mtbc: maze J (red-white)
I was busy with a family visit. )

The rented Volvo was a little annoying. )

I have also been involved with a major product launch at work and have been somewhat covering as colleagues have also been taking some days off. At least work stuff has gone fairly smoothly and I have enjoyed getting back to writing some code. My work-life balance is back under control, at least to a first approximation.

Given the above activity, last weekend was my first reasonably free one for quite some time. I spent the Saturday with family visiting from Dundee. Now we are to ready the flat for relisting for sale through a different agent. Among all that, we will try to find another weekend for camping, not that the current weather is encouraging.

Our dog's a good weight, I am finally dieting to improve mine. )

Money's tight at the moment. )
mtbc: maze D (yellow-black)
The city seems to be repainting markings on roads which is great but somewhat overdue, plenty more to be done yet. It can be hard to see where the boundaries are and what the arrows are, making it difficult to know exactly where to drive and when to stop. It is also awkward to discover which lanes are now for turns or not only at the last minute, one thing some US states get right is plenty of advance warning about which lane to get into.

One kind of lane usage I am undecided on is those where there are two lanes in each direction, the inside lane being for buses and taxis except near a junction. The normal cars all occupy the outside lane, get stuck behind people turning right at junctions, so cut into the end of the bus lane, cross the junction in the inside lane, then move back over as the bus lane resumes.

I don't much get why taxis are typically afforded driving privileges, they basically do what cars do except for having a driver who doesn't want to go to the destination then parks more obstructively once they arrive, but I am all for making bus travel a priority. Still, I don't know how much buses benefit from their separate lane, as balanced against the safety issue of causing all these lane changes at many intersections.

I had to dodge a driver this morning, one of these who wants to move into a lane they can't currently see the traffic in, so crosses their fingers and noses out into it anyway. The last accident I was in, years ago back in Ohio, I was proceeding forward in my lane and the other driver tried to cross it without being able to see it was clear, at least their insurance company folded easily and it didn't affect my premiums at all.

Student pickup around our youngest's high school is absurd. The roadside already has plenty of parked cars so parents just stop their car out in the main carriageway and wait for their child. I can understand a momentary pause in the road to pick them up but blocking the traffic to wait for some minutes seems very selfish to me.
mtbc: maze D (yellow-black)
Not to be outdone by Aberdeen's Back Wynd, St Andrews has Butts Wynd, they're both fairly central. Though, the larger surprise has been my what did it say? when hearing Google Maps speak street names as I drive around Glasgow, examples including Biggar Street and Siemens Street.
mtbc: photograph of me (Default)
Holding the aerial displays out to sea, to be best viewed from Ayr beach, apparently made the appellation International Ayr Show irresistible. American airshows feature more of an abundance of modern military aircraft but, especially with paying only for car parking, there was still enough at this air show to make it well worth our going.

The Red Arrows were probably the main attraction. I hadn't known that Army people would be parachuting (that part over land, of course). My favourite, also popular with the crowd, was the Eurofighter Typhoon, which showed off some manoeuvring, we saw that both on the Friday and the Saturday. I also liked the Chinook, I hadn't realized quite how agile they can be, it made me wonder quite what the controls look like for a twin-rotor helicopter.

We were lucky with the weather. Friday evening's displays had the sunset as a scenic backdrop. Saturday's forecast had seemed mixed, there was rain later on, and on the following morning. At times when we most wanted not to be rained on, the clouds kindly obliged.

Traffic was fairly dreadful. Roads approaching and leaving Ayr were understandably congested. Perhaps more preventably, the car park at Belleisle Park seemed poorly managed, exiting was somewhat anarchic and took a very long time. The traffic was not directed well and some of the queues of vehicles trapped in the car park moved extremely slowly. I wondered if those using the car park at Ayr Racecourse fared any better.

Update: The traffic and car parking issues made the local news, with accounts of drivers being stuck in car parks for hours.
mtbc: maze D (yellow-black)
Driving in England, I often see national speed limit signs which implicitly specify a speed limit that depends on the road one's on and the vehicle one's driving on it. There are also speed limit signs stating a specific number, often 30 or 40, which I believe limit all vehicles identically, at least the Highway Code doesn't seem to add any obvious caveats suggesting otherwise. These signs seem agreeably easy to interpret: one is ordered to apply either the defaults or the given number.

Driving the moving van, I became more aware of those defaults because the limits for such vans are different. It was but a modestly sized van but still limited to 60mph on dual carriageways. I got to thinking of the larger lorries that even on motorways are limited to 60mph and wondered about signing I had seen on Scottish sections of motorway that bear a 70mph sign instead of a national speed limit sign.

