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Week 284: Damaged/restored
I left a glass on the floor at the top of the stairs to remind me to take it down, thinking that surely I couldn’t miss it. But of course I could. It didn’t smash, but I watched it bounce down the steps two at a time, leaving a big obvious dent (or pair of dents) in the oak of each one it hit.
When we had the house renovated a couple of years ago, we went for engineered wood – it’s about 6 mm of wood on top of a plywood base – rather than some kind of synthetic flooring because it looks nicer, and because our house is so small that even expensive flooring doesn’t cost all that much. But there was another reason: you can repair wood, and when the wood starts off with a slightly rustic look (knots and filled-in cracks) it’s even easier to camouflage further repairs.
I used a clothes iron and a damp cloth to raise the dents, then drop-filled with superglue where the varnish was damaged. When the glue had hardened I scraped it level using a razor and polished it with some very fine sandpaper.
It was only about half an hour of labour in total, but it worked well. The damage is now invisible to all but the most careful of examination, and I don’t have to engage in self-criticism over my own stupidity every time I walk upstairs.
A horse came to Peckham Levels to take part in a musical performance (a reprise of Oliver Leith’s Garland, I believe) but I only saw the back end of the equine disappearing round a corner. I could still smell it all the way through the building for some time afterwards.
I cycled to IKEA on Friday to buy some more rechargeable batteries. They sell cheap, good quality, LSD NiMH batteries that are widely believed to be rebranded Eneloop, and these ones are made in Japan which makes it almost certain that they’re from the same factory.
I had a lunch of plant balls, naturally.
While I was there I also picked up a couple of Knagglig pine crates to organise the two compartments of chaos in our pantry cupboard. Apart from being a bit tall, they’re just the right size. But they’re just pine; with a razor saw and a couple of minutes I was able to modify the flat-packed sections and reduce them from three-slats-high to two before assembly.
I have two weeks of work left on my current contract. I’m looking forward to a couple of months off after that; my plans include Electromagnetic Field in July, and a walk with a friend to Canterbury over several days (mostly following the pilgrimage route, but avoiding the bits that are now the A2) in August. I’d also like to sleep a bit more than I have recently. Even with a three-day weekend, there isn’t nearly enough time to do the things I want.
Before all that, there’s Okinawa Day on Saturday, for which I have to finalise a guitar arrangement for a piece we only decided to add guitar to last Friday. On the day, rather than juggle two instruments myself between pieces, we’ve decided to assign someone as a roadie so I can just hand off my sanshin and get a guitar back, and vice versa. That will be good if it works.
Older
Week 283: Expensive plastic
The small crack in the shelf in the fridge door has graduated to a big crack, and a shard even fell out. I looked up the spare part – it’s just a squared-off polystyrene bucket – and it costs £82! That’s one eighth of the cost of the entire fridge! Unfortunately, the extended warranty on the fridge was only for three years, and this is closer to five years old.
Week 282: Frankenpad
I attended a Prokofiev concert. Not that one, although Gabriel Prokofiev is the Russian composer’s grandson. Even though I used to go to gigs at Iklectik regularly when they were in Waterloo, since they’ve moved into their new venue in the same building I work in I hadn’t been until last week. It doesn’t help that their website’s “What’s on” page still says that they’re updating it; I only knew about the event from a poster.
Week 281: Melting
Hello from London on a 34 C bank holiday Monday. I’ve lived in hotter places; I’ve even lived in places that were both hotter and more humid; yet the UK remains one of the worst places to be in a heatwave. There’s little air conditioning, and British houses lack the thermal mass to regulate the temperature downwards. All they can do is keep the sun off, at best.
Git push directly to another workstation
You don’t need GitHub to work with git on multiple computers, and you don’t even need a git remote set up to do it.
Sometimes I’m working on some code that is incomplete, or is speculative, or there’s another reason that I don’t want to push it to the remote branch yet, but I need to swap from my desktop to my laptop or vice versa.
Git is a distributed version control system, but I think people often forget what that implies. A git repository can be as simple as a directory available via
ssh, which means that your other computer is already a git repository as long as you cansshto it.
Older entries can be found in the archive.