James Harrison

Really don't mind central London so much when I leave enough time to simply walk to where I'm going. Nice wander across Hyde Park and the Mall today.

Today I moved approximately 1500kg of type 1 and 10mm gravel, and about the same again in clay and soil out of the hole I excavated, but we now have a well-built 0.6m3 soakaway for the gutter to run into where before it was running into a patch of mud. So a good day, but everything hurts and I am very sore!

Feel a bit better about having missed the gym last Thursday.

This weekend I successfully made an app I was annoyed didn't exist, which was nice. Feels good to have actually made a thing. Started actually packaging it and making it possible to sell, which is a first for me!

Last August I was just starting #weightloss and cardio health, and realised I needed actual cycle clothing to ride comfortably long enough on my trainer. I found a great small company making plus-size cyclewear (Cycle Wear Central, formerly Fat Lad at the Back) and fit nicely in one of their largest sizes of bib shorts. I figured I'd never fit "mainstream" cycle clothes.

Yesterday I did my first ride in Castelli bib shorts and a jersey, and not even their largest sizes. Still somewhat shocked.

We finally got around to Project Hail Mary. It's a great film imho! Could have used another half hour to get some more exposition in there but all round solid if you ask me.

I have regret about not bringing the comfy foam earplugs to this hotel that lacks double glazing and overlooks a railway and major road. I am used to the noisiest thing at night being a distant owl every once in a while.

This will be the 12th consecutive working day for me, with most days worked evenings too, but me and my team do appear to have successfully moved a 45,000 customer ISP and wholesale platform onto our existing 50,000 customer platform in one big bang weekend without any major hiccups. All the teams we support seem very happy.

Quite proud of that. But very much looking forward to a weekend, a nice cocktail or two, and some time off!

Finished the excavation work for our new front flowerbeds, got the 4 tonnes of topsoil into the beds and realised we need 5 or 6. Ah well. Easy fix after the bank holiday.

Now just to extend some paving and then lay about 16 metres of new kerb edging into about 0.3m3 of homemade C35 concrete to make the driveway solid and immobile again.

Today has been a good day for DIY. Moved about 3 tonnes of rubble, sand, and concrete, and broke a lot of concrete up. Cordless Boschhammer has fully earned its keep.

Today we excavated 4 tonnes of rubble and put 4 tonnes of topsoil in its place. New flower beds 1 and 2 done! Now for 3 and 4... once the skip gets replaced with an empty one. Slightly underestimated how much I'd fit in a 6 yard.

Our local air traffic is certainly a bit more "interesting" than usual as of late. (We get a lot of RAF Fairford arrival traffic overhead)

First attempt at tamagoyaki went alright! Technique needs work, but it was tasty.

Lying on the sofa reading a book and still my Garmin tracked me at low stress rather than rest. Baah.

Rather enjoying Everybody Loves Our Dollars as a break from big system migration work. Solid dismantling of international financial controls, and how they've entirely failed to stop money laundering while causing immense harm.

Well, I have fsck'd the imaged and rewritten (onto new card) SD card from the loft Pi and for some reason, still not booting. Will have to get it down and chuck it on a spare monitor to work out why, which is I think the next step, after a quick trip to the gym and the shops for the inevitable one missing thing from my curry I just tried to make...

ADS-B/ACARS feeder pi's SD card has finally bit the bullet and gone read-most-blocks-only mode, bah.

ddrescue doing its best now or I'll have to faff around rebuilding all the configs which I could honestly just do without. Hopefully I can pull enough working filesystem to at least dump the ultrafeeder config files.

A few weeks back I decided to build the photo copying and organising app I wanted and thought I'd try doing it as an actual app people could pay for. Which is a new thing for me, previous bits of this nature being open source releases, but having a mortgage really focuses the mind. Hopefully the stress of dealing with taking money etc is worthwhile, but I'll be glad to have tried either way

Hooray, bits for my new soakaway have arrived. Just need to dig a 3 metre long channel about a metre deep (avoiding the house's incoming water supply pipe, of course) and wait for a few tonnes of gravel to arrive tomorrow...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfF8jzBVWvM what an absolute banger of a set. Damn I missed Thomas. Saw him last time he performed in the UK (2007, Wireless Festival, as part of Daft Punk).

It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realise my subwoofer was not woofing. Fixed after a power cycle and feel like I need to go listen to the last hour or two of music again.

Weird bug. Had that happen twice now where the 7350A says it's unmuted but definitely isn't, despite showing a green LED on the unit. Uncharacteristic for Genelec...

Day of training, dinner and drinks with team, then worked till ~midnight fixing some broken stuff, 6am start, check out of hotel, day of training, 2h drive, check in to new hotel for a system launch tomorrow with our warehouse team, I am fully knackered and early bed feels a great plan...

Glad not all/many weeks are this mad.

Two days of mixing concrete, setting out edge blocks, and cleaning up. After a couple of months (of weekends when we can manage it) we now have a front driveway that's complete and load-bearing (once the C45 concrete fully cures), and some major new flowerbeds to plant!