened, but the story’s great too. I’m sad it’s over and I’ll definitely want to read it again. I enjoyed it so...

We made it through November. Well done everyone. I was exhausted on the train home last Sunday and needed some respite from the external world. I pulled up the hood of my jacket and tightened the drawstrings to cover my eyes so I could take a nap. After I woke up, the vision in my right eye was blurry and I had a moment of drowsy panic...

A better week, with a fair bit of sorting out. Still pointlessly stressful but it would’ve got worse if I hadn’t put my foot down. I think I’m making progress. Some kind people got in touch to be encouraging or check I’m okay. Thank you. Three gyms. One morning it was -1 °C outside so I’ve had to start wearing a coat for the...

It’s getting darker and wetter outside. Three times at the gym in the dark and wet. Shit week but I had half a slice of Ole & Steen social on Thursday so that perked me up. I can feel I’m getting close to burning out for completely avoidable reasons. I’ve been tiptoeing around it for months but my mission for next...

A busy week at work, therefore not much to report here. Three times at the gym. I’ve stopped the backsliding but not yet reversed it. Stress means snacks. On Thursday I had dinner with Murray at Wahaca. Their food’s not particularly special but they do have a separate vegan menu so that’s good enough for me. My roasted...

It’s November now. The heating only went on for about half an hour, but that’s still putting the heating on. Three gyms. Six hours of Project Hail Mary left. The anxiety ratchet only goes in one direction, and it clicked up another couple of notches this week. I hope one day it’ll release and I’ll be able to relax by...

It’s getting pleasantly cold outside. No heating yet. 🍂 My notes say “I love this time of year” but I already mentioned that so I won’t bang on about it. Seven times at the gym. I did not, in fact, get a grip; I just keep waking up early and I’d rather spend that time mindlessly exercising than lie awake fretting. I...

Back to work, because this is how we’ve collectively decided to best spend the impossible gift of life, apparently. It’s been a stressful week so I’ve comfort-eaten a lot of junk to make myself feel better, which makes me feel worse. I went to the gym four times to try to offset it but it doesn’t really work that way. I’ll try getting a...

Last year I booked the first full week of October off work, then cancelled it at the last minute because I felt like I had too much on my plate to step away for that long. This year I booked it off again, and if anything my plate is fuller this time, but crucially I made a conscious effort not to care more than anyone else for no reason, so I...

It’s October. Love it. Bought a pumpkin today. Gym? Three. The beeping continued throughout Sunday night and I started to question my grasp of reality, like a man in a film taking place in a universe where the laws of nature are clearly different from ours but none of his beliefs or decisions take that into account. ...

These are my three hundredth weeknotes. I can’t help but feel a twinge of pride at my own unbidden tenacity even though I’m still unsure when to celebrate the round numbers. I suppose the best news is that I’ve decisively narrowed Alice’s lead from 53% to 23%. I reckon I’ll catch her at this rate. On the other hand it seems unlikely I’m...

I love this time of year as it cools down and the nights start drawing in. I’ll be grumpy once it’s dark all the time, but for now: perfect. Last week the roads were rammed and chaotic because of the tube strike, and the increased difficulty of basic manoeuvres made everyone more aggro than usual. This week it seemed to go back to...

London became cold and rainy this week. I like it so far. On Friday there were rainbows behind the Gherkin. I’m getting tendon pain in my left wrist. I’ve put it in a splint and started making a conscious effort to type less (and relax more?) to give it (and me?) a break. Three times at the gym. In May 2024 I bought...

Autumn’s on its way. I made my first baked potato of the season, with baked beans and hot sauce. Food of the gods. Four gym visits. No sooner had I said “I can stop losing weight now” than I took my eye off the ball and immediately started gaining it again, so the struggle continues. Why can’t I just have a normal, stable body mass like...

That was August then. Monday was a bank holiday. Glorious. The pendulum swung to the other extreme and I spent the four-day week working from home like a pampered sultan. It was luxurious but I can feel the cabin fever encroaching at the edges of my mind so I’m looking forward to the cognitive reset of seeing my officemates in...

Hello! An antipodean-friendly early edition to welcome Tim. It was a long, tiring week which stretched my patience to its biological limit. But there was some good stuff too. Thrice gym despite spending all five weekdays at the office. Occasionally I can tell that sleep would benefit me more than exercise, but once I’ve...

I think — I hope — that today will be the last warm day of summer. I’ve had enough of being sweaty and angry for one year. I did have a nice sunny ride to Black Cat for lunch though. Five gym visits. Five! I watched Sinners. It’s clearly a good film: fun, inventive and impressively executed, especially its music and visual...

Busy at work all week. A peaceful, sunny weekend in south London. Nothing else to report. Another three times at the gym. I suppose I’ve found my level. I hit my target weight at last. The mornings are already getting darker and the sun’s no longer visible when I get up. I tried to play the latest batch of Astro Bot...

Still very busy and working long hours to drop fewer balls than I otherwise would. I already need another break. Three weeks til the summer bank holiday. Three gyms. Slowly, slowly, nearly there. I’m listening to audiobooks at the gym a bit less often because I need the thinking time, but I’m making occasional progress. I’d...

Very busy this week, but getting things done. It’s cooled down outside and I’m grateful. I had a lazy start to the week but made it to the gym on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday before a lazy weekend. Everywhere’s so quiet on Fridays. I went to a tech meetup in Shoreditch for the first time in many years. The talks...

Back to work. Instead of wfh on Monday I went into the office to escape the heat and spent the day alone, easing back into my unread messages. The punishing emotional journey of reading both “Bank Holiday (N Ireland)” this week and “Summer Bank Holiday (Scotland)” for three weeks hence pushed me over the edge and I finally deactivated...

I spent the week in Belgium: two nights in Antwerp, two in Bruges. I wanted a less hot and stressful break than last summer, and this one succeeded on both counts. Travelling by train — Eurostar to Lille, trains to Antwerp, Bruges and Brussels, then Eurostar home again — made the journey feel like part of the holiday instead of...

At the start of the week it became hard to sleep for several nights in a row when it got way too warm for comfort. I came close to busting out the aircon on Tuesday night so I could get some badly-needed rest, but if there’s one thing I know how to do it’s make my life more difficult for no reason, so I resisted the temptation and sweated in the...

Well, that’s the first half of 2025 done with. Did you smash all your targets? Same. Since the solstice on 21 June the sun hasn’t set until 21:21 every night and the evening light has felt magical. It rained on Tuesday and became cooler for most of the week until it started warming back up yesterday. Next week’s going to be boiling...

The brand guidelines oblige me to mention it’s hot. It was 30 °C on Thursday and reached 34 °C yesterday. I am boiling and I don’t like it. Gym visits: three. The heat scuppered me for most of the week but then weeknotes scared me straight and I got off my arse on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. The system sort of works. Work...

Hello. It’s been mostly bright and cool, except for Friday, when it was 28 °C. No thanks. Gym: three times. I’ve comprehensively stopped losing any weight. That either means I can chill out and stop exercising, or I have to maintain this sorry grind forever to prevent myself backsliding. I have my suspicions. Yesterday I went...

Hello. I’m pooped. Three visits to the gym. I know nobody’s interested in this information but I find the mock accountability a useful motivator. On Wednesday I paid my first visit to the new Shep for breakfast with friends. It’s a weird feeling: same physical space, same chip garnish, most of the same company, and yet...

It’s sunny and warm. I baked a couple of loaves this morning with the windows open. 🍞☀️ Another extremely welcome four-day week. Nearly three months until the next one, although I’ll take a week off in the middle. Work’s hard work. Four times at the gym. In May I lost about a kilo and a half, versus the four-ish...

Hello! Busy at work, with not much else to report after last weekend’s exertions. Another three gym visits. Making a tiny bit of progress again. Last night I cycled back to Roz & James’s place for a games night with them and Murray. I of course don’t know how to play any games and needed the dreaded rules dump, but after that...

The week began with an unbelievable thunderstorm. It rained harder and faster than I’ve ever seen here. Scary. Despite draining at its usual impressive rate, the gutter couldn’t cope and began to overflow. Some men had to come round and seal it somehow to prevent my downstairs neighbours getting their outside wall drenched if this ever...

Hello. It’s beautifully sunny and comfortably warm in London. Everything feels easier when it’s like this. 🚴🏻‍♂️☀️ Monday’s bank holiday — only two weeks after Easter Monday — was a balm for the soul. And we only have to wait two more weeks for the next one! As long as this continues I’m going to be absolutely fine. I...

It’s been a beautiful spring week, reaching 28 °C on Thursday. The fair-weather cyclists are already out in force on my commute. I made it to the gym every weekday and I’m pleased about that. In the interests of balance I’m enjoying a sunny, breezy weekend of doing nothing. I’m sleeping properly again. Phew. I’m...

Hello! My sleep’s slowly improving, so I’ve been able to properly return to the gym, with four visits this week. I’ll have lost another four-ish kilograms in April, heading for twelve-ish overall since the beginning of February. I feel immeasurably better for it. A third of the way through the year and still no booze, for no...

Happy Easter to pagans only. 🐣 I love the springtime. I’ve had several sunny bike rides where I’ve barely needed a jacket. It’s bright but still cool, and now my commute is always in full daylight. I’m absolutely loving the four-day weekend. I’ve long since recovered from norovirus and the subsequent cough, but a frustrating...

I didn’t puke at all this week, which was brilliant. I’m feeling much better. It’s taken until today to return to full health, slowly easing back into eating normally and trying to shake a persistent cough. Last night I slept properly for the first time and it really helped. No gym yet, mainly because of my chaotic sleep...

Happy new tax year. Despite not visiting the gym at all this week I still managed to maintain my weight loss progress. What’s my secret? Norovirus. I must’ve caught it around lunchtime on Saturday. I’d felt fine all weekend and it wasn’t until halfway through the train journey home on Sunday night that things started to go...

Well, that’s Q1 2025 basically over. How much did you get done? Me too. A whole week off with nothing to do, filled with spring sunshine. I doubt life gets any better than this. Among other pottering, I spent some time on Monday wiping my trusty M2 MacBook Air and installing macOS Sequoia. It’s still a great machine and having...

It’s properly spring. On Tuesday I cycled home from work in daylight for the first time this year. ☀️ Thursday was the spring equinox and my first day off. It was sunny and 18 °C so I went for a quick ride in a T-shirt, visiting Broadway Market and Homerton for coffee, stopping off to lie in the sunshine in London Fields....

Last Sunday I made triple quantities of preserved lemon and chickpea stew, another #amwte classic. I’ve been eating it for lunch and the occasional dinner all week and it’s been delightful. Arguably it’s a bit too autumnal for March but it’s still cold outside and I expect a more seasonal dish would survive less well in the fridge for a...

The afternoon sun’s streaming through the open windows. We’re well into meteorological spring, if not yet astronomical. 🌱 Four times at the gym. Over time I hope to approach the contentious optimum of three and a half visits per week. I made a huge pot of ratatouille last Sunday and ate it for lunch all week. Easy, cheap and...

March! The weather was miserable early in the week but it’s given way to a clear, sunny weekend. It’s light outside in the mornings. Spring’s on the way. Three more visits to the gym. I lost about 4kg in February, which isn’t an amazing pace but a good start if I’m able to maintain it for another couple of months. ...

Last Sunday I cocked up my evening batch cook so comprehensively that I thought I was going to have to throw it away. In the end it did produce something edible, albeit far more portions than I’d intended. So I’ve been eating dal for lunch & dinner all week which is delicious but does get a bit samey. Note to future self: as the recipe says,...

Hi. Another 15 years to go until Love Tuesday. Hang in there. It’s more than two weeks away, but I must remember to make those sourdough pancakes again. Conversely, I made it to the gym four times this week and it’s having the desired effect on my eating habits. No booze yet either. I continue to feel slightly...

At long last I made it to the gym before work on Monday, then twice again later in the week. I already feel slightly better for it and have lost a tiny amount of weight. It’s not much but it’s a start. As always, the main benefit of exercise is not the calories burned but the stubborn determination to eat carefully all day for fear of...

Hello. Happy Groundhog Day. I had a good Monday at work, getting past another project milestone with the team. Making progress is more difficult than necessary but we’re doing okay. On Thursday I had dinner at Mildreds with Marina & Sofía. I’ve been to Mildreds so many times that it’s hard to say whether I like it. I don’t...

Good afternoon. Obviously I’ve voted for yourself. On Monday night I met Anne, Russell & friends at the pub to ward off the imaginary Blue Monday. It was good to see some friendly faces, and then to go home before I got too sleepy. It’s slowly but surely getting lighter in the mornings and evenings. It’s almost — but crucially...

The lonesome foghorn blows. Some small wins at work this week, which I will take. I’m getting more sleep but have yet to brave the gym. Alice injured her foot last Sunday, immediately and rudely defying my wishes. Get well soon Alice. In the interests of Getting Out More, I went to DIY Magazine’s Hello 2025...

Hello. Everything’s going to be great. It’s been −4 °C this weekend. I record this to remind Summer Me that even though putting the heating on seems unthinkable in the sweltering hell of July, it’s essential in January. Likewise the prospect of opening the window at the moment is ridiculous but I know I’ll be doing it at every...

Happy new year! On a global scale I don’t think it’s likely to go very well but I hope your corner of it is fine. 2025 = 45². It’s been 89 years since the last square-numbered year and it’ll be 91 years until the next one. We’re still just about within the window where it’s possible for a person to live long enough to experience two...

Another year done, and that makes exactly five years of weeknotes. Now would be the perfect time to stop if I knew what was good for me. Onward. Hyperlocally it’s been a pretty good year. By which I mean: nothing seriously bad happened to me, I’ve not had any major health problems, my no-longer-new job is properly underway, and life is...

Oh, hello, I didn’t see you there. This no man’s land between Christmas and the new year is when I’m at maximum risk of not even realising it’s Sunday and that I need to write weeknotes. We’re already teetering on the brink of the new year but, crucially for yearnotes purposes, we’re not there yet. Until then? This. ...

I’ve been relaxing at home by mostly doing nothing this week, which has been absolutely brilliant. I can now see I’d underestimated how stressed I was. On Monday I streamed the Astro Bot: Winter Wonder DLC. I realised too late that this game (and certainly this level) aren’t really conducive to streaming because there’s not much to...

I just about coasted past the finish line this week. At one point my brain was so sluggish that I considered taking a sick day, but instead I showed up and only got a small amount done. Better than nothing, maybe. On Monday night I saw Ballet Shoes at the National Theatre as a Christmassy treat. It was classy, cosy, sweet and...

I’m running on fumes a bit. One more week til my Christmas break. Last Sunday I made triple quantities of Ruby Tandoh’s hot and sour red lentil soup to stock my fridge with meals. It’s one of my favourite recipes ever because it’s so simple to make — although producing 3¾ litres of boiling water is easier said than done — yet so...

Wotcha. It’s December. That can’t be right. At the moment I feel like I’m playing chicken with the utter dearth of stuff I have to write about every week. I spend most of my time working and thinking about work and I can’t cover work here. That makes it difficult to summarise my week in any meaningful way. Today, at least, I...

Hello. It’s cold and it snowed on Tuesday. Heating’s on. I remain incredibly busy, sort of stretched, like non-dairy spread that has been scraped over too much sourdough. Next week is Thanksgiving in the US which hopefully means it’ll be a slightly easier one. On Thursday I met Chris for beers near Old Street. The...

On Friday, out of nowhere, I got a hankering for Marmite. Yesterday I bought and ate quite a lot of Marmite. Today I don’t want to ever eat Marmite again. I don’t know what it means. I now have a cellular connection on my watch and I’ve been trying to get some use out of it by occasionally leaving the house without my phone. So far...

Glad I bought that whisky. Life in the 21st century is one fucking disaster after another isn’t it? Maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic coming from someone who isn’t currently being displaced, deported or dehumanised, but wow, things are still getting a bit too end-timesy for comfort. On Tuesday night I repeated my insomniac routine...

Hello! New month new you. Or is it? One final push got me over the hump of a project milestone at work. The period since I began writing worknotes is the hardest I’ve ever worked, I think, so it’ll be nice to ease off a bit before the next deadline begins to loom. This weekend I ordered, received and drank some...

Work work work work work work. I woke up unusually early this morning and lay there in the dark trying to understand why. Am I anxious about something without realising it? am I ill? am I cold? am I hungry? am I late? It wasn’t until after coffee that I remembered the clocks changed overnight. I met Leo & Murray for lunch on...

Wow, week 250‽ Oh, wait, never mind. It’s raining. We have one week of British Summer Time and two weeks of Pacific Daylight Time remaining. I had to refer to last year to remind myself what the hell is happening with the timings of all my meetings. And so that means: tomstu.art/daylight. Last October I...

The weather’s getting colder, I’m getting sleepier. The weekdays are, if anything, becoming busier, dense with technical challenges and fraught conversations. I should take some time off; maybe next month. I had one of the top… five?… best burritos of my life for dinner at Club Mexicana on Thursday, followed by waffles & ice cream at...

At the risk of becoming a bit repetitive: how can it be October already? It’s definitely getting darker outside. I’ve eaten several baked potatoes. I already have one (1) pumpkin. 🎃 MORE ON BEEPS: when I mentioned the melodious beep of my new washer dryer, Denise expressed… disappointment? surprise? relief? — to characterise...

It’s been properly raining for the first time in ages. Colder days, darker evenings, leaves scattered across the grass. It was a very busy week at work with three teammates visiting simultaneously, and therefore many more face-to-face conversations, pairing sessions and group meals than usual. I found it incredibly productive and...

Hello. Yesterday was probably the last day of the warm and sunny weather, and today it’s turned cooler and rainy for the coming week. Right now I love it. Ask me again in a month. Thank you to the several readers who sent advice on which washer dryer to buy. Unfortunately most of the specific suggestions were ruled out by my need for an...

The nights have begun suddenly and obviously to draw in. It’s cool and crisp and sunny. As I apparently insist upon saying every flipping year, autumn’s here and I love it. 🍂 I caught a cold. Other than a bit of sneezing and sniffling it hasn’t been too bad, although I did have to cancel some social plans for fear of spreading it...

I was woken by a thunderstorm during the night. Nice and cool today. I FORGOT TO MENTION THAT I: went to see my parents last weekend. It was a nice peaceful train ride down to the coast and back. On the return journey I pulled my hood up, stuck on some white noise and dozed contentedly all the way to London Bridge. I FORGOT TO...

Hello September. It’s slowly, slowly cooling down. Most of the packaging has now left my flat. Only a few large chunks of expanded polystyrene remain. The communal waste & recycling bins aren’t large enough for me to get rid of everything at once without inconveniencing my neighbours. I initially threw about half of it out and lived...

A lazy weekend of downtime after wrapping up several weeks of extremely intense work. Yesterday it rained — gutter still drains! — and today there’s sunshine and a cool breeze blowing through my flat. This weekend will be even lazier than usual because of the bank holiday tomorrow. I now habitually think of this as the last bank holiday...

Nothing’s happened this week really. Only work. All five days in the office to help welcome my new teammate, who’s settling in well. I’m looking forward to having another London office buddy for the foreseeable; it makes a huge difference to my mood when I get to see friendly faces in person. Speaking of which, I had dinner...

Frazzled, frazzled. Too much to do and nowhere near enough time to do it. I’ve been burning the candle at both ends this week and I can really feel it. I hope I can get back to normal soon. I smugly made it to the gym on Monday but then immediately broke my August streak on Wednesday because I was snowed under with other stuff. That’s...

Another week of uncomfortably high temperatures. I worked alone in the office on Monday just to have some air conditioning. It was too cold in there but that’s easier to deal with than the heat. On Monday night I made a delicious chopped salad from a Meera Sodha recipe and it fed me all week. (Doesn’t 120ml of olive oil seem like way...

A low-energy week, busy and occasionally dispiriting, yet we soldier onward. I definitely underestimated the impact of COVID. I now realise that a negative test result doesn’t mean I’m magically healthy again. Everything is taking more exertion than usual and I haven’t been able to summon the energy to go back to the gym even once. I’m...

What I most dislike about being ill is the deadening sensation of waiting for time to pass. There’s nothing useful you can do, just metabolise while the tiny machines in your bloodstream busy themselves with the real work, not needing your input. My positive COVID result last Sunday came from a test kit more than a year past its expiry...

I spent the week in Florence. Thus: ciao. The journey to Italy was relatively easy because it turns out that flying from London City Airport is convenient. Unfortunately the plane was populated mainly by coughers & sneezers; that’s foreshadowing. Florence reached 37 °C which is too hot. In retaliation I set the hotel air con...

Hello. First weeknotes under a Labour government. Yes, the results of the UK general election provide plenty to worry about, but I’ll gladly take the win. It’s a relief to no longer have the Tories in government, and I’m delighted to be entirely rid of famed oxygen thieves Liz Truss, Penny Mordaunt, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Gillian Keegan,...

Hello you, goodbye Q2. ▮▮▮▮▮▮▯▯▯▯▯▯ 50%. It got hot during the week but it’s a pleasingly cool 19 °C today, the light drizzle precipitating a medium petrichor waft. I’ve made it to the end of June while maintaining the Monday, Wednesday, Friday & Sunday gym routine, which feels like a achievement for someone so inherently...

It is, regrettably, getting warmer. The wonky fan script is back online. I voted. Despite the act being somewhat symbolic I remain enthusiastic about playing my tiny part in Torygeddon. I got a papercut on my lip while licking the flap of the postal vote envelope. More insidious voter suppression tactics from the...

I’m loving how cool it is at the moment even though everyone else in Britain is complaining about it. This time last year was a sweaty nightmare and I’m relieved to not be experiencing it again. Yet. Paul avariciously incepted me into treating myself to a Raspberry Pi 5 as a replacement for my trusty-yet-ageing Pi 400. It’s very nice. I...

GOOD NEWS: I managed seven consecutive days of 6am-ish trips to the gym before taking a break at the weekend to ride my bike instead. In any case I’m consistently closing my rings™ and that feels good. My foot’s holding up fine so far. BAD NEWS: I picked a busy time to adopt a fitness routine. Getting up early every day without...

June again somehow. When will it all end? An unusually busy week, although the Monday bank holiday was so pleasant and relaxing that I don’t really remember it. I don’t think I did much. I went to some leaving drinks with my team on Wednesday, but that’s about it for socialising. Oh, but! Earlier on Wednesday a...

It’s getting summery in London. At least, it’s getting how I think summer should be (twenty degrees, warm daylight, cool breeze) rather than what it’ll actually be like (thirty-five degrees, baking sun, men shouting). I’m enjoying it while it lasts. For example, on Monday I took the opportunity to wander over to Spitalfields with my...

Windows open every day. The war on tiny flies recommences right on schedule. Last year I spent a dangerous proportion of my waking life thinking about insects. This year, in an attempt to maintain a tenuous grip on reality, I’ve bought a mains-powered bug zapper which sits in the middle of the room and occasionally makes an alarming...

More beautiful sunny weather. Yesterday morning I rode from Hackney to Clapton — a brief final stop at Black Cat to collect merch — to Peckham, cool breeze and sunshine all the way. Then, incongruously, to a dark kitchen in Bermondsey to buy a vegan doughnut. Mine was crème brûlée flavour and it was pretty good in its own right, not...

Hello there. May the fifth be with you. It’s been properly sunny for the first time this year. I saw sunlight bouncing off a blue building and scattering through a red raspberry. This morning I rode to London Fields, sat on the grass and ate a bagel. The warmer weather brought near-continuous lightning on Wednesday night. In...

It’s raining. I’m enjoying the cool London weather but I’m worried it won’t last. I had a disjointed week without much momentum. I felt suddenly nauseous at work on Thursday and came home to groan in bed all afternoon and most of Friday. I’m basically fine now with only the lingering tail of a headache. I hope this was a random virus...

Back to the hospital on Tuesday afternoon for another foot X-ray. The consultant looked at the essentially unchanged scan, then at me, then back at the scan, then back at me, and said “are you vegan?”, which nobody had asked before. So now I’m taking calcium and vitamin D every morning in the hope it’ll encourage the bone to actually...

Hello. While civilisation remains, here are some idle distractions. It’s properly spring. It was twenty degrees yesterday which meant I could go for a bike ride wearing only a T-shirt (and, you know, trousers and that) for the first time this year. It felt good to be out in the sun and cool air, weaving through Shoreditch’s packs of...

Hello. 222 is a pleasing number isn’t it? It also means we’re a third of the way to weeknotes 666. I’ve struggled to dispel the holiday brain fug and get back into the groove of work. It’s tempting to blame the truncated post-Easter workweek, although I did sleep for twelve hours on Thursday night after feeling grotty all day, so maybe...

Hello from BST. It was dark this morning. I bet this evening’s going to be impressive when the sun sets after half seven. 2024 progress: ▮▮▮▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯ 25%. RIP Q1. How’s your year going? I’m still rubbing my eyes and blinking. I had a lazy week off while it rained outside. I more or less did nothing, although I did manage to...

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...

A dispiriting week at work, as you do. I’m keeping my chin up. Unrelatedly, on Thursday I gave a brief internal talk about calculating π with Git, to a largely bemused reception. It’s fair to say it didn’t do numbers on the socials either. This may indicate that my brand of “content” has finally become too niche for anyone to enjoy,...

Happy Sunday morning. In 2009 I started my own limited company and spent a few years doing consultancy work through it. Then I got myself a real job in 2016, and the company’s since lain dormant while money drains out of it into the accountants and administrators who keep it on life support. Several times a year I get stressed about...

February overstayed its welcome a bit didn’t it? February. February. I love this cold, clear, proto-spring weather. The sky’s been very blue. GET OUT: On Monday I had lunch with Phil at Cook Daily. The setup was less chaotic than last time and I enjoyed the food more because I chose a rice dish instead of noodles, avoiding the...

Windows open. ☀️ For the second week running I got out of the house a little bit more than not at all. I went for beers and burgers with my teammates on Thursday night, and met James for lunchtime chat and phở on Friday. I’m calling that a success. Oh, and with all the mathematical pancake excitement I forgot to mention that I...

Some beautiful weather this week: clear, sunny, crisp, blue. It’s no longer dark when I wake up! I bought a bunch of daffodils. Project Get Out More achieved medium success: I met Denis for coffee, and I also went to LRUG. I’d intended to be more sociable than that, but I walked around too much and had to dial it...

I’ve spent all week in a daze from jet lag. Embarrassing. For the first time ever I did manage to sleep for almost the entire flight home, but obviously I still lost eight hours and it’s taken me longer than usual to pay back the sleep debt of having to wake up in time for work every morning. Monday was a total write-off and the rest of...

I spent the week in sunny, rainy Cupertino. Going all the way to California with a broken foot sounds like it should be difficult, but the privileged combination of taxis, airport assistance, lie-flat seating and a borrowed knee scooter made it easier than getting around at home. The trip was eye-opening in many respects. The...

Morning! It’s been a very busy week. I chose to hobble onto the bus and into the office for a team meeting rather than miss out. The black boot of shame made the journey tolerable and after two weeks stuck at home it’s a relief that I can get around when I need to. My foot’s slowly healing. It still hurts but the...

I took a taxi to see a foot doctor on Wednesday morning. The administrative part of that visit was a comedy of errors. The person on the front desk told me to take the lift to the fifth floor, where I had to hobble down a long hallway to reach another reception, whose receptionist said my appointment was actually on the fourth floor. So...

On Friday evening I hopped up onto the bed for two seconds to reach something. As I stepped back down I landed awkwardly and felt my ankle crunch into a sickening position beneath the full weight of my body. The all-consuming, eye-watering pain subsided after a couple of minutes and I was left with a swollen foot that I couldn’t walk on. ...

Happy new year! Twixmas passed in a haze of tissues and Lemsip. I was in principle invited to a New Year’s Eve party for the first time in… years? my life?… but didn’t feel well enough to go. I had one day back at work, felt worse and had to pull a sickie to end the week. 🤧 Did you know that Lemsip is paracetamol +...

And we’re back. This year was much better than last year. My life feels more stable and that’s what I need at the moment. I don’t have any grand plans or big ambitions, which is fine; I just want to make good things and enjoy my time. I’m grateful I didn’t have any real health problems to deal with. I’ve had a few aches and...

A new unnecessary problem I’ve invented for myself: do weeknotes or yearnotes come first when the week and the year finish on the same day? Weeknotes first makes sense, I think. The week is contained within the year and we can all agree it’s important to close the parentheses in the correct order. This is also the first time I’ve...

Well done gang! We made it through the solstice and out the other side. Happy Christmas Eve. And what could be more festive than pointlessly maintaining a strict weeknotes schedule? Nothing. 🎄 I’m visiting my parents. I didn’t bother getting a tree at home because I knew I’d be spending Christmas with them, but this year they...

This time of year’s a bit exhausting isn’t it? Some overseas teammates were visiting all week. It’s always refreshing to have technical conversations in person and generally spend time together outside of the context of a video meeting. It’s also more tiring than the usual routine of mostly typing. On Wednesday I met Aleks &...

I haven’t hung any Christmas decorations yet. In fact, the Halloween bats are still up. I’m going to see if I can style it out by saying they’re Christmas bats. I set aside Tuesday evening to watch the new Hbomberguy video about plagiarism. It’s long but brilliant and well worth your time. On Thursday I went to a festive...

Apparently it’s December? Snow and -1 °C outside broke my resolve: heating on. On Tuesday I met Alice for a coffee at what used to be Bulldog Edition inside what used to be Ace Hotel. I used to see her in London more frequently so it’s a rare treat to do it now. Aren’t things different these days? Remember the past? ...

A quiet and surreal week of working from home while the Americans are away for Thanksgiving. My back’s better. It’s cold in my flat but the heating’s not on yet. Over the weekend I took a train down to the coast to see my parents, then a rail replacement bus partway home, watching brake lights through fogged...

Hello! Welcome to your quotidian yet reliable update. My back is slowly returning to normal. Gym attendance has been dismal so let’s not talk about that. I had an extremely long day on Thursday, culiminating in beyond-midnight beers with Joe in the nostalgic ambience of The Reliance. The evening was curative for the soul but...

This week in socialising: saw nobody, did nothing. The sun basically sets at 4pm. Conversely, I’m continuing to solve a lot of variant sudoku (e.g. finished the November pack) and am really enjoying it. I’m definitely learning. London’s getting chilly. I love pulling on a knitted hat and feeling the air sting my cheeks as I...

Whoa! Exactly two hundred weeknotes?! Amazing!! 💯💯 I went to a new doctor for a routine physical exam. The receptionist asked to see some ID, which I didn’t have with me because I wasn’t buying a four-pack of Stella in 1998. Even after he de-escalated to “anything with your name on it” I still couldn’t help, no matter how many times I...

Another busy and intermittently stressful week. I’m low on energy at the moment and feeling a bit short-tempered and irritable. Am I ill? Tired? Dehydrated? I don’t really know. I’m going to try to exercise, sleep and drink lots of water to see if I can snap out of it. In fact I joined a different, better gym and have gone...

A busy week at work, so not much else besides. No energy for reading fiction. Oops. NOVELTY CORNER: I felt very cold a few times and got properly drenched during my morning ride on Thursday. 🌧️ Later on Thursday I went on a boat and got a good view of a straw bale hanging from the Millennium Bridge. ...

A whole week off work, a few days of which were gloriously brisk with bright blue skies, reddening my cheeks and ears as I cycled. As close to perfect as I can imagine. What else? Some walks in the sunshine to nowhere in particular, a few coffees & beers & meals out, a bit of reading & watching, a lot of sleeping. I’m really good at...

Hello from the waning days of a habitable planet. It’s 25 degrees outside. I collected my glasses and they’re great. I can read okay without them but it’s way easier with them on, and now I can clearly see pin-sharp text in the evening without having to make the lights brighter. It feels like magic. In fact it’s a little alarming...

Hello October! Best month. 🎃 On Wednesday I went back to the optician (Alice said “nestled deep in the socket of Big Eye” 🤢) and sweated like Blathers for twenty minutes while he made me try on a succession of different frames, all of which, yeah, looked like glasses. I eventually made a baseless decision out of sheer exasperation so...

Quiet week, basically. Yes, I did go for an eye test. It revealed I have astigmatism and would benefit from wearing glasses to correct it. At least, that’s what the optician said, but it’s exactly what he would say, isn’t it, nestled deep in the pocket of Big Eye. The optician was near the Barbican. Is it Phil’s former...

