The week of May 8th.
I had an errand to run in Hebden Bridge, the next town down the valley.
Traffic was hugely backed up due to roadworks and trains were on strike, so I dusted off my bike.
It was really nice. About 30 minutes at a leisurely pace along the canal, past allotments and the hippie canalboat community and pubs and angry geese.
It's not the ideal bike for it, though – the canal overflows are rough and cobbled and it's a rather fair-surface bike. I walked it across those bits.
I'm thinking about getting a more appropriate bike, and it's hard to separate the overly aspirational from what I think I'd actually do.
We watched the Eurovision finals with friends.
I'm not a Eurovision fan, but it was a lovely social event with delicious food.
I watched season one of Barry (2018–2023) and liked it. Good balance of humour and drama; deftly flawed characters; interesting developments in the relationships between various characters.
I watched the first episode of season two and it went way heavier on the humour in a way that felt completely out of character; hopefully it gets better.
We watched Devil in a Blue Dress (1995). Excellent modern (👴🏻) noir.
We re-watched Alien (1979). Great lived-in future. Appreciate the evil corporation angle and Jonesy the cat upping the stakes. Great pacing. Pleasing title sequence.
It was hard to take that scene seriously having seen Space Balls.
We had the plumbers here to fix an outdoor tap, and I asked them to also install the new bathroom tap since I hadn't gotten around to it.
I'm glad I did – it was more complicated than expected. It's always tricky as a homeowner whether to DIY or pay someone to do it.
I'm proud of how much better we've gotten at resolving conflicts at work. In the early days, we were not.
This week I was in a Slack discussion (about calendar conventions!) that was heating up, and a first shot was fired in a would-be documentation edit war.
I suggested "Tuple?", got a "👍", and we had a constructive and friendly 5 minute discussion where we happily agreed on some changes.
Increasing bandwidth when text-based communication runs into conflict is a good habit.
I modernised a Slack integration and took the opportunity to introduce Zeitwerk in our internal Ruby-but-not-Rails chat bot app. Worked really well.
I also cleaned up some magic encoding comments that haven't been needed since Ruby 2.0 was released a decade ago. This app has been around a while.
I enjoyed: