Weeknotes for week 22, 2023

The week of May 29th.

I'm back in the UK after a week in Sweden.

As always, I was thrilled to get into my own car at the airport. I love that thing, and I love the drive back.

It was slightly magical to get home – our wisteria in full bloom, church bells ringing, evening falling on the valley.

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At work, I made a Metabase SQL-backed dashboard showing the progress of something we're rolling out.

ChatGPT, for all its faults, turned out to be an amazing Metabase collaborator.

I gave it a fairly detailed description of the tables I had and the kind of diagram I wanted, and the query it returned worked perfectly. I can figure out fairly advanced stuff in SQL, but it will take me a while, and this was a huge time saver.

I kept using it to evolve the dashboard and it kept being incredibly useful.

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I watched a bunch of stuff.

Dark City (1998). Rewatch. Not very good. I'm astounded that IMDb reviewers seem to find the plot profound.

The Gallows Pole (2023–) is set in one of our neighbouring villages and filmed in another. I watched the first 2 episodes – decent, with some well done naturalistic dialogue. I'm genuinely offended by the ungrammatical "Old English" in the credits and episode titles. "Booketh" as a noun? "Thy had a dream"? Stupid.

I didn't expect to like Renfield (2023), but I did. Funny, good action sequences, good cast.

The World's End (2013) was pretty good. Lots of callbacks.

And I went on a Buster Keaton binge. Sherlock Jr. (1924) (fantastic), The General (1926) (likewise) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) (some incredible scenes but not as good overall). It's amazing to think that this was nearly 100 years ago. With a well-told story, you don't really notice or care that it's black and white and silent. Highly recommend.

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On the Saturday, we went to the Royal Armouries in Leeds for a Wild West show – it's one of my partner's many special interests. It was a lovely day out.

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On the Sunday, we gardened and had amazing BBQ under a parasol.

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I'm very excited about Apple's WWDC keynote tomorrow, with the rumoured AR/VR headset. I see a lot of promise that hasn't been realised yet.

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I enjoyed: