Mark Carroll's Journal

I survived my first week at work. I went on-site in Edinburgh for the first three days, initially picking up my shiny new MacBook M4 Pro running Sequoia. The office turns out to be a pleasant dog-friendly space with the amenities one might hope for. Being a hybrid worker, I book desk space when I need it from the hot-desking pool. The desks are motorized adjustable desks that can become standing desks. There are very many onboarding things to do over the coming weeks, a lot to do and learn, and plenty of friendly, helpful people to meet. Despite the open-plan layout, it's not too hard to focus, not very distracting.

As usual, there's some wrestling with the Mac but, in all fairness, plenty of things did just work quite well. The most obvious wrestling was the usual: Mac users love to see things in blurry-text. Okay, all the problems I ran into this week arise because I have the temerity to plug the Mac into non-Apple hardware. For instance, the external monitors on the desks have low pixel density and recent versions of the OS have removed useful options for fixing that. I was able to solve the blur by installing iTerm2 and unchecking Anti-Aliased. Other pending issues include it applying the wrong keymap for my external keyboard and imposing some godawful acceleration on my scroll-wheel but they're in progress, I want to get some actual work done too.

Nice though the office environment is, being in transit for at least three hours per day makes me appreciate fully remote work: Wednesday felt as if it should already be Friday. I am currently taking the more expensive option: subway over to Queen Street, and the frequent faster trains aren't as crowded as I'd heard, quite tolerable. (Work has provided my laptop a privacy screen to limit viewing angle.) My current route to the office includes climbing the 124 News Steps which means I get the hardest part of my workday out of the way at the start. The bus would be cheapest except I'd probably want extra bus to and from the stations: at each end, the bus station is further than the railway. A compromise might be the limited rail ticket: I'd end up working long days but could probably just walk at both ends around the intercity portion. Belatedly, I also wonder if I should be masking for the railway journey: perhaps it's outstandingly the riskiest among my habits.

We have been somewhat lucky with the weather recently. We had a lovely day for when my two children visited for some walking and shopping in Glasgow city centre. We similarly had a lovely day for visiting Edinburgh, we finally got to explore the botanic garden. Our luck runs out this weekend: we had planned to go camping again. Last time went well but the weather forecast for tomorrow looks grim so we will get things done here at home instead.

Having been made redundant from my fully remote job, I am starting a new job that has me on-site in Edinburgh twice per week. In looking into how to make this a cost-effective habit, first I thought of railcards but there don't seem to be any that apply. Fortunately, there are flexi ticket bundles that are useful for people taking a few trips within a longer period, which seem to be the best option.

Among the flexible tickets, the two obvious kinds appear to be from ScotRail which would cost me around £22 per day and allow me to travel on all the relevant trains, and from CrossCountry which for around £15 per day allow me to travel on only their trains which are the minority, only a couple of plausible ones each day either way. We need to save money where we can but the latter option has me arriving back into Glasgow at 21.22 at the earliest.

I didn't discover the cheaper option until after I had bought the other, at least for the initial period. After I learn more about the peak-time trains and the culture in the office, I can look into limiting which trains I may take. Perhaps a couple of longer workdays each week will make sense.

Having transcribed the timetable into LibreOffice Calc and tried some sorts, it seems to me that Central Station has those couple of useful CrossCountry trains which take at least an hour, plus some ScotRail services that take rather longer still. Queen Street station is further from me on foot, easy by subway though, and offers only ScotRail services that run frequently and take less than an hour but are anecdotally rather busy.

I am amused that family visiting from the tropics have chosen to visit Edinburgh today where, with windchill, it is forecast to get as warm as -3°C. I hope that they have a good time exploring the city and are wrapped up well.

Update: It turns out that they indeed had a good time.

With all our kids away, we took a brief roadtrip ourselves into the North of England, just me and R. and our dog L. who got to run around happily everywhere from Easby Abbey to Morecambe Bay. We're back home now, settled in cosily for the New Year and the multi-hazard storm it is to bring us.

