Mark Carroll's Journal

I don't manage to make time to update much lately but I can write a little about this and that occasionally.

Our dog L. is still doing reasonably better, which is reassuring. He's seemed quite well lately. I look forward to being able to take him for a good walk again. Right now I'm in the middle of my in-office days for the week so not much else gets done, of course others are home with him.

mst3kmoxie will graduate with M.A. (Hons) Art History so yay for them.

At work, I'm finally coming to the other side of a tricky project that's gone on for some weeks, I'm glad to be moving on to other, more usual, tasks, though today my current tasks got something of a specification change partway through. The tricky work is getting more testing now, I do hope that goes well. It's been nice to have limited timezone overlap with the person testing, then I can fix things before they start work and they get to test without me also fiddling with things.

Recently, I ran an errand which had me driving along a local road that had what seemed to me to be an absurd bicycle lane (on Google Maps), barely a couple of feet wide right in the door zone alongside the parked cars. If I were cycling, I'd not use it while hoping not to be annoying the cars behind. (When I passed, there were more cars parked further along the road than shown in the link.)

We saw Sinners (2025) and I didn't see what all the fuss is about. I tend to like the Deep South as a setting, and I like the blues, but I feel as if I've largely seen the elements before, it was easy to guess what would happen, the characters and plot seemed fairly thin; I just didn't end up much caring. I'm obviously missing something.

I've also been watching Pluribus (2025) which is an interesting concept but it does move fairly slowly, each episode doesn't come with quite the pace of developments that we get from, say, Fallout (2024). It's enough to keep me watching but, again, I'm not quite the fan that plenty others seem to be.

( 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. )

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.

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?

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.

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.

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. 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.

( Earlier this week, expected deliveries kept me at home. )

On today's expedition, ( I peered at a high school and avoided a bicyclist. )

( Google Maps led me astray. )

( I checked out the city-centre shops. )

( I bought freezer bags at Sainsbury's. )

( I still plan to buy a car. )

( I was a bit sore after the walk but I do need exercise. )

A couple of examples of where I wish service providers could do better:

( Broadband )

( Car insurance )