What on Earth do those mean? Are there any 70mph signs in England too? Can a large articulated lorry really travel at 70mph on these roads? If not, where is the section of the Highway Code that tells me that?
mtbc: maze D (yellow-black)
Today we drove over to Aberdeen to finish the cleaning in our flat there then drop the keys off at the letting agent's office. It's been remarkably foggy so I used the fog light on the car, though I haven't actually observed it myself yet, I'll have to turn it on again, get out and look at it. For some reason, in driving between Aberdeen and Glasgow, I find that the stretch between Perth and Stirling feels the longest. Now we are back at our Glasgow flat.

The letting agent's cleaning checklist is laughable, many pages long. As always, we leave the flat cleaner than we found it. For a fair few places, if they really did pay professional cleaners before we moved in then they need to be engaging a different one! I have never moved into a flat where a persnickety cleaning specification appeared to have been remotely followed by the previous occupants, though I have been thanked by private landlords for leaving the flat so clean.
mtbc: maze D (yellow-black)
We have now moved in to our converted flat in the heart of Glasgow, we stop back in Aberdeen this coming Sunday to finish cleaning the rented flat there. A few appliances, etc., seem to need repair or replacement so we are working through those, unfortunately the market is buoyant enough that there isn't adequate opportunity to inspect fully in advance, but that's all quite manageable.

More awkwardly, our normal walking around on our mostly laminated floors apparently seems a terrible imposition on the neighbour below. I'm switching to very soft-soled slippers and we're putting some thick rugs down but ultimately we don't have the money to re-floor the whole place and don't yet have the skills to levitate like the Strangers in Dark City (1998). Ultimately, it's not we who decided to move to a converted flat below another, they're not known to be the quietest, and the ceilings are high enough that they could put in a suspended one if they needed to.

The move went well, especially given that everything fit into the van, and the van fit into the car park below, and it was great to get to drive manual transmission again. The weather largely smiled on us when convenient, at least sufficiently. The window ahead of my desk here features a major intersection so I sometimes get to hear the sirens of emergency vehicles or the complaints of drivers annoyed with each other. Still, it's nice having the motorway so close at hand, we can easily visit IKEA and suchlike for furnishing our flat. There is also plenty within an easy walk, including a nearby Asian supermarket.

There is much on our to-do list, ranging from address changes to furniture assembly. However, I very much look forward to some quieter evenings and weekends in the longer term. We have had the viewings, the purchase, the move, now the setup, and I am ready for something of a break.
mtbc: maze F (cyan-black)
We have been exploring Aberdeen's festival of light. It is over a few evenings which, judging by queues, doesn't seem to be quite enough. Among other things, there are giant glowing figures, and apparently a dance routine where we arrived around when it finished. One of the glowing figures suffered technical difficulties but we remained for long enough to see it restored to its former glory.

Yesterday evening, we walked back down to attend the maybe largest part of the festival, in Union Terrace Gardens, that we had previously postponed in view of the queue, which is probably at least an hour long. Before joining the queue, I picked up some takeaway Taco Bell, and ate as I waited. Here in the UK, the seven-layer burrito remains on the menu, a favourite of mine among their fare. Once we were finally admitted to the gardens, we found that the festival site included some nice clanking trees whose glowing orbs' brightness was related to the clanks, and a glowing fox and owl. I also noticed some drones high in the air above.

Queueing rather less, we have also visited woodland and the like. There may have been interesting animals but I am bad at spotting those, at best I managed the two small deer that crossed the trail right in front of us. Maryculter Woods is one of the closer such destinations. We were generally lucky in getting a parking space in what were mostly small, busy car parks. The weather in recent days has been most cooperative with such expeditions.

One nice thing about Aberdeen is that parking at the beach is easy and free so, yesterday afternoon, we returned and got to see plenty more dogs being exercised, some getting into the water, also the usual couple of people in wetsuits out swimming or surfing. Graffiti asks, is the water real? The woodland trails also see a fair few dogs being walked.

A busy day

Dec. 1st, 2022 09:32 pm
mtbc: maze F (cyan-black)
I have been sleeping a little too late, falling asleep after midnight and rising after 9h. My schedule is more naturally more like a rather early 22h to 6h so I have some adjustment yet to do. I shall get there, especially as, next month, I'll have a child here to help get out to high school in the mornings. I'll have to figure a way to designate the various kids in this journal, I had my other two over yesterday.

