Pedestrian crossings across local roads

My neighbourhood features mostly one-way streets, alternating in direction rather like in Manhattan. At junctions between perpendicular streets, the two incoming directions for vehicles can be stopped by a signal-controlled pedestrian crossing, the outgoing directions allow vehicles to leave freely. This is a little inconvenient as a pedestrian: to make my way ahead, at each junction I must make two crossings: one to get to the other side of the road I am following, the other to cross the intersecting road. It is fairly workable, often I can make one of the crossings shortly after its counterpart, but I wonder how typical this arrangement is, how other cities place pedestrian crossings in such situations.

E-mail systems: MTA logs available in MUA

A nice aspect of not using a large ISP's mail provision is that I get to see the mail server logs. In particular, if somebody did not get an e-mail from me, I can see evidence of that their system accepted the message (or not) then pursue the matter accordingly. It occurred to me that, as I use Gnus for my e-mail client, which is very programmable, it ought to be possible, for each sent message, to grab relevant server logs before they expire and store them alongside the message itself. A bit of elisp and ssh and grep would probably go a long way in my case, though still more than I will get around to implementing myself. Still, I expect that many others would also like such a feature, so it seemed odd that I had not noticed other mention of it.

Worldcon: Glasgow 2024

Worldcon, the large science fiction convention, returned to Glasgow with well over seven thousand attendees for this year's. From my flat, the venue is but a pleasant walk along the river, an exceptional enough event that it is worth the cost in fees and in time, over a weekend so only three days' leave from work.

( I had little chance to prep but it was easy to get started. )

( I focused on getting from session to session. )

( Again I wondered at how modern novels tend to be much longer. )

( There is more on offer than just the sessions. )

( The convention seemed to achieve its goal of being inclusive. )

( Worldcon's closing ceremony was better than the Olympics'. )

I had been growing to appreciate the ambience of Worldcon and was a little sad to see it end.