It’s finally, undeniably autumn. There’s already a thick carpet of brown leaves in the park. I felt a bit cold at one point. There were a couple of brief power cuts this week, and each time I lost the ability to control my IKEA lights via HomeKit, presumably because the various parts of the system came back online in an unhelpful order....

Hot, humid, unpleasant. I can’t do anything when it’s this warm. I lie motionless, gently steaming like a wet bulb, and wait for it to be over. 🫠 On Wednesday I did manage to meet Reema for dinner in an air-conditioned restaurant that served frozen margaritas, so that was pretty great. I’ve been meaning to give Alan Wake...

Right, but seriously though, how can it be September? On Monday the biblical rain of the previous week abated and I had a cool sunny bank holiday bike ride across the river and back. The leaves on the trees were already turning brown. 🍂 My physical health is below maximum at the moment. The cough still lingers and, despite...

Several readers asked why I expect people on TV to be left-handed. It’s a reasonable question; presumably the majority of actors are right-handed just like the general population. All I know is that I notice it a lot when I’m watching TV and find it disconcerting, to the extent that I now anticipate it as a way of cushioning the psychological...

The worst of the cold symptoms cleared up quickly. The long tail was a lingering cough which, while relatively benign, did stop me from sleeping at night, and that’s not how you want the night to pan out, you know, ideally. So the week was basically a write-off. I lay around on the sofa watching telly (see below) and trying to Lemsip–Jakemans...

I’ve been ill for the last few days, stuck in bed with a cough and aching muscles. The COVID test is negative so I suppose it’s just a cold. Fortunately it’s mild and I’m on the mend. NO CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP CORNER: I’ve gone back to daily gym visits after an idle couple of months. That meant I had to power through a humiliating...

August…‽ The continuing drizzle and cool breezes come as a miraculous, anomalous relief after the last few boiling-hot summers and before the many boiling-hot summers to come. I haven’t plugged in the air conditioner at all this year. On Monday I returned to the Everyman and met Aleks for Barbie. It managed to pull off being...

Cool, breezy and rainy this week. A perfect planet while it lasts. On Thursday afternoon I went to my local brewery’s taproom for a solo pint and some light typing. It felt a bit naughty but completely blissful. At one point I thought I’d made good progress on my WebAssembly interpreter by implementing the final few...

A good week: various administrative successes and plenty of time spent with friends. A balm for the soul. I met up with Chris on Monday for a therapeutic chat over lunch and a medicinal pint or two, which sorted me right out and got me through most of the week. I baked a couple of decent loaves on Thursday morning and then...

On Monday I braved my local Everyman to see Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Surprisingly, it was great! Of course it’s mainly Tom Cruise sprinting and driving and punching and stuff, but if you can accept that inherent silliness, it’s a visceral, exciting and even occasionally funny film. The widely-publicised bit with a...

July has so far been way less hot than June. I’ve been drenched by rain on my bike twice. I hope it stays like this. I met Tekin for beers on Monday and had to wear a light jacket on the way to the pub. Imagine! Tekin mentioned there’s a second season of The Bear so I started watching the second season of The Bear and...

We’re halfway through 2023. I haven’t done anything yet. Only joking. I literally did some things this week. Ufuk was in town so I had the rare treat of meeting him for beers in De Beauvoir Town on Monday and Tuesday nights like some kind of bon vivant, and I had breakfast with friends in Shoreditch on Thursday when Alice was staying...

On the summer solstice, 21 June, the sun set at 21:21 in London. I’m sweating in thirty-degree heat as I write this. It makes it impossible to do or think anything. 🫠 Tomorrow is meant to be seven degrees cooler so I’m saving all my doing & thinking until then. Sorry about all the weather chat. It’s just really hard to...

Morning! On Monday it finally rained big fat hot rain, generating the elusive mega petrichor waft. After the rain I went to the Royal Festival Hall and saw Warpaint supported by Amie Blu. It was a decent gig despite the large proportion of the audience who enjoy standing up and/or walking around during performances at that...

It’s definitely warm but it hasn’t been as unbearable as I’d feared. The fan helps a lot. Most of my brain is now specialised to the task of spotting tiny flies hiding on walls and windows. If anyone needs that as a service, let me know. The sun’s started staying up until 21:15 as if that’s normal and fine. I must...

It’s a pleasant twenty degrees this weekend. The forecast threatens a nightmarish thirty degrees next weekend. I’ve ordered a fan. I was pleased with myself for catching flies with a handheld vacuum cleaner until I realised I’d created a small plastic box filled with live insects. It’s none of your business what I did with...

London is very sunny but not yet overpoweringly warm thanks to the cool breeze. The parks are bursting with daisies, buttercups, dandelions and freshly cut grass; in the skies, swifts and swallows dart about after insects. Glorious spring weather means much more time cycling around town. I usually cross the river at Southwark Bridge...

It’s warm enough to need the windows open, and the cooler air brings the wildlife in with it. During the afternoon my flat is toured by flies tracing a wonky star polygon in the middle of each room. They are all my enemies but they’ve got the numbers. The other thing that comes in is sound. This week I learned that the awful busker on...

It was May bank holiday two of three on Monday. This time it was grey outside so I just had a big sleep. I spent Wednesday night shouting in an underground room in Fitzrovia again, this time over dinner with friends of Interesting. I did in fact enjoy myself — it was lovely to see so many familiar and/or friendly faces all at...

It’s getting so light in the evenings now. Apart from the fifteen minutes of biblical hail on Thursday it’s really starting to feel like spring. I finished the first chunk of new work on my WebAssembly interpreter. It turned out to be more involved than expected and at one point I nearly became extremely bogged down because I’d...

Some absolutely perfect weather this week: gentle breeze, warm sun, cool shade. I’m trying to make the most of this brief moment before it becomes sweaty and unpleasant for four months. And so a few nights at the pub! On Tuesday I met Murray at a pub in Earth, London, Islington where a live band were mysteriously playing “gypsy...

Hello! I’m grumpy at the moment and trying not to let it leak out into weeknotes too much, because who wants to read that? I hope this is a passing phase rather than my new personality. On the plus side, we’re well into the upward steep bit where the sun rises much earlier and sets much later from one day to the next, and I’ve...

I didn’t get out much this week. I’ll go to LRUG tomorrow to make up for it. Having given myself permission to hack on my WebAssembly interpreter whenever I want, I’m now having trouble choosing which part to look at first. Maybe it’d be fun to write a parser for the .wasm binary format? Or maybe I’d enjoy simplifying the AST by moving...

Happy Easter! 🐣 I hope you spent yesterday letting the liminality wash over you and today eating nondenominational chocolate products. I’d decided to avoid hot cross buns in a weak attempt to be healthy, but then I saw Phil’s poll and I was like, well, obviously toasted hot cross buns are amazing, then I got the bread mist and one...

Dismal weather (therefore wet bike rides) all week, but today it’s sunny! In London! ☀️ Okay, it was overcast earlier when I went out for mysteriously vegan “chick’n & waffles” at Club Mexicana and I got cold on the walk home, but that was just bad timing. The food was extremely delicious. Yesterday I rented a van and...

Welcome to British Summer Time. A few bad nights’ sleep this week, plus losing an hour to the clocks changing last night, means I’m in a bit of a daze. I happened to be up late anyway so I made a point of watching the clock tick over from 12:59 to 02:00. Small pleasures. The video of my LRUG talk is available if you’re interested in...

I’m tired. One week til the clocks change. I had a great time at Alice, Phil & Russell’s 145th birthday party on Friday. It was a good party with good people and good pencils. The Last of Us concluded its first season with an excellent final episode that got the tone right and didn’t feel rushed. Overall I’m impressed that the...

It snowed! I’ve been busy with work this week so haven’t had much energy for anything else. I’m itching to make progress on my WebAssembly interpreter but I think I have to accept that streaming doesn’t fit into my schedule at the moment. Even when I do have a couple of hours free for it, I’m not in the mood. So it goes. I...

Blimey, February doesn’t last long, does it? Almost fully recovered, again, from a cold. No more colds for a bit please. I couldn’t find the time or energy for streaming this week. I’m a little anxious about the risk of dropping the ball entirely on this project. I often have odd moments when I’m in the mood to hack on the...

A difficult week. A friend is going through a terrible ordeal and I’ve been doing what I can to support her but it’s been hard to concentrate on much else. I managed one stream which was inevitably a bit of an anticlimax after last week’s milestone. I chose to sketch out a rough public API for loading and executing a WebAssembly module...

Sun rising, birds singing, daffodils pushing up. Too early but welcome in the short term. 🌼 I’m enjoying baking again. I try not to think about how much the electricity costs. I shook the cold just in time to give a lightning talk at LRUG about my WebAssembly project. I think it went okay; if nothing else it was nice to...

The days are getting longer, with the distinct feeling that the rate of change is itself increasing. 🌱 I caught my first cold since 2019. Retro! The sore throat and cough were only a very mild inconvenience but enough to stop me streaming and I had to cancel social plans because that’s how The After works. I’m feeling better...

Hello February. It’s not quite starting to feel like spring yet, but on a couple of sunny afternoons this week it was definitely threatening to. Bit soon. Two streams, more enjoyable this time because I made good progress. I worked on tables which aren’t inherently interesting but forced me to shake out lots of details of how...

It was set to be a busy week until I went for a bike ride on Monday and pulled a muscle in my back again. I had to cancel several meetings and spend the rest of the week shuffling around with a theatrically pained expression instead. I’m mostly mended but haven’t been able to ride anywhere yet. Very frustrating. Fortunately I did...

An uphill struggle this week. Two more streams. Not very good. I persevere regardless. Oh, except: this stupid project forces me to understand the WebAssembly specification in greater detail than I would as a casual reader, which in turn confuses me when I can’t make sense of it. Earlier this month I reported that the spec...

After the nosedive of December I’m pulling back hard on the stick and beginning the long climb back to cruising altitude. It’s winter and I haven’t had the heating on for two weeks now. This is in theory financially convenient but otherwise a bit worrying. I went to the January LRUG on Monday, stopping beforehand for beers...

Cliffhanger resolution: after a slow and ominous beginning my sourdough starter bubbled back to life over the course of the week, and this weekend I made my first loaves for a long time. They came out pretty well. I’d forgotten most of the details of breadmaking so I found myself referring back to old weeknotes to jog my memory. That...

Me again. As foretold a year ago, the hellish “consecutive days” prophecy has come to pass. Weeknotes 208 is going to be a killer. Happy new year! 🍾 I’m home from seeing my family for Christmas. Aside from the usual stress it was intermittently relaxing. The most relaxing moment was when I returned my rental car without...

Three full years of weeknotes! I’m as surprised as anyone. Briefly: this has been the worst year of my life. After largely breezing through the worst of the actual pandemic, 2022 was the year when the extended isolation of lockdowns and remote working really hit me; my mental health, my physical health and the world in general seemed to...

First Christmas Day weeknote. Happy Christmas! 🎄 I’ve had a bit of prosecco so you’ll get what you get. I thought I’d have the time and energy to stream this week but I was wrong. My YouTube channel still crept past 200 subscribers so maybe not posting anything is the secret to success. The one thing I’d been missing...

After I hit publish on my weeknotes last Sunday, I went to the window and saw it snowing heavily. It’s strange how quiet the road outside gets when it’s blanketed with snow. It’s since melted into sludge and the noise from the buses and sirens and drunks is back to normal. Work got in the way of streaming this week — rude — and I...

My former TruffleRuby teammate Chris Seaton passed away. Mike’s announcement said all the important things, and the rest has been covered well by Aaron, Justin, Brandon, Benoit, Joel and Denis, so I’m not sure what I can add. Self-indulgent personal recollections? Okay then. Although we ended up working closely together from 2020...

A quiet, busy week. Two streams, taking me past the hundred hour mark. I’m elbow-deep in the abstract syntax parser, trying to build an identifier context so that all the symbolic identifiers are resolved into numeric indexes before runtime. That turned out to be more involved than I expected: to know the index...

Some disappointments and failures this week, so I’ve had to just put on my big boy pants and deal with it. It has of course instantaneously become Christmas and every pub has a Christmas tree in the window. It feels premature but it’s kind of cosy all the same. It’s certainly cold at last. I haven’t had a mince pie yet. I...

Only boring things this week, even by the usual standards. Brace yourself. Two streams. Standard. I spent ten minutes going on about pattern matching. Good progress otherwise: by fixing stack unwinding and implementing a few commonly-used instructions, mainly call_indirect, I got an unusually large number (seven) of...

Another week, another note. That’s how weeknotes work. ✅ Only two streams again, a quantity which is starting to feel less like “shamefully few” and more like “a normal, sustainable amount”. As anticipated, I pulled apart the interpreter to extract an abstract syntax parser so that evaluation doesn’t have to waste effort messing...

A sense of doom pervades. Meanwhile, life continues. I only managed two streams this week between various commitments and general laziness. I’m getting into the details of the WebAssembly language proper. The official test suite forced me to understand that there are essentially two plain text syntaxes for WebAssembly expressions...

Welcome back to GMT. It’s dark all the time now. I’ve had lots of automated emails from Mastodon in the last couple of days. Three more streams, taking me past the fifty hour mark. Fifty hours of drivel! That’s pretty good! Halfway to a hundred hours of drivel. I’m making decent progress given the wider context of how long...

I got in four more streams this week after taking last week off. My toy WebAssembly interpreter now has working floating-point numbers, more or less, with only a few bitwise and comparison operations left to implement. I was happy that Monday’s stream gave me a chance to demonstrate what’s cool about the way floating-point exponents are...

UK update: chaos reigns. We’ll probably have another prime minister soon. 🦊 A mini holiday this week, then, first to Broadstairs and then Margate, both of which were lovely in their own way. I grew up near the coast and British seaside towns have always given me the same feeling: cosy, dreamlike, nostalgic, somewhat...

I streamed four more times and made decent headway on implementing integers and floating-point numbers for my toy WebAssembly interpreter. I’ve fixed most of the snags I spotted last week: I can see the live chat, the webcam’s mirrored, the microphone is louder (albeit noisier?), the orange dot is gone and I’m generally more...

Tories, inflation, exchange rates, taxes, energy prices, Russia, Italy. Bit bleak. To cheer myself up I started a silly Ruby side project and streamed myself working on it. I’ve never written code on a livestream before so I wasn’t sure whether it’d work at all, but in the end I had fun and nothing went very wrong. I...

Hello! At the time of writing, western Europe has not yet been vapourised by a nuclear weapon. It’s officially autumn. I love the cooler weather and the blue skies. There are conkers all over the pavements and paths. 🌰 It was quiet outside on Monday as the UK shut down for statey funes. It’s only a vocal minority who believe...

Darker mornings, darker evenings. 🍂🌧️🌃 All UK news, all week: the Queen remains dead. I’ve seen The Queue a few times as I’ve been crossing the Thames. It’s hard to ignore how strange, huge and alienating it is. The government messaging around it has been incompetent and dystopian, which is what she would have...

London became cooler and wetter this week. It feels nice. Smalltalk with strangers has changed from “this heat!” to “this rain!” and I’m enjoying the novelty. Boris Johnson is out: The problem is, I finally feel defeated. […] What’s the point? I am trapped on a dying island ringed by a shadow of human shit and Brexiters took...

August has finished. Ideally that would trigger the transition from “taking time off” to “thinking about work”, but despite mounting economic anxiety I’m not ready yet. This brings me back to more or less exactly where I was two and a half years ago which is either reassuring or pathetic depending on your worldview. Anxiety aside, it’s...

This week’s priorities: doing nothing; getting a bit bored (contra my earlier claims); tinkering with code; worrying about the grimly-named “cost of living”. I forgot to mention, for balance, that London has cooled down at last. It’s such a relief to open the window and feel fresh air. My right arm is one big yellow bruise,...

On Monday I rode over to Broadway Market and met Tekin for lunch. We ate on a bench in London Fields, surrounded by parched yellow grass, brown leaves crunching underfoot. On Tuesday morning I had breakfast with a group of friends at an Old Street café, in a faint echo of Sheps past. Will this happen again? I don’t know. In the...

My third attempt to visit Paul was successful. On Monday we went for a walk on Ilkley Moor in the blazing sunshine, ending up (mercifully) at a pub. On Tuesday we drove into the Dales and walked to Malham Cove. The serene natural beauty of these places was remarkable. In some ways it reminded me of the Dorset...

I’ve left my job. Time for something new. I’m taking some time off before anything else. So far I’ve been sleeping, reading and watching a man methodically solve sudoku puzzles while he narrates his thought process in a soothing voice. I met Emily for breakfast, had a call with Sandi and cooked dinner for Aleks & Reema, which...

Not a good week. Reader responses to last week’s toilet question: “wet wipes” and “drug pellets”. Both seem equally plausible. I was trying to find a place to meet visiting coworkers for lunch and realised that all the pubs near me have narrowed their menu to a single type of food: one does only burgers, another only pasta,...

Earth’s yellow sun punished the hubris of my social plans by making all the trains get basically cancelled, so Alice couldn’t get to me on Tuesday and I couldn’t get to Paul on Wednesday. Fortunately it was powerless to stop me cycling round the corner to have breakfast with Chris on Monday before the heat really kicked in. Train...

It’s too hot and it’s getting hotter. I can’t do anything except sit around and sweat. 🥵 Homeland season two turned out to be quite good. Since I’d only seen season one before, I’d always feared the show would suffer from the Prison Break problem of not knowing what to do once the initial motivating question (will Michael break out of...

I’d meant to write up a transcript of my Brighton Ruby talk this week but unearthed two problems with that plan: firstly, I’m lazy, and secondly, I didn’t record the presentation so I won’t know what I actually said until the video comes out. I did try to record it, but Keynote’s “Record Slideshow” menu item was inexplicably greyed out....

I gave my Brighton Ruby talk. I felt extremely nervous but managed to keep it under control and I think it went alright in the end. I’m glad to have appeared on the official Brighton Ruby lineup at last, and to have broken my almost 3.5-year streak of not giving talks in person. I’m also relieved I don’t have a talk hanging over me any more...

I finally broke the seal on For All Mankind season 3. No spoilers, but: wow, they are not messing about. I love it so far and I’m impressed by how the show has steadily built up to some exciting stuff over the course of several years. No movement on Obi-Wan Kenobi yet. I expect I’ll eventually watch the rest of it but it doesn’t feel...

Quick one today because of, and/or despite, it being a busy week. On Monday my team made a change to RubyGems that starts the process of enforcing multi-factor authentication for authors of popular Ruby packages. This has been a long time coming and involved a lot of people-wrangling work on top of the comparatively mild technical work,...

Hello. Please enjoy these seven bits of trivia from my week: I relistened to the already ailing but now presumably dead Hello Internet podcast. It was diverting enough for exercise or chores but I was surprised how much more uncomfortable I found the episodes now than when they first came out. CGP Grey is the main attraction of the...

June, though. I successfully claimed my commemorative four-day weekend. It’s nice to have some downtime, although at the moment I’ve got lots of work to do so the timing wasn’t ideal. I remember it blowing my mind as a kid when I realised that other people can see the world so differently from me. Now I can watch millions...

I didn’t get much sleep this week. I’m not having a great time. Next week will be a three-day week because of the Platinum Jubilee, which is the most the Queen has ever (by remaining alive) done for me. It’s notable how carelessly the official Platinum Jubilee site has been built: the animated countdown timer at the top is...

This week I’ve been from London to Seattle to Portland, then from Portland to Seattle back to London. I’m tired and the volume is turned down on everything in my brain as it awaits my mortal soul. I didn’t miss my flight after all. In fact I still had to kill several hours at the airport so I clearly need to take a more daring risk next...

Tomorrow I’ll be on a plane to Portland (via Seattle) for RailsConf. I’d like to paint myself as the sort of capable and well-adjusted person who takes unusual events in their stride without making a meal of it, but the truth is that this week has mostly been about preparing logistically and emotionally for that trip so I might as well admit...

Hello. I have some rollovers from last week, so let’s deal with those first. ⏪ California had the alien and not entirely convincing vibe of a land where COVID never happened. I saw almost nobody wearing a mask and it never got mentioned by anyone. We ate outside a lot. I was at a loose end for my first full day in the hotel so...

I’m home again. 😴 California was great. I hung out with Sandi, perpetually bathed in golden sunshine. After so long without travelling it felt very weird being back in America, or indeed anywhere other than the streets immediately surrounding my flat. The vegan food options in both San Diego and Carlsbad — at least...

I spent this week with the Canadians (they’re not all Canadian, I just think referring to them this way is funny) as my team descended upon London for our first in-person work meetup. I wasn’t sure what to expect, and beforehand I felt a little uneasy about the impending step change in our relationships, but it was lots of fun and I needn’t...

I’ve recovered fully from COVID. Happily I don’t seem to have any lingering symptoms unless you count the weight I gained from days of lying on the sofa eating chocolate because I felt dreadful. I suppose it’s now at least temporarily safe for me to return to the gym, but I’ve got 2 weeks away from home to get through first. Happy...

I’ve had COVID all week, feeling confused & congested and testing positive for 11 days straight. Nothing has happened. Oh! Except yesterday I got my first negative test result, and again today, so we celebrated by jumping on a train with our bikes and visiting RHS Wisley. It was sunny and breezy and felt like...

Previously on weeknotes: One of those rides was to Islington for a pint with Paul while he was briefly in town. […] Inevitably he did test positive for COVID the next morning, but so far I appear to have dodged it. 🤞 As should be obvious to anyone familiar with the narrator from Arrested Development: I didn’t dodge...

Welcome to British Summer Time. I’m looking forward to returning to a more familiar work schedule, although part of me had just started adjusting to my last meeting of the day finishing an hour earlier. I suppose it’s all good practice in case Canada moves to permanent daylight time and I have to adapt for six months at a stretch instead of...

Welcome to spring! 🌱 Yesterday’s brunch went well. It was nice to see friends, none of my baking went wrong and nobody got COVID. The cost was the social (and perhaps actual) hangover that I’ve been nursing today, but that’s okay. It’s all good practice for being normal. The most tiring part of having guests was doing a...

I’m a bit ashamed to say that I’ve forced myself to break the habit of instinctively looking at the news every hour or so. It makes my stomach drop every time I do it and I’m not sure who that’s helping. Work is matching donations so I did that instead. I’ve taken a break from baking this weekend. Next weekend some friends are coming...

We are, for now, still here, so let’s do this again. WEEKEND BAKING: I made more croissants and they were slightly better than last time. With the same dough I improvised some clumsy-but-tasty peach Danish pastries. I also baked a loaf of sesame sourdough. And that’s all the baking. WEEKNIGHT GAMING:...

Geopolitical anxiety level: very high. Let’s distract ourselves for a few minutes with some inconsequential trivia. According to Twitter, it’s been 15 years since I joined Twitter. On reflection I’m not sure I’ve used my time wisely. It’s also been 7 months since I told my energy supplier about the gas meter mix-up and they...

Towards the end of last year I was expecting to visit Canada to meet my teammates, which ultimately didn’t happen for COVID reasons. The dates got moved back to January this year, then March, and then the destination was changed to New York City rather than Ottawa. Exciting! Well, the logistics have at last settled down, and in April we’ll...

As the days lengthen I instinctively worry I’ll get tripped up by my provincial human assumptions about the time difference between me and my North American teammates. It turns out I’m exactly a month early: this spring’s confusion zone stretches from the 13th to the 27th of March. I’ll probably never get the hang of this. Back in 2020 a kind...

On Tuesday I cycled to Stratford for an ultrasound to check out my organs. It was, as before, a very efficient and friendly process. I rode home through Victoria Park in the sunshine, again feeling almost overwhelmed with gratitude towards the medical staff who’d helped me out for free. I’m told my organs are fine. While I was...

The war on beeps is taking the internet by storm, which is to say that three friends have separately told me they were inspired to disable “acoustic signals” on their own appliances after reading about mine. I see this as confirmation that a better world is possible. On Wednesday the electricity went out briefly in my flat. When it came...

Shortly after setting off for my parents’ house at Christmas I absentmindedly took a wrong turn and had to wind through a few unfamiliar London streets to get back onto my usual route. If you live in London you probably already know where this is going. This week I got a letter from the car rental company saying I’d strayed...

I went to the dentist this week for the first time since the pandemic began — a long time between checkups even for me. Going to the dentist is exactly the sort of anxiety-inducing experience that somebody wouldn’t subject themselves to if they were a massive baby, which I am not. As I sat down I asked, wisely yet hesitantly, “should I take...

Back to work, then. I’m not delighted to get up on time every morning but I’m coping. 😰 On Tuesday morning, when I was feeling especially not delighted, I gritted my teeth and signed up to attend a February in-person work event in London. I wasn’t completely relaxed about the idea but I’d said I was going to make an effort to Mix...

Happy new year! This again. I weighed myself when I got home and, yes, it was bad and I feel crap. I’m hopeful I can fix this problem as quickly as it appeared if I make a proper effort. Er, starting tomorrow. As well as opportunities for self-improvement, the new year brings many temptations because it’s such an obvious time...

Another year over. In hindsight I picked the worst possible period of my life to document with weeknotes: the 2010s were full of travel, projects, people, adventures; so far the 2020s have been all about staying indoors and not dying. But if we all keep hanging in there, maybe things will get interesting again. Right? I continued to get...

Hello from the Christmas hibernation sofa. Extremely little has happened, so that’s good. At the start of the week I was dreading the logistics of collecting a rental car, loading up all the gifts & gear and driving to see my family. But it all went smoothly and everything arrived without getting crushed or smashed or melted or...

I stumbled over the finishing line at work this week and now I’m on holiday. 🎄 So far I’ve just been relaxing and doing nothing, which is what my brain craved because it was running on empty. I know that I need a change of routine in the new year to prevent myself from getting into this situation in the first place but I haven’t worked out...

Thanks to a hyperlocal tip-off from a reader, I managed to get a walk-in booster vaccination at St Leonard’s on Tuesday instead of waiting until the end of the month for an appointment. I’m relieved to have got this out of the way before Christmas. I’ve been making quite a lot of baked potatoes recently because it’s cold and dark...

Welcome to December! I forgot to mention that I did manage to book a booster vaccination a day or two before the five-month anniversary of my second dose. It’s a little frustrating that the appointment is still almost a month out (unless they implement the latest guidance and let me move it sooner) but I’m grateful I’ll be getting it...

I bought Life is Strange: True Colors on sale and started playing it. As expected it fixes the problems I had with its predecessor by reverting to a likeable female protagonist, believable characters, and the one truly crucial ingredient: cosy, atmospheric small-town vibes. I’m only a couple of hours in but I really like it so far. It’s...

I’m feeling slightly more normal this week and getting back into the rhythm of post-RubyConf work. I expect this’ll be short-lived since next week is Thanksgiving (and, more significantly, Black Friday) and then begins the slow slide downhill towards Christmas, so work isn’t really going to be normal until January, but I can at least be at my...

RubyConf was this week. My talk came and went and nothing bad happened. I got a few nice comments but ultimately I don’t think more than a handful of people paid it any attention. With the benefit of hindsight, I wouldn’t do a prerecorded conference talk like this again. An in-person conference provides a venue and audience that aren’t...

I’ve spent all day trying to get my RubyConf talk’s accompanying blog post & code repo ready before the conference starts tomorrow. I’m nowhere near finished yet so these notes are going to be cursory and irritable. In a semi-desperate attempt to generate any interest at all in my talk, I uploaded the video to YouTube and scheduled a...

Halloween weeknotes. Spooky. 👻 Earlier in the week the mornings became instantly dark. We’re thundering down the steep bit of the day length rollercoaster so this shouldn’t be surprising, but wow, time has gone fast this year. As of today the clocks have gone back in the UK so we’ll get a bit more light in the mornings again, but...

I was up until 3:30am on Monday night recording and editing my RubyConf talk, but I nonetheless got the video submitted before the deadline as long as you measure “Monday” in the right time zone. There are a million things wrong with it but it’s a huge relief that it’s done. I still need to publish the accompanying blog post and GitHub repo...

I took the week off work and it was brilliant. I’ve been impatient and irritable for the last few weeks and the break has helped to reset my mood a bit. As usual I feel like I need at least another week off to properly unwind, but that’ll have to wait until the end of the year. I also felt better after I spent Monday getting a rough...

I’ve had lots of fun implementing, and no fun writing, my RubyConf talk. I tried hard but failed as predicted to get a video recorded by the end of Friday, so now it’ll be hanging over my week off, which isn’t ideal. Given that it’s too late to avoid pain entirely, I think my best option is to sacrifice a day next week to getting it done so...

October! The best month. 🍂 I’ve made decent progress on my RubyConf talk at last, mainly because I’ve spent every available moment working on it. It still feels impossible that I’ll have it all finished and recorded by the effective deadline (this Friday). I’m just going to do as much as I can and accept that it’ll be half-baked. ...

It was a quiet week. There are always things happening at work and with friends & family but none of that seems like obvious weeknote fodder. I did watch some telly and get annoyed at a video game. Let’s run with that for now. I forgot to mention last week that the PS5 system update came out and so I installed a 1TB SSD as planned....

I haven’t even started thinking about my RubyConf talk yet. It’s been a few years since I last had the threat of a conference talk hanging over me and I didn’t miss the feeling at all. This week I had an anxiety dream about standing on stage in front of hundreds of people and suddenly realising I don’t have anything prepared. That doesn’t...

On Tuesday the treadmill died in the middle of a workout and tripped the RCD. I didn’t want to deal with getting another replacement so I asked for a refund and on Thursday a van came and took it away forever. Goodnight, sweet prince. In hindsight, maybe I should’ve read this damning review and saved myself some hassle. Back to...

After I dropped off last weekend’s rental car in Edgware Road I found myself walking past the Marble Arch Mound and decided to go up it before they started charging for tickets. It’s weird and perfunctory, like the whole thing is an elaborate front for a money-laundering or perhaps Elder-God–worshipping scheme. I could wander straight in on a...

A whole new treadmill arrived on Monday, as foreshadowed by the cryptic email. Opening another pristine box felt excessive when the old treadmill could have been repaired, but since the UK distributor just imports them from China I assume it’s cheaper, quicker and logistically simpler to send a new one straight from the warehouse than to try to...

I’ve spent a lifetime ignoring the snooze buttons on alarms because I never want to use them. They’re an annoying UI hindrance which I’ve learned to blank out of my awareness entirely so I don’t press them by mistake. But I finally noticed that the cursed button in the Apple Watch timer interface doesn’t say “snooze” at all, it says “repeat”....

I’m calling it: I’ve attained satisfaction with my breadmaking routine. For a long time I was struggling to get better results but now I’m confident they’re as good as they’re going to get. My loaves aren’t perfect or even impressive but they’re more than good enough for me to enjoy without feeling frustrated or disappointed and that’s all I...

One summer when I was eight years old I realised that the date 8/8/88 was approaching. I vividly remember the excitement and anticipation of what seemed like an impossibly significant numerological event. On the day itself I didn’t know how to celebrate it so I wrote “8/8/88” on a bit of paper and looked at it and couldn’t think of anything else...

August??? etc I’ve now had time to read some of the second edition of The Elements of Computing Systems. It’s a decent upgrade: the material is essentially the same but it‘s been expanded, clarified and reorganised. The new organisation more clearly separates the hardware and software halves of the book, and there are improved &...

Back to work, just in time for one of the periodic internal hackathons. I got to contribute to a regular expression implementation which was a fun change of pace and tied nicely into my interests. The timing was accidental but it turned out to be a nice way to ease back into work after a holiday so I might try to arrange it intentionally next...

I was on holiday all week so I don’t have much to report. Given the current situation we mostly stayed home and relaxed, which was brilliant, although a week isn’t really long enough to properly decompress. (Would two weeks be long enough? A month? Am I in fact capable of decompressing or have I already bottomed out at my lowest possible...

It was Nat’s birthday yesterday, which was really fun, and we’ve both taken a week off work to relax and enjoy ourselves. After making a fuss about the unforeseen onset of June, I missed the opportunity last week to note that we’re more than halfway through 2021 now. What the actual. I’m conscious that I complained last year about...