Anyhow, I overslept this morning and R. helpfully called me and I managed to get the car in for its booked recall work in reasonable time. Oddly, they didn't call me back for pickup, I guess it's running into tomorrow. I did remind them to actually note my telephone number. The loaner is a Honda Jazz of the same generation as mine so it required no introduction.

I attended to three work tasks and am glad to have gotten them done: I sorted out some diagrams and their generation, I adjusted how database configuration responds to command-line options, and I addressed a couple of unrelated issues that had been making continuous integration fail on that previous.

We also turned further attention to relocation preparation, such as the acquisition of warmer attire for arrivals from the tropics.

I ran three laundry loads and caught up on rather belated washing up, which isn't as bad as it sounds because I at least rinse the dishes promptly.

Feeling rather busy, and finding that frozen fish may not have survived too many months in the freezer, I opted for an easy, quick lunch of canned chicken jalfrezi with a piece of toast, followed by a Fry's Turkish Delight.
mtbc: maze D (yellow-black)
This evening, we shopped in Mandaluyong, finishing at the SM Megamall, which is where I once had a shawarma burrito from Taco Bell. What I hadn't previously noticed is the Japanese automated car lot outside, there are metal towers in which cars are parked on individual platforms that slowly travel up and down. We watched it while waiting for our Grab* six-seater to arrive. Some of our cars home use Waze to navigate which requires verbal correction on our part. Our impression is that Waze is inspired by the routes motorcycles take, not distinguishing them from cars when routing, which can guide drivers onto some of the local roads in Bicutan, etc., that are not comfortably passable in something as large as a car.

*like Lyft, Uber, etc.
mtbc: maze L (green-white)
Last Sunday, I took my children to a transport museum which unexpectedly came with surprise bus trips, even a mystery tour. It is interesting to see how things were. Now I wonder if I will even ever own another car for which I need to know how to change gear, I don't think I've had to use a manual choke since the nineties. This morning, I was reminded of how my father and I did some applied mathematics with quite different approaches, he had not been taught to use complex numbers and matrices but would reach the same answer by other means. In the afternoon, I was reminded of part of the behaviour of the 6502 CPU's status register. Separately, I have often thought about how I had a childhood without Internet access, what a difference that makes, I had to use reference libraries for really quite basic information or even just to find the address of to whom to write to get the information.

Or, again going back further, I bought a couple of rather more historical books about English cuisine given how very much it changed since WWⅡ, now I even know how to bake a hedgehog. [personal profile] anna_wing recently posted about how people arranged to stay warm before central heating allowed them to heat their whole environment throughout, at least until Russia turns off the gas. In short, things change, and how we learn to live changes accordingly, and I can't help but wonder how very many how-to-live techniques are widely forgotten from one generation to another. I don't even know if children can tie shoelaces any more.

Part of me says that these past people's lives, skills, and experience matter and should be held close but perhaps that's a more emotional part. A more rational part of me wonders, why? Would it not be better for me to not distract myself with past ways, instead to look forward to what can be done henceforth with what we now have? Would there be any point in salting beef on Martinmas, or whatever? After civilization collapses, sure, but as a computer programmer I am probably rather screwed regardless of my timely beef-salting. Maybe it's related to grieving for my parents: on the one hand, I don't want to let go of the world that they knew, which of course is part of who they were, but, well, it's gone now, and no degree of wistfulness or gratitude will bring it, or them, back. I wonder if I should try to pay scant attention to remembered worlds and focus more completely on the world I find myself in now.
mtbc: maze D (yellow-black)
Having now had more opportunity to drive around, including out to Dyce, I am pleased indeed with my fourth-generation Honda Jazz, and look forward to heading to Dundee on Sunday to spend some hours with my children. It helped markedly to stop the car from chiming alerts at me. )

There are nice features. )

Simple is also nice but not available. )

The car once lived near my aunt. )

The cost of car insurance is a concern. )
mtbc: maze D (yellow-black)
Last night was my first sleeping in my flat on the top floors in an Aberdonian housing development; my first day here is warm and sunny, most agreeable. In the distance, I see the North Sea. Things have gone roughly to plan, at least enough so, though costing money, and so many small to-do's now. I did a bunch of shopping yesterday at an Asda Superstore, today I can try to get things straighter and put away better and make sure the various things around the flat work and report those that have issues.