On one of my work trips to London, EasyJet failed somewhat for the departure back home. They called us to the gate for the delayed flight far too early, especially given that the gate was small with hardly any seats. After having our boarding passes checked, we all got to stand in a small area watching the arriving passengers disembark, then continued standing for much longer while some system loudly played the last call announcement for the flight over and over and over again. Talking to somebody else afterward, they did the same for another flight.

For the same departure, it took quite some time to even get airside because security kept stopping altogether for no obvious reason; the staff and passengers would stand around, waiting for the music to restart or whatever.

An interesting thing I learned on the work trip was about BCPL, an ancestor of C. I may be misconstruing some details but the approximate story is that its simple compact bytecode is such that the interpreter core and your bytecode programme together may run even faster than a straight machine code version of your programme because they fit better into the processor's level-one cache. It seems plausible though I couldn't find a confirmatory reference at a glance.

While I'm in a constituency where my vote could help it to swing from the SNP to Labour, which I've now decided would be preferable, I think I like the Liberal Democrats enough more than I dislike the SNP to give them some support instead, even if they aren't a likely contender this time around. Not quite a last-minute decision. In general, my life's a bit more lurching-between-urgencies than I prefer.

I visited West London in assisting the aforementioned consular tedium and drove back up to Glasgow yesterday. While down there, I was interested to see a Porsche Carrera that was maybe forty years old, and a Citroën 2CV that was probably older still.

Thinking back to the Eurovision Song Contest, I think I found the Armenian and the Finnish entries quite fun and liked the Estonian and Lithuanian ones, maybe somewhat also the Ukrainian. Perhaps there's a little bit of geographical clustering there.

We might go camping again some weekend soon. ( We've camped a couple of times beside a loch. )

We failed to find a buyer for our flat. I've taken it off the market and will try relisting next month to get it back to the top of the search results. I am cautiously hopeful, it's not as if we require anything beyond its valuation.

Yesterday, I headed into our Edinburgh office for the first time since moving to Glasgow. Technically I am wholly remote but I like to show my face occasionally if possible, there are empty desks for visitors. There are many trains between the two cities, and the express trains take less than an hour, it turned out to be a pleasant, easy journey. I walked through Princes Street Gardens on the way to the office, and I stayed after work to socialize before heading back home. It is most welcome to see colleagues now and again and it was noted that I have been employed with them for a year. Luck held well enough for me to avoid heavy rain. The day may have tired me out: I slept late this morning and felt lethargic afterward.

We hadn't tried FlixBus before but were able to book good, cheap seats for an intercity journey so they definitely seemed worth a try. They then changed the booking to give us worse seats on a different bus. In the meantime, our original seats are back for sale on their website, for more money. Their live-chat service agent cannot reverse this nor initiate a refund.

No doubt the above bait and switch is entirely in accordance with their terms and conditions. However, treating customers like that seems so outrageous to me that I shall make a point of not offering them any more custom until they stop treating people like suckers.

Update: After our subsequent complaint, they eventually issued a full refund.

When I lived in the US, fast food worked as one would hope: one orders, then the correct items are presented promptly. Last year, I mentioned here how life in Metro Manila was rather different, where some restaurants often had a surprisingly small fraction of advertised menu items even available in the first place, admittedly mostly not fast-food restaurants.

Ordering fast food here in Scotland, we often find that items are available but we are presented with not quite all of them. I suspect it may actually be the most common occurrence that exactly one is missing. Often, when I go back to raise the issue, they seem to recognize quickly that the item still awaits presentation, it still lies on a counter they use in assembling orders. Still, it does rather put one off ordering anything to take away, as first suggested some years ago when my eldest enjoyed a few chicken sandwich orders without any chicken in the bun.

One caveat: the Taco Bell on Graceland Boulevard in Columbus, Ohio, worked rather differently from other American restaurants. One could watch one's food being prepared which was always interesting to see because many staff beavered away, taking a long time to produce not quite the right order rather badly. They stayed in business because one had to return occasionally to reassure oneself that it really was the disaster that one remembered from last time.