Week 4: Central London bound

  • Frances went on a school trip to the British Museum1 on Tuesday. It must have been a success - she made us go back on Sunday, to show her brother a 5,500 year old mummified “butt”.

    My daughter pointing out the butt of a mummified man
    Look Fred, that's its butt

    We also all ate a meal in Chinatown at Fred’s favourite restaurant (he’s been there once!), where he got us to eat exactly the same food he’d had the last time. It was actually pretty great. Are my kids growing up?

  • In other positive news, I fixed our dishwasher. As in I ordered a new pump, took the machine apart, replaced the broken pump, and put it all back together. All without killing myself. Genuine highlight of my year so far.

  • Suprised to see an Only Fools and Horses reference in the TypeScript documentation.

    type OnlyBoolsAndHorses = {
      [key: string]: boolean | Horse;
    };
    
    const conforms: OnlyBoolsAndHorses = {
      del: true,
      rodney: false,
    };
    
  • Zero running, zero PT sessions, zero exercise, ugh.

Footnotes

  1. Tried to gently broach the subject with the kids as to whether all these antiquities should be in Britain rather than their places of origin. Not much engagement, and then my mind started wandering into thinking about the huge logistical operation it must have taken just to plunder all this stuff.

Week 3: Cannula woes

  • Very short weeknotes this week, mainly because I spent hours on Sunday getting a new insulin cannula into Frances, only for her glucose levels to continue to rise. Up until 2am checking blood sugar, realising the cannula was kinked, inserting a different cannula, calculating correction doses, etc. The whole awful saga dragged on until Monday lunchtime (should that be in next week’s notes?). Not much time for anything else.

  • Kept up the exercise, with two runs and a PT session. For the first time Danie and I went to the personal trainer together. Worked really well, the session felt shorter, and we got to get some tasty lunch from Pavilion afterwards.

Week 2: Two runs, one week!

  • Ran twice this week, for the first time in ages! From running more than 200km the month before my daughter was diagnosed with T1, to way less than half that in the three months since. Finading the time to get out has been so difficult. It affects my mood, both the lack of day-to-day exercise, but also the general feeling of unfitness lingering over me. Determined to somehow get back into it more regularly. Watch this space (or rather Strava).

  • Been watching Poker Face (the Rian Johnson/Natasha Lyonne series, not the Ant and Dec gameshow). I really like that every episode is self-contained, that every detail is important in that particular episode, that it knows just what it is (a ‘case of the week’ detective series) and doesn’t try to be anything more.

  • Also saw Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania with my son. Fred said he liked it (though was less effusive than with other films we’ve seen), but man I was so bored. We’re constantly told the stakes are incredibly high, yet they feel tiny. I’m 100% in the Scorcese1 camp:

    “What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk.”

  • Loads of palaver getting my daughter’s diabetes medication sorted. While we have loads of insulin, it’s not in the right vials for her Ypsopump. That takes small vials which we have to manually fill, but we’re running short on the empty containers. The pump also takes pre-filled vials which we’d prefer, but every time we’ve tried to request them something gets lost in translation. We ask the GP, who then ask the pharmacy, who then order from their supplier. And a week later we pick up the prescription only to find that while it’s the correct insulin, it’s for a pen not a pump. So we try again…

  • Done a fair bit of tinkering on this site, partly to clean things up, partly to play around with new shiny things. It took me a little while to get my head around the way astro adds styles to components, but I think I like it. You define a component like this:

    <style>
      h1 {
        color: red;
      }
    </style>
    <hgroup>
      <h1>Title</h1>
    </hgroup>
    

    Astro will split the stylesheet out from the markup, generate markup:

    <hgroup class="astro-ABCDEFGH">
      <h1 class="astro-ABCDEFGH">Title</h1>
    </hgroup>
    

    And css:

    h1:where(.astro-ABCDEFGH) {
      color: red;
    }
    

    So the styles are scoped only to markup generated by the component, not all h1 elements on the page. All this is automatic. I like it, it makes styling these components much easier not having to worry as much about style clashes, and the generated static site is still slick enough for me.

  • A new OS feature I’d like: ‘What the beep?‘. Its purpose is simple. Whenever an app makes a sound, the OS adds it to a list you can go back and review. ‘What the beep was that?’ ‘A new notification on the Mastodon web page’ ‘A terminal tab’ ‘Slack’

Footnotes

  1. Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.

Week 1: New Blog Who Dis?

  • Re-written my blog for maybe the 1000th time, this time using Astro 2.0. Although Astro can do more, I just want a simple static site, and it’s been a pretty decent experience so far. Only a few quirks and minor obstacles to overcome, and to my eyes everything seems logical and well thought through. I’m going to try and write some (sparse) weeknotes, import as many posts from older versions of my blog as I can, and generally get my shit together more.

  • Last Sunday it took more than 6 hours to cancel my Virgin Media broadband, but the saga still wasn’t over. Danie got 5 calls from their retention team on Monday before picking up.

    ”I can offer better deals than our normal agents can make”.

    The thing is, I don’t want the hassle of pretending to cancel every couple of years just to get a decent deal. It’s their way of offering price discrimination, but it’s awful for customers and I hate it. I’m with Community Fibre now, who will have to go some way to be as painful as Virgin have been.

  • Kids watching The Lion Guard on Disney Plus, set in the ‘innocent’ world of the Lion King. Except the current series seems to be about the main character’s developing drug dependency. Quick search shows I’m not the first person to have thought this.

  • Managing Frances’s diabetes has generally been fine but hard work, for everything except when we need to change the position of her infusion set. Every three days we need to do this, moving the point where the insulin from her pump enters her body, giving the existing location time to refresh and heal. But she hates the thought of the new injection so much, it takes hours of distress and negotiation to make the change.

  • Took my nephew to the biggest Lego Store in the World in Leicester Square as his birthday present. I think it went well.

Photo of my nephew on the tube holding his new lego set