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 had thought it a good idea to choose glasses with fairly large lenses, figuring that I would have more of my visible field corrected. However, seeing as my distance vision is fine (though worse than it was in my youth), I find that it's not as practical for me to peer over the top of my glasses, I have to take them off or at least slide them down a bit. Well, now I know for next time I choose some. Additionally, another unanticipated effect of my choice is: having opted for rimless, if I put them down then it is harder to find them afterward.

I saw a surprising sight a while ago, commuting to work: travelling from west to east in the morning at a rather northerly latitude, at one point I noticed the sun on the left of the railway carriage. It turns out that, approaching Edinburgh, the more northerly railway line bends rather south for a spell before passing south of the airport instead of north of it.

I haven't yet settled on how to use my commute on in-office days. For a workday it totals 3½h door-to-door, at least I could try to use the inter-city segment well. One challenge is that I don't want to add much weight to the bag I am already carrying, especially as it has the mighty work laptop therein, and my water flask. In the meantime, the railway carriage window gets looked out of somewhat.

One morning last week, I had a surprise: I glanced up at the right moment and, in the distant cloud or fog, I could make out a row of three large, white, shallow pyramids. I very much wondered something like, WTF?. Ongoing observation revealed that I was seeing the towers and cables of the Queensferry Crossing, carrying the M90 toward Edinburgh. So, support for a bridge, rather than a row of pyramids.

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. )

In walking our dog L. we occasionally meet other friendly dogs. It has been interesting for me to observe that many dogs appear to know the rules of a game. Each round has them bring their faces near to each other and pause (tail probably wagging) then they both dart apart and run around or chase a bit before starting the next round. It appears to be very good fun.

Most of the retail clothing stores that we go into display pictures of models who seem to be doing fairly normal things. Primark is an exception: their models appear to have quite an attitude, possibly annoyed to have been bothered by a photographer. Perhaps they aim their clothing range at customers who are unwelcoming and irritable, so they can look at the pictures and think, that could be me if I bought those clothes.

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.

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.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned how this year's Eurovision Song Contest followed the usual pattern of my concurring with the public televote rather than the verdict of the panels of industry professionals. Yesterday I reflected on how last year's contest was an exception to the pattern.

The United Kingdom's song scored unusually well last year yet I thought it one of our more mediocre entries. France's and Germany's scored the worst, yet I thought both to be quite decent songs. Perhaps neither song was positively a gem but nor did they seem superlatively bad^* against the other finalists.

^*superlatively bad tempts me to imagine words like sublative

One thing that brings home to me that I now live at the heart of a large city is, on the way back home tonight after heading out for milk, I noticed that Joe Satriani is playing just several minutes' walk away.