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.

Our couple of small road trips down into England afforded some success though plans were a little derailed by sites having holiday closures that weren't previously obvious. Fortunately, my plans include fallbacks so, among other things, our dog L. had a good time running around on Bamburgh Beach in Northumberland (near the impressive castle) and Roanhead Beach in Cumbria (near Morecambe Bay). He also got to see swans at Annandale Water from as close as I dared let him get. Roanhead Beach turned out to be enormous: by coincidence, we arrived at around low tide when there is an awful lot of walking along the sand that one can do before getting near any sea. I also learned to avoid Windermere: narrow roads full of tourists.

L.'s been suffering some gastrointestinal issue over these holidays; there has been an infection going around. They now seem to be on the mend but it slows us down and distracts us while we focus on making sure they're okay. We actually left Northumberland early to make it to an appointment with our regular vet. With luck, we won't need a second appointment.

After a quiet New Year at home, we'll go to visit family in Dundee then be back at work. R. works tomorrow too, at least from home, helping to fill out the support rota.

This morning, I got out of the bedroom at a leisurely pace. I had a dream in which a security camera had caught Claudia Winkleman (British celebrity) fast asleep in a chair at some garden show she was helping to present, which caused some amusement among viewers of the footage, then I awoke and took a bath. After toweling off, I usually lie on the bed a little to finish drying. During this, I indulged in having Alexa play me David Bowie's Life on Mars, Ultravox's Vienna, ELO's Twilight (from back when we had concept albums), and Elton John's Nikita which, together with the The Rocky Horror Show earworms I've had lately, probably ages me well.

Another thing that probably ages me is that, when I was thinking about the results of our dog L.'s breed test, in interpreting the percentages in terms of ancestry, of course I was thinking in powers of two which comes quite naturally to those of us who grew up with early microcomputers. I suppose that people in the Antebellum South would be good at such arithmetic too but I am not that old. Anyhow, L. is indeed largely Shih Tzu with, quite reasonably, a bit of Lhasa Apso among great grandparents. I was pleased to read that L. is not at risk of any of the medical conditions that they tested for.

Our lack of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination provision in the UK is said to stem from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation's rather limited consideration of the impact of COVID-19.

My impression of COVID-19 is that there is enough accumulated evidence of risk of life-changing long-term effects, ranging from cognitive to vascular, perhaps also immunological, and enough extra risk from reinfection, that I should be fairly concerned given that our lives don't allow us to live like hermits, and that SARS-CoV-2 infection seems to remain an ongoing issue as mutations continue.

Also, that JCVI's assessment considered rather little of the above and that's most of why they don't judge it worth handing out vaccinations rather more freely.

I wonder to what extent I am mistaken in the above. Or, if not, if there are any good summaries that lay the case out clearly and persuasively, to help me be yet another source of pressure on our elected representatives. Also, how susceptible JCVI might be to political pressure, or if a rather more limited assessment is somehow required by their remit.

And, if JCVI were to be more expansive in the evidence considered, if that would actually change the cost-benefit sufficiently.

Part of why I suspect that I may not just be catching hysteria from the swivel-eyed is that American health insurers seem to intend to continue covering such immunizations. One would expect them to excel in brutally realistic analysis of health statistics.

My weight remains much higher than it should be, indeed much higher than it was when I lived in Eastern Tennessee, but I am grateful that it at least seems to be remaining stable. In time, as I improve my diet and exercise, it may thus drift back downward. Also, on a health note, we just got our influenza vaccinations, paid for by the family medical coverage from my employer, Addepar. Somebody from Spire Global reached out to me to see if I'd like to work on a project there but, while I'd love to be working locally in Rust on space systems, they pay less and don't appear from the outside to be as pleasant a place to work at this time. With Addepar, at least I am getting to learn a little of complex financial instruments which is differently interesting.

My work is sometimes entertaining in further overloading the acronyms in my head. Recent examples include:

acronym	what I first thought	what it meant
AMA	against medical advice	ask me anything
PTSD	post-traumatic stress disorder	position time-series data
UVF	Ulster Volunteer Force*	unit verification failure†

^*I was born into 1970s Britain, the Troubles were in the news
^†for instance, how much stock someone owns today should be what they owned yesterday plus buys less sells, we check that's so

My illness ran the usual course of a cold, though it took its time somewhat. From yesterday, my head felt rather clearer, even though I still had plenty of physical symptoms. So, I could work, and felt like doing other things too, rather than just sitting and resting. I still have some congestion and a sore throat but they're just inconvenient, I don't feel anywhere near as rotten.

I'll head into the office today. Because of other things going on at home, e.g., I have a dental appointment on Friday morning, today would end up being my only day onsite this week, so I want to go in at least sometime, and in recovery I would think I am well past being infectious.

I am up in the middle of the night because something happened with the toilet cistern so it wouldn't stop filling. I don't know how it gets into that mode, it's easy enough to remedy temporarily, but anything non-trivial in the middle of the night wakes me up. What annoying timing, I already didn't feel great and now I get to be sleep-deprived before commuting for a full day in another city.

I'd feel better if I were already more productive at work. It feels as if I take a while to get to grips with each aspect of what they do and my colleagues already have much of that familiarity. And, whenever it feels like I'm getting nearer finished with a task, it becomes apparent that actually I am not. Nobody's said, goodness, you're dangerously slow here, what's your issue? but I feel it plenty just from myself.

Part of it is getting used to Java again but more of it that I have never used some of their frameworks (my relevant background is mostly Hibernate and Spring) and I am still learning how their code is arranged, and how people like things to be done. It's certainly clear that my intuition often doesn't match others', sometimes quite strongly; each time I misjudge that, more time is wasted. I don't see why I won't get there in the end but, a couple of months in now, I would already rather like to be contributing better than I am. In the meantime, I'll keep on plodding through, and hoping that others remain more patient with me than I am with myself.

We returned to camping last weekend and were quite lucky with the weather, the loch looked beautiful on our first morning and we saw small fish in the shallows. I am out of shape or just worn out though, I was very appreciative of having limited duties with the teardown in particular. I slept well, wrapped in my sleeping bag inside a sleeping bag atop a new air mattress. The sunny afternoons could be warm but the nights still get chilly. While different absolutely, I was reminded of the relative cooling when I was outside Tucson in the desert after night fell. In a different life, I might have ended up living in a trailer in the Sonoran Desert but that's something the multiverse can explore on my behalf. R. is excellent at organizing our camping, I am lucky to get to follow their lead.

I have receding gums and my teeth are somewhat exposed toward the root. It is with considerable trepidation that I face cleanings from a dental hygienist. One cleaning I had back in Dundee had my teeth still aching for a couple of days afterward.

My present dentist is quite excellent. It was only through unusual luck that I was able to land them as an NHS rather than a private patient. Given my past experiences, what we do is: when a cleaning is due, they do half my mouth in a session: four injections to numb one side, then the cleaning is under local anæsthetic and, so far, after the anæsthetic wears off a few hours later, I remain pain- and ache-free. That, I could get used to.

I wish that I had been born a little later when we could just adjust our bodies to keep on producing teeth, or at least when we could grow clones of our teeth that can be popped in when the current are in poor shape. I remain impressed that our cells organize themselves into the structures of our various teeth.

I try to drink plenty of liquid each day, typically glasses of room-temperature water and hot tisanes, sometimes various tea and coffee also. About the only use I have for ice is for making a bowl of very cold water in which to cool boiled eggs rapidly.

With our colder weather, something new has happened: no longer do I find glasses of cold water appetizing. It would take plenty of tisanes to get me what feels like enough liquid. So, inspired by a colleague back in Dundee who used to drink plenty of warm water, I've now started doing likewise: it's okay. So, that's the new pattern, at least for now.

( 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. )