Mark Carroll's Journal

On a recent visit to Edinburgh, R. and I chose Edinburgh Street Food (ESF) for lunch, on our way to the botanic garden. ESF features diverse vendors around an eating area. Initially, I was unimpressed: very much, oh, they reinvented the food court. Admittedly, I am a fan of food courts: they tend to be cheaper than restaurants and allow people their separate choices. Anyhow, it turned out that one can order online from any combination of the vendors in one transaction, providing one's table number, then the food appears in due course, delivered to the table in somewhat random order. So, much nicer than queueing then waiting at multiple counters. The Polish vendor was decent and, across the vendors I noticed, the prices seemed reasonable. R.'s Peruvian food was adequate but they undercooked the rice.

I am indeed settled back into watching what I eat. I am not monitoring carefully but I am certainly eating rather more strictly than previously, mostly by favouring vegetables and reducing portions and frequency of various calorific pleasures. I make the occasional exception, though: especially, I ignored my diet for Burns Night (haggis^*, turnip, potato, cranachan, etc.) and for Chinese New Year (round fruit, and takeout from Yum on Aikenhead Road). Mostly I haven't been distracted by hunger so perhaps I need to be stricter; time will tell.

^*We found a nice large non-pork haggis in Aldi.

We recently had a storm pass over Britain, not that it much affected us here in Glasgow. A high pressure system is following it, tomorrow should be pleasant, just in time for not-the-weekend of course. I took the day off for Thanksgiving so perhaps we'll be able to take a nice walk with L. This evening, we drive out to the supermarket to pick up the remaining items for Thanksgiving, including a turkey crown. The traditional meal with the turkey, stuffing, pies, etc. is the kind of food I enjoy, just as I also enjoy the traditional English meals like a Sunday roast. In unrelated news, I remain overweight.

Recently, R. made us some pan de coco. She wasn't impressed with the yeast or the coconut but I thought the buns came out well. I miss living in Maharlika Village where we could walk over to the market with the people with the, er, coconut machines, and R. could select a coconut and instruct them as to what she wanted, then we would come away with our fresh, er, grounds and fluids.

Several weeks ago, we found the Forge Shopping Centre, took quite a while for us to notice it given how long we've now been in central Glasgow. It's fairly linear with a fair range of stores, including an integral Asda at which we shopped this morning. There's a cafe in the concourse called Sisters which serves good food at a good price but enough of the staff are variously unfriendly that it isn't worth the mental cost. I get the impression that they'd prefer us not to bother them by ordering things. There is also quite a range of unlabelled dessert items, leaving me inclined to order only those things I can more precisely identify both to them and to myself.

I have had an eventful few days after spilling coffee on my laptop computer. As a rule, I try to keep drinks separately from, and preferably lower, than the computer, but I violated it thoughtlessly. After drying my computer out, opening, inspecting, cleaning, experimenting, it responds to input if the SSD hard drive is not inserted. With the drive in, it freezes at the BIOS welcome screen. The drive is unreadable in a USB enclosure so, although the drive is on the opposite side of the motherboard from the coffee impact, it appears to have been catastrophically destroyed by the incident.

Through further faults of mine, I am behind on both noting more recent passwords in some written form and on backing up my laptop. With all the moving house and catching up with other deferred chores, especially given now being in a small flat, my personal computing remains in disarray. So, I screwed up in a few ways at once. Fortunately, a path remained to make these mistakes far less consequential than they could have been. While moving house and setting up the new flat, at least I had made encrypted remote backups of some of the more critical items.

My data is linked by a varied and idiosyncratic arrangement of memorized descrambling algorithms, of keys, passwords and passphrases, and of variously encrypted archives of various things in various places. I got around to unpacking the hardware that allows me to read the old backup (and make new ones!) and finally worked out a half-remembered descrambling algorithm and, between them, they bootstrapped a chain of each step unlocking the next as I regained access to things, including those more up-to-date critical items.

I also used all this, another computer, and Docker, to create a virtual environment that lets me do the more important things for which I had used my original laptop; one puzzle there was in discovering X11UseLocalhost. In due course, I shall put a new hard drive into the real laptop computer and gladly get back to using that one instead.

Back in the late nineties, in England I could buy coffee bags. They were packaged and used very similarly to tea bags: many in a box, same size, etc., just add to very hot water then wait awhile. Purists may turn their nose up at such but they were certainly a convenient improvement over instant coffee.

Coffee bags remain available but, oddly, they've grown. The boxes tend to hold fewer, larger bags, I suspect less cheaply too. In trying different brands, we found that the Percol Americano stocked by Tesco are among the best. Perhaps better is the Rich Italian from Taylors of Harrogate, we should try their other flavours, also compare the price with the Percol.

Yesterday was sunny and mild, perfect for getting out and about. We caught up on supermarket shopping and picked up plenty of heavily discounted items along the way. A fair bit of the discounted food was fried, otherwise processed, etc., but it was tasty and very cheap, so hard to pass up. Once at least the cold items were put away, in the refrigerator, we headed back out for a walk along the beach. We didn't see as many other people there as usual but it was late afternoon by then. It was somewhat windy, which affects the waves, and we saw a few large ships leave the harbour, setting out for wherever. There was also a helicopter that I guessed was en route to an offshore platform.

Once we were back from all that, I walked down to collect my repaired mobile telephone. The display and touch responsiveness had started to fail so I had them replace the screen. It's convenient that they could deliver next-day service and are open for long hours. I can understand my European Moto G 5G Plus being a surprise to repair shops in the US but the guy in the store here also regarded it as being a rather unusual model so perhaps the UK market doesn't much see them either.

We had a couple of days that didn't quite go to plan. Midday Friday, during dishwashing, laundry, etc., we lost water, along with many others in the city, and it didn't return for well over twenty-four hours. I don't think I've experienced such an outage before and more surprising to me was that it seemed to take the provider a long time to identify the cause, at least judging by their occasional updates. We ended up spending the night in a Holiday Inn outside the city, which blessed us with a working bathroom.

Today, my cooking didn't go entirely to plan either. I made crêpes but a little too thick. Then, I made cookies but overbaked them a little, they ended up rather dry, maybe now best accompanied by coffee. It's all part of still getting used to making things in this kitchen. Next time, I know to use less batter for each crêpe, and to bake the cookies for less time; I can again increment toward agreeability.

Update: I forgot to mention that the hotel room's television appeared to be locked down to not respond to various buttons on the remote control. Unfortunately, this seemed to prevent making the closed captioning appear. I wonder if they realize what they did there and how readily they accommodate guests who don't hear well.

With my family finally being here, I have been quite busy, helping with all the settling in, and enjoying time with them, alongside full-time work. I am the only driver but they also have plenty available within walking distance. They are adapting well to the cold and I am pleased that they have found various new foods that they like. They have been a great help around the flat, and it is a pleasure to be back with them after our traveling a couple of weeks apart.

I wonder if we may buy a house of some kind in the New Year, I hope so. I will have been in my job for six months by then, which tends to reassure lenders that it's a steady gig. There are some great flats available but I fear the hassle of working with unchosen neighbors on communal maintenance issues. The first job is to figure our new household budget in more detail to determine what is truly affordable.