After last week’s introverted cerebrality, this week was social and busy. I’ve dashed from having lunches and drinks to catch up with people, to collecting second hand windows from gumtree and leftover building materials from friends for the workshop I’m building in my garden next week, to a wedding and a birthday drink.
I’ve enjoyed being busy as a balance from exessive solo ruminating. The things I’ve been doing have been going well enough to feel productive, and there’s no time to overthink anything. I’m a little stressed at how long my todo list is, and something important falling through the cracks, but all good so far 🤞🏻
I was in Brighton for the wedding on Friday night, and birthday drinks in Bristol on Saturday. I’m used to being charged £45 for a single from Paddington-Bristol, so I thought this journey, going via London and including that journey as part of it, would be even more of a rip off. But I got an advanced ticket for £32.80. Then with a two-together railcard it was £22.96. Then with 10% back for buying it through uber it was £20.66. Then with 1% cashback on my Chase card it was £20.43. This includes the Zone 1 Elizabeth Line transfer! It had to give it to me in paper tickets!
I’m telling you this because it was my main point of conversation at the wedding. It’s good wedding content. It went down well. But only my blogpost readers get to hear the final joy: the final train was 35 minutes late. The Delay Repay claim was approved today. Total cost totals £8.95 each. Hold for applause.
I bought a good chunk of the wood for my workshop from my local independent timber merchant. Only 5 years ago I would have been far too terrified by the whole thing to go into such a place, and although they do have an online booking system I could have used, I walked over in person during a lunch break and did it in person. It was good to have a walk, it was good to look at the wood, it was good to get a sense check from the guy that I wasn’t doing anything stupid, it was good to talk to him about bread sauce at Christmas. Sometimes I don’t know who I am any more.
I did a quick little talk on Retrieval-augmented generation that nobody asked for at the ff.studio studio. Talking about work is fun.
In note 9 when talking about modifying the kitty ai journaling system for my own needs, I said:
Two yak shaves I’m currently resisting: rewriting it in ruby, and moving my todo list away from Apple reminders so I can have an API to feed it.
But this week I realised that I can get Claude.ai to rewrite it in ruby in seconds, and I found this CLI for accessing my Apple reminders, so yaks… lawnmowered?
While in Brighton, we popped in to see Ammonite by Collectif Scale. This kind of large burner-style is usually right up my alley, seeing as I like to do it myself, but unfortunately the Collectif Scale stuff seems to do nothing for me. R is mesmerised by it though. Art huh?
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