Mark Carroll's Journal

I took a few days off work, I'm back in the office this Friday. My time off has kept me rather busy with all manner of unexpected things, to some extent that looks to continue. To give one example, on the evening before Thanksgiving, with a raw turkey marinating, there is a large puff of smoke, the power breakers trip, and our electric oven appears to die. Fortunately, the top element for grilling still seems to work, with which R. coaxed us a turkey after all. The new oven arrives this weekend, when we'll see if we can replace the fitted oven ourselves or if we fall back to summoning a tradesperson. Also, for making one of the pies: canned pumpkin seems to have largely disappeared from the general supermarkets, we ended up ordering that from Amazon.

Not wanting to bother with VPNs and Peacock and such, I usually find one of the free Thanksgiving parade streams that shows the centre of the action from some other city than New York. I think it may have been Philadelphia or somesuch last year, this year I stumbled upon Chicago's, not the best choice as it turned out to heavily promote some sponsor's product for cleaning up fæces.

Among other things keeping me busy, today I did my office desk booking for the rest of the month, and tomorrow we are to get our SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations: I seem to have found local Moderna which costs us £85 each but the risks are too high to not do this at least occasionally.

It has been some days since I made an entry here. While R. works on making some ube (purple yam) cake, I can write up and share various tidbits. R. is pleased to have found salted duck eggs at a good price earlier today in what passes as the closest area Glasgow might have to a Chinatown.

( I watched some science fiction. )

I found myself in an odd mood for more mellow electronica lately, Alexa managed to play me things like Synergy's Ancestors and Jean-Michel Jarre's Computer Weekend without getting songs mixed up.

eBay irritated me. I bought two of an item, then found ( it difficult to request a refund for one, then the other. )

At work it's interesting to see how I have a pattern of afternoon meetings at the moment, given that I work closely with US-based colleagues, though we do also have engineers in Pune. Back at Zilliqa my meetings tended to be in the mornings, as I worked with people in the Middle East and Asia.

( I found that I have various money, and I read some science fiction. )

( I am still experimenting with commuting for days that I work on-site. )

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.