Week 35: The Neighbourhood

May 19, 2023

In the Neighbourhood. This week has been spent entirely in London, and mostly at home. This has been great. I have enjoyed going to a meet-up, trips to my local coffee shop and park, and attending Parkrun after some time off. Most of all though I have enjoyed having lunch or meals out with friends. I've been thinking a lot about the value of living near friends this week. Sitting outside on the garden chairs which we (very) optimistically bought back in March was also great.

view from the top of Waterlow park View from the top of Waterlow Park

Meeting up, again! I spoke at the DevSecOps London Gathering this week. I enjoyed getting some challenging ideological questions about SPIFFE and OPA and the thoughtful conversations I had after the event too. I appreciated that it was quite a chatty event and would recommend!

'Card Clash'. While traveling into central London, I 'touched in' at my local station with a company card and exited with my personal Oyster Card. Immediately realising my mistake, I touched out again with my company card correctly completing the journey. However, this left me with a £9.40 'no touch in' journey charge on my personal Oyster. Largely due to my company card not being registered with my TfL account, the matter took me over an hour to resolve on the phone this weekend, speaking to 4 different members of staff. Don't card clash kids!

Elite men's 10k race Paul Chelimo before breaking away (note the 5k split on the screen)

Running. The weekend was mostly about running. After Parkrun, we stumbled upon the happening of Night Of The 10k PB's and returned in the evening to catch the Women's and Men's elite races. Watching Mizan Alem run the 11th fastest female 10k time ever and Paul Chelmio finish in 27:12.73 (PB!) was inspirational to say the least. Equally inspirational was experiencing Anna's half marathon PB - and first hand from my front row seat as personal 'hype man' - well done Anna!

running the hackney half Anna and I, somewhere in Hackney

Website Weeding. After playing around with typescale.com, I made a number of updates to my personal website's fonts. I have no idea what each 'scale scale' offers vs the others but it was a cathartic exercise to standardise the mess of font sizes on my site. I also changed the font to Inter, after thinking it looked nice in this post which flew by on Mastodon. Firefox's font inspector tooling is really great.

Consumerism Update. Don't bother with a Richlite chopping board, they warp and 'that's not right'™. AliExpress is great for getting cables, but have you tried VW? I want to watch Andor or something about space. I ought to to read Carmageddon too.