I don't have a car yet but a fair bit is quite walkable from here, I am near the city centre with its Victorian granite buildings. A lot can be found less than two miles away. In coming days, I start my new job, which will be demanding, so I should make the most of the time I have now. I've been going back and forth on buying a car, especially given that current trends probably warrant a fairly new hybrid which costs more up front, and I may be spending many weeks this year working from Asia, but I think the convenience would be worth it. Among other things, I want to continue my current history of insurance coverage without claims.
mtbc: photograph of me (Default)
A couple of examples of where I wish service providers could do better:

Broadband )

Car insurance )
mtbc: maze B (white-black)
I do not eat much fast food but I do enjoy it. In my last days here, I sometime eat at places that do not have locations in Scotland. Today's choice was Hardee's, I've not visited for years and I like their mushroom swiss burger. It turned out that they have a location in Oliver Springs so I headed there this lunchtime. For not being busy, they were rather slow, they omitted the sauces/dips I'd ordered, and the burger was … not something that would create in me the ability to miss it, not that I can put my finger on the disappointment. Their slowness was doubly surprising given that I had placed the order from home for pick-up ASAP. Still, they were apologetic enough about the delay that they assured me that my apple pie was the best of the batch, though I'd expect a small variance among them.

While waiting for Hardee's to complete my order, I sat in the warm sunshine, in my rented Chevy Malibu, watching the traffic on state route 62, and reflected on how very at home I feel in the less-populated areas of the US. I really enjoy living here, that's why I returned, and why I'd hoped to be able to share it with my children now that they are adults. Still, at least I got to spend some more time here, we all have alternative lives that we might have lived, I just wish that I'd had more warning that my stay would be greatly truncated. On the way back home, I saw four deer in somebody's back yard.

It is strange to be driving an automatic, I keep wanting to control the gears. East Tennessee can get hilly and I like to use low gear downhill. The automatic has an L which seems to be a lower gear but too mildly so. I was surprised to observe that the cruise control seems to shift into a higher gear when going rather faster than the target speed but, again, insufficiently aggressively. I give it marks for effort, though.
mtbc: maze B (white-black)
I may be far from Scotland but I lived there for long enough that I like to mark Burns Night, principally with food. Cabbage isn't exactly uncommon in Scots cuisine, I had already cooked a whole one at lunchtime though. I get at least four portions out of a cabbage. A couple of portions, I mixed with black pepper, egg, and fried baked potato. The other portions, I mixed with garlic and onion and will figure other seasoning when I use them. At lunchtime, I also discovered that Progresso make a properly spicy jambalaya. Sure, the label on the can said that it was spicy but, for something aimed at mainstream Westerners, it's nice to find that they did actually deliver.

Anyhow, after work, for the main event, I placed an online food order for haggis, neeps and tatties, among other things, and drove into downtown Knoxville to pick them up. On the way, I remembered how much I loved when I first moved to Columbus, Ohio, and lived in the city itself, very near an interstate exit, which put plenty close at hand. I miss being right amid all that now. Others on the street were upset at all the traffic but I wondered what they expected living so near an exit. Here, I-40 takes me right downtown and has all manner of other useful exits, also there is (scarce) free parking after 18h. The radio played me Billy Joel, Fleetwood Mac, etc., most agreeable. Once I arrived back home, on getting out of the car I was greeted by an eyeful of Orion and the Pleiades.

The food did not look grand and was not cheap but was rather good, it hit the spot. I don't know how authentic the haggis might be but it looked correct and tasted fine. I much like certain haggis and black pudding, and am not much of a fan of some others, so hitting on a haggis I liked was agreeable indeed. Naturally, I supplemented the meal with a drop of Glenfiddich.

Burns Night unfortunately coincided with salad-making night for work lunches so, with the earlier cabbage-and-friends portions too, I had a lot of washing up waiting when all was said and done. Having also lost time with the trip to Knoxville, unusually I left a fair bit of washing up over for today, at least I am now caught up again. Next year I may plan better.
mtbc: maze B (white-black)
Being a little stricter with myself seems to have been working, my weight returned to its gentle trend downward. Next, I should focus on my resting heart rate, I am still slacking in trying to get back into exercising most days.

Whenever I come in under 140lb, I get a day off to eat whatever I like. Yesterday I tried Krystal for what may be the first time. I am used to White Castle, which is soon to celebrate its centenary, and this seems similar. The meal was quite good, mostly in terms of spice: the default condiment on the cheeseburgers is mustard, chili cheese fries are readily available, and the apple turnover had plenty of cinnamon; altogether a nice combination. If I order online from home then I reach the Krystal drive-through just about on time for pickup.

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mtbc: photograph of me (Default)
Mark T. B. Carroll

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