It’s day four of my five-day weekend. I badly needed this rest and I’m loving it so far. Today we rode to a park to meet friends for lunch. Imagine! Because the park is in Britain this did involve spending half an hour sheltering from torrential rain under a tree, but there was enough sunshine afterwards to make it worthwhile and it...

I got my second dose of COVID-19 vaccine. It was less of a production than last time: I had an earlier appointment and the hospital was much quieter so I was straight in & out with no wait at all, plus I got to pop there and back on my bike instead of walking. It was a sunny day and it felt nice to be out for a morning ride across the river to...

Some weeks nothing happens again. It’s been less hot and more rainy this week, which is a relief. Most mornings I’ve enjoyed opening the bedroom window and letting the cool, damp air wash invisibly over me. Sometimes it smells nice too. I took my newly-repaired bike out for a spin yesterday. I didn’t go far — only to the big...

Some weeks nothing happens. It’s already a bit too warm. Last year I didn’t start complaining about the heat until the end of June so this trend doesn’t bode well for future years. I have so far resisted wheeling out the air conditioner though. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is pretty fun. I’m still at the beginning because I’ve...

June! June! By cancelling and rebooking I managed to bring forward my second COVID-19 vaccine appointment by three weeks, so I’ll be getting my second dose at the end of June instead of late July. This feels like a meaningful difference given that (see above) it’s actually June right now. No more nocturnal Velcro® incidents...

I’m still doing those stretches every night before bed. I haven’t missed a single day this year. Over time my motivation has become less about investing in my physical health and more about irrationally maintaining my streak, which is as good a reason as any to keep going. Likewise, my experience of Returnal has progressed from merely...

Once I got through the critical first step of sorting out my desk wiring I lost all momentum and it’s now stalled in a half-finished state. The dangling cables are a bit inconvenient but not inconvenient enough to force me to complete the job properly. Our house was permanently like this when I was growing up so it’s probably genetic. ...

As foreshadowed, this week was the end of my first year at my job. My teammates wrote kind things in a card and I felt an emotion, which reminded me that it’ll be good to actually meet all these people one day. A year into this weird remote technical leadership role in a different time zone during a pandemic I do of course continue to...

We finished For All Mankind and it was genuinely brilliant. It was well worth the delayed gratification of going back and rewatching the first one-and-three-quarters seasons before advancing to the end because it reminded me of details I’d forgotten and made some of the characters’ motivations more convincing. Plus it’s just very well written and...

Tomorrow’s a bank holiday so I took Friday off work to create a restful four-day weekend. Bliss. I bought a rug from IKEA because they’re one of the few companies who sell half-decent rugs which aren’t made of wool, and I insist on inconveniencing myself by avoiding wool to make some kind of point that nobody cares about. I like the...

I’ve been in a reflective mood this week, so naturally I haven’t noted down anything to write about. Some weeks, everything feels so relentless. I don’t know why. It’s not like anything is ever different. (Maybe that’s why.) Actually, something’s different: I did end up buying a treadmill to use at my standing desk. I...

Back to work. I’m unexpectedly gravitating towards using my desk in its standing position more and more by default. When I first got it I’d stand for at most an hour first thing in the morning, then again after lunch if I was feeling particularly spicy, but now I rarely lower it into a sitting position unless I’m doing something passive...

I’m still on holiday, but only for a couple more hours, which I am savouring. The time off was fantastic. It doesn’t yet feel safe to go anywhere or do anything so I didn’t go anywhere and I didn’t do anything. In practice that meant ten days of sleeping, reading, cooking, baking, drinking coffee, playing games, watching TV & films, and...

I’m on holiday. I don’t set a holiday email autoresponder because the system is exactly the same as when I’m not on holiday: I will get back to you eventually. ♻️ I’ve been very tired this week. I don’t have a good reason why. The most likely explanation is simple accumulated fatigue from not having taken a break since...

I feel impatient that there’s been no apparent movement on the vaccine front. The page still says “people aged 50 and over” no matter how often I reload it but there’s nothing I can do about that. Having managed to open a new bank account, I had the strange and unhelpfully futuristic experience of closing my old one entirely through a...

It is finally, properly, officially spring. 🌸 I don’t yet have an appointment for my first dose of coronavirus vaccine, but a few friends have already been given theirs so it’s starting to feel within reach. This page says “people aged 50 and over” at the moment and I’m reloading it every day. I desperately want to go back to the...

Happy π day. Nat & I did some light trigonometry to celebrate. 📐 I enjoyed WandaVision overall, but the final episodes felt a bit, I dunno, chaotic? Arbitrary? It was always going to be a difficult premise to wrap up and I’m not convinced everything made sense. Still, it was an entertaining show and I’m glad to have seen something a...

Last week I got a notification congratulating me for spending 14 years on Twitter. That doesn’t seem like something worth celebrating but it did provoke two otherwise unrelated thoughts about Twitter. Twitter thought one: I remember having dinner in San Francisco with Twitter cofounder Evan Williams and internet pundit Keith Dawson in...

Welcome to the bottom-right corner of February! We really showed that perfectly rectangular bastard who’s boss. It’s been a year since I first mentioned COVID-19 here. At the time I’d been looking forward to visiting Canada for an interview and it was disappointing to have to reschedule everything to happen remotely, even though I was...

I finished Control and was really enjoying it by the end. It never stopped being a bit too obtuse but it redeemed itself with a bravura sequence late in the game which was so unexpected and well-executed that it left me with a big grin on my face. I got a second laugh out of Arrested Development, and as predicted it was when someone...

I took Friday off work, which was amazing. Four-day work weeks are great. Let’s all do that. Over the long weekend I played a lot more of Control. It’s mostly good! I got off to a rocky start because I generally don’t like combat in games and always have to remind myself that it’s put there on purpose and is supposed to be fun. I’m...

Not having a telly in lockdown is shit. You can’t watch telly. As of Thursday, I have a telly again! The men unexpectedly brought my old TV back with a brand new panel fitted. A modern TV consists of little else but a panel so it feels like a weird technicality to call it “my old TV” but it was still logged into my YouTube account so I...

I woke up at 7am this morning and stumbled through a fair chunk of my weekday routine before I realised it was Sunday. It was a lovely feeling when my half-awake brain understood that it could stop what it was doing and go back for another couple of hours’ sleep. Another massive bag of flour arrived. I also treated myself to a flour...

It snowed in London today. 🌨 I go back and forth on my feelings about lockdown. On the one hand, it’s utterly miserable and I feel like I’m just marking time until it’s over and I can go back to some semblance of a normal life. But on the other hand, it’s basically fine isn’t it? I just spend more evenings at home watching TV than I...

I got my Cyberpunk 2077 refund on Monday. It’s nice to have the £50 back, and even nicer that I can now safely erase the whole sordid affair from my memory, like a cyborg would, probably. Community: Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television. I finished! The finale was much better than I was expecting: heartfelt and funny, with real...

It’s pretty shit that everyone goes back to work on the same day at the start of January. It can’t be healthy to focus planetary quantities of psychic pain onto a single Monday. Why do we choose to live like this? I took Monday off and it was great. Then the first full week of 2021 telescoped out to the size of many conventional weeks...

Happy new year! 🍾 The days all run together at the end of December, especially in the dead calm between Christmas and New Year. (I’d never heard the word “twixmas” until I saw Lucy Prebble use it the other day, but I suppose that’s what it’s called.) Most of the time I had absolutely no awareness of what weekday it was. This is the...

As everybody who writes something today will say: it’s not been a good year. The unremitting bleakness has felt a bit much at times. But hey, we made it to the end, so let’s summarise! At the start of January I’d just left FutureLearn after being their CTO for three and a bit years. I didn’t have a plan beyond taking a couple of months...

I’m having an extremely quiet and relaxing Christmas break. The last-minute tier 4 restrictions don’t allow us to go anywhere or see anyone so I’m trying to make the most of it by watching lots of films, taking lots of naps and eating lots of foods that I wouldn’t normally have the time or inclination to prepare. I didn’t realise how much I...

I’m on holiday! 🎄 Community: Analysis of Cork-Based Networking. I got through season four without any real trouble; I’d braced myself for it to be terrible, but in practice it didn’t feel like a massive detour from the gentle downward trajectory of the show as a whole. It’s still entertaining enough that I’m going to watch it to the...

Cyberpunk 2077 came out on Thursday so I streamed it in the evening. I didn’t really enjoy it. Even ignoring the fact that it’s full of bugs which make it borderline unplayable, I just don’t like this kind of game and I wish I could stop overlooking that in my excitement to play something new. I’ve wasted so much money on unappealing action...

I didn’t think of something funny. I’ve decided not to get a Christmas tree. I understand why a lot of people are plunging headfirst into getting festive after such a shitty year but what I really need is a quiet and unstressful time, which for me means taking a holiday from the chore of obtaining, erecting and decorating a massive...

Heating’s on. We’ve been playing a lot of Astro’s Playroom. I already thought it was great but another week of play has made me love it even more. Friends of mine will be unsurprised to learn I’ve really enjoyed replaying the levels to discover every last artefact and puzzle piece. The music is unbelievably catchy too — the GPU Jungle...

Heating update: aside from that momentary lapse two weeks ago, the heating is still off. Maybe I really will make it to December before properly turning it on. This bodes well for my energy bill if not the long-term habitability of our planet. Bread update: my twice-weekly loaves are now large and round. I don’t have a...

I started my job six months ago so I’ve been spending some time thinking critically about it. Overall I’d say it’s going alright, although I don’t feel especially useful yet. (Maybe that’s normal?) I have good days and bad. I enjoy the company of my colleagues and the technical work is rewarding; when I’m elbow-deep in writing or reviewing...

I put the heating on for a bit yesterday. On the morning after the US presidential election I woke up at 3am and couldn’t get back to sleep. I kept playing out the two scenarios over and over in my head: Biden wins, Trump wins. Biden wins: relief, gratitude, the possibility that some of the damage of the last four years might be undone....

It’s November and I have yet to put the heating on. 🐶🔥 Will I make it all the way to December? No. On Thursday night I started playing Watch Dogs: Legion and streamed my first few hours. It’s not good so far. The writing and voice acting are pretty embarrassing and there’s little to care about in the plot, characters or main...

Although I try to affect a breezy manner in these weeknotes, I hate writing and resent the way it hangs over my Sunday. Enjoy! I’m excited to be doing some mentoring at work. I’ve started working one-on-one with a couple of super smart people who are keen to level up, and I honestly don’t think there’s anything that I find more...

Sorry, even more media this week. Look, it’s Halloween season and the nights are drawing in so I have to stay up late watching spooky things and there’s nothing else to tell you about cos there’s a pandemic on. 👻 We continued our accidental Mike Flanagan season by watching Hush. I enjoyed what it did within its constraints and, at...

I’ve had an extremely leisurely week off. The weather’s been nice enough for a few walks around the neighbourhood but otherwise I’ve been enjoying some rest. Set your expectations accordingly. While I had plenty of time to waste I took the opportunity to replace a leaky inner tube on my bike. That isn’t normally a big job but it had...

I’m on holiday for the next week. As with last time this won’t involve going anywhere because that still doesn’t feel safe enough to be relaxing. The weather forecast looks a bit too grim for the occasional Hackney walks and bike rides I was imagining but I’m still looking forward to the downtime even if the scenery’s not going to be very...

Hardly any notes this week. Apparently that homescreen widget advantage was short-lived. After my initial (stoically unreported) disappointment on the 17th, I managed to preorder a PS5 Digital Edition this Friday. I could’ve got the one with the optical drive a week ago but that’s not what I want: I don’t buy games on disk so can see no...

This was my team’s first proper five-day work week since June. The general consensus is that working on Friday is for mugs; I certainly didn’t have much brain juice left after four consecutive days of work. Oh well. As everyone knows, you can’t change the system. There’ll be more content recycled from other sources this week because iOS...

I’m feeling a bit better this week! Adrift but otherwise fine. By looking out the window I can see that it’s a lovely day today: cloudless blue sky, sunshine, gentle breeze. I want to go outside as an abstract goal but don’t have any ideas about where to go or why. I just opened the window instead. Since I started exercising...

Timestamping a new weeknotes file is a good opportunity to compare my expectations of what month it is against reality. Hold on, it’s September? Okay. A low week. I spent most of it feeling listless and grumpy, prompted by nothing in particular. I expect that’s normal at the moment. I had a couple more in-person coffees with...

I got some positive feedback on last week’s #breadchat so I’m afraid there’s more this week. Only negative feedback can stop this; I don’t make the decisions. I baked a loaf for my dad’s birthday and posted it to him with some marmalade. This was logistically a bit difficult (e.g. where do you buy a box for posting bread?)...

The framing shop phoned to tell me the print was ready for collection. I picked it up and was relieved to see that it looked really good, neatly avoiding any framing-decision regret. Now I just have to hang it in exactly the right spot. It’s a piece of concept art from The Last of Us Part II, by the way, which wasn’t secret, just...

I haven’t heard anything from the framing shop yet. Maybe they’ve accidentally thrown my print away and I’ll never have to deal with it. It remained really hot for most of the week. It was horrible. For the last couple of days it’s been raining which is a massive relief and means I can finally sleep and think again. I’ve been...

It’s really hot in London which makes it hard to think or sleep. Those are my two main things. I bought a print for the wall of my newly-habitable home office, like a normal person would, but it’s an unusual size so I can’t put it in a standard frame. I took it to a framing shop and discovered a new world of decisions for which I have...

Lockdown is doing weird things to my brain. From one week to the next I’m behaving as though my life is on pause. But of course it isn’t! At the time of writing my life is currently happening! I don’t know what to do about this. I think it’s sensible to stay away from other people and remain relaxed about work and basically focus on Just...

I never got any scan results. I think this silence is NHS-speak for “you’re fine, stop wasting our time” so I’m happy enough with it. In other Elderly Gentleman News, on Wednesday I managed to injure my wrist somehow, probably with the sheer intensity of Vim after several leisurely years of Google Calendar and Trello. So I had to spend all of...

No CT scan results yet. Sorry for the false advertising. For the last 18 months or so I’ve been helping with the second edition of 99 Bottles of OOP by providing a JavaScript translation from the original Ruby. It was a lot of work for everyone involved but we got there in the end: the book was released this week and I’m very happy to...

I’m feeling much better this week, thanks for asking. I eventually had a CT scan which took about a minute. Tune in next week for the exciting results. Having a week of holiday has been brilliant. In some ways it’s a shame to not be able to travel anywhere, but it’s also very nice to feel justified in staying home and relaxing. I...

Nothing to report this week. I spent nearly all of it feeling unwell — kidney stones, probably, which hurt — so I haven’t done much besides lie in bed and groan. The pain stopped last night and I’m slowly returning to normal, except I’ve now become one of those people who drinks a lot of water. The NHS is brilliant and precious of...

This weekend I finally completed the gruelling chirality tutorial of assembling IKEA furniture. My home office is now messier than it’s ever been, but it should be downhill from here as the highly concentrated mess osmoses into the bare cupboards and drawers. The pace has been glacial. I can’t put furniture together for more than ten...

I’m writing these very late because I frittered away my Sunday playing video games and assembling furniture. My back pain’s basically gone so in its place I have developed a condition which I’ve decided to call “flatpack hand”. Although lockdown has been basically fine, I was surprisingly sad about reaching the summer solstice — the...

Update on my electric toothbrush / the existence of the supernatural! Following last week’s incident I decided to use a process of elimination to diagnose the problem. It was much easier to replace the toothbrush than the bathroom so I got a new toothbrush and now everything is fine again. I slightly begrudge the loss of thirty pounds but it’s...

Today, after several weeks of inaction, I revived my starter and made some dough. While I don’t think I’ll ever be good at baking bread, I have at least become comfortable with it, so the process is now familiar and relaxing. Instead of staring at a recipe and agonising over the details I can just potter around enjoying the methodical...

Out there, in the external world, each week is worse than the last. Feels apocalyptic. Indoors, things are mostly fine. It has now been exactly six weeks since I last left my flat. Everyone else I know (or follow on Instagram at least) has long since resumed going for walks and bike rides and picnics but I’m too concerned that I’ll transmit a...

What a week. I’d intended to spend the last hour writing weeknotes but instead I’ve been watching the news and feeling angry. But let’s keep it light. At work, the onboarding (week 2 of 4) continues. This week Shopify announced that they’re becoming “digital by default”, i.e. a remote-first employer, as a result of the coronavirus...

Not much time or energy for weeknotes this week, so I’ll give you the short version. On Monday I started a new job at Shopify. My team is working on internal tooling and engineering practices, which is exactly the sort of thing I’m interested in. At the moment I’m still onboarding so I haven’t thought about that yet. The company...

This week I became briefly fixated on catching scorpions in Animal Crossing. I didn’t really know how to do this and (as usual with games) couldn’t find a coherent explanation online, so I just muddled through. This gave me the opportunity to watch myself develop a belief system about how bug spawning works and what I might do to...

I made sourdough again this week. It’s getting really good now and I’m finally enjoying the whole convoluted process. I expect you’re sick of the sight of other people’s bread so, instead of a picture, here’s the sound of yesterday’s loaf crackling as it cooled. This isn’t necessarily going to be the next big ASMR craze...

Mercifully no breadmaking this week. Instead I made sourdough crackers to use up some excess starter. This turned out to be very easy and tasty so it’s worth trying. We finished Tiger King. It took many weeks to watch the whole thing because everyone in it is an awful person. It’s cleverly constructed but weirdly uncurious...

Three years ago it was surprising — embarrassing? transgressive? — when Robert Kelly’s children walked in during a BBC interview, but we’re all Robert Kelly now. Everyone’s been stuck indoors for weeks and it’s become impossible to maintain a façade of sophistication. All the webcams and microphones are shitty, all the lighting is unflattering,...

Happy Easter! 🐣🍫 I tried to make vegan marshmallows as an Easter treat for Nat. They came out alright despite the difficulty of doing anything like this without a sugar thermometer. It’s not a perfect result but it’s fun and surprising that such a thing works at all. At some point I’ll try again with a thermometer and a...

The baking will continue until morale improves. I now have a banneton so can make loaves that look very slightly fancier than before. Evidently I still have a lot to learn about shaping and scoring. In the past I’ve struggled to find ways to get through two loaves while they were still fresh, but it turns out that sandwiches and...

This last couple of weeks has made me realise how accustomed I am to living in precedented times. When you’re trying to decide something it saves a lot of time and energy if you have a precedent. At the moment I’m making a lot of mundane decisions from first principles and it’s exhausting. Picard has finished but I haven’t got around to...

It’s spring! Well done everyone. 🌷☀️ You are position 718 of 1041. Your wait time will be about fifteen minutes. Like the majority of the city/country/planet, we’ve been stuck inside all week. This isn’t very different from how I’ve been living since the start of the year anyway so it’s not a huge imposition. The largest...

Made it to double digits with the weeknotes. 🎉 I’ve had occasion to cycle along Victoria Embankment a few times recently. It’s a very pleasant ride overall — flat road, safe segregated bike lane, nice view of the river and South Bank — but the best part is being able to cycle continuously for about a mile and a half without being...

You can relax because I did in fact finish The Stone Sky this week. I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as the previous two books, largely because it had to be crammed with all the backstory and lore that those books had been mercifully light on, but it was still very inventive and thoughtful. It was particularly exciting to finally see more of the...

Having read The Fifth Season last week I managed to finish its sequel The Obelisk Gate this week. I’m such a laborious reader of fiction that I couldn’t possibly have found time to do this if I’d been, you know, going to work every day, but again the combination of an audiobook in the gym and a paperback the rest of the time worked well and I...

Last week I forgot to mention that @bbcmicrobot has been a source of nostalgic pleasure since it came online a fortnight ago. I spent a lot of my childhood writing silly BASIC programs on a BBC Micro or Acorn Archimedes so it’s heartening to watch other people do it on Twitter in 2020. Most impressive so far are Eben’s ludicrously ambitious...

Time passes. Someone at the gym asked me to spot them. I had no idea what that involved but in the moment I panicked and said “yes” out of a misplaced desire to be helpful. This instantly trapped me in the life-threatening situation of being responsible for a person’s safety without any knowledge of how to ensure it. I suppose that...

Another week of focusing on my physical and mental health. Nothing notable happened. I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to further lower my standards for weeknotes; this is it. A few more tentative work chats, which is nice, but I’m not going to bang on about work here unless something actually interesting happens. I made...

A lot of pottering this week between the meals & coffees with friends. I’m starting to feel a little guilty about not doing any Productive Work, even though I know it’s totally okay to rest and get healthy. But it isn’t January any more, so technically it is time to stop being on holiday. I don’t feel hugely incentivised to jump back into...

I’m feeling a lot better. I haven’t lost as much weight as I’d hoped I would by the end of January, but the rest and exercise has meaningfully affected my mood and energy level, and my shoulder now barely hurts during normal activities. This all makes a big difference so I’m glad I prioritised it over more quotidian concerns like what to do with...

My physical wellbeing continues to slowly but steadily improve. I’m now in much less pain which is making everything else feel easier, including hauling myself to the gym in the dark every morning, so the positive feedback loop has gained a little purchase. This week I cooked Ruby Tandoh’s hot and sour soup: (Again,...

I’m feeling a bit better this week. The gym has now deigned to open so every weekday I’ve set my alarm and gone there early like someone who has somewhere they need to be, which I don’t. I’ve lost a little bit of weight and my shoulder hurts less. I want to get healthier but am conscious that I don’t have an income, which means that...

Happy new year! 🍾 I wanted to try writing weeknotes but didn’t have anywhere to put them so I had to make a new website. I was surprised how involved this turned out to be, even though the same thing has happened to every project I’ve worked on. Since the moment I first thought “I want to try writing weeknotes” I’ve had to make a...