Day: September 25, 2020

Another full day of work. Friday is perhaps my busiest day each week as I have four newsletters I’m directly responsible for, plus one other I give the OK to.

A man turned up from the company that will be building our new conservatory. He was scheduled to do a “test dig” to figure out the quality of the foundations on our existing, and collapsing, conservatory. I wasn’t expecting him, however, as we’d already committed to having the foundations redone from scratch, but he wanted to have a look anyway despite it chucking down with rain.

Our cats seem to have lost all sense of taste after having been let outside for the first time this week. They no longer seem to enjoy the taste of their usual food, but still beg for it. Going outside after being inside for several months must be a bit mind blowing, I might go off my favourite foods for a bit as well.

I really enjoyed this time lapse video of a flight from Singapore to Paris – it’s amazing what you get to see along the way.

Had a good chat with Corey Quinn of Last Week in AWS fame about the banal realities of running newsletters as a business.

The weather continued to get worse today with lots of wind, heavy rains, and the true force of autumn making itself known. Similarly bad weather is forecast for the entire weekend which is fine by me.

Had some sort of Moroccan meatballs in tomato sauce with pitta bread for tea. I wasn’t convinced it was gluten free but Mrs C says it is. I shall find out in a few days.

A relatively boring day today, mostly made up of work on our Ruby Weekly and Node Weekly newsletters. The Node space is rather quiet lately and it has the sense of being a technology whose excitement has plateaued, though I don’t see it going away any time soon.

Once I was up and ready I rode my scooter to the local shop to grab a caffeinated drink and spent most of the day working.

I’m becoming concerned with our email service provider (Sendgrid) and overall deliverability issues we’re having, so I’ve begun to investigate the possibility of running two ESPS in tandem, both Sendgrid and Amazon Web Services’ SES system. This is easier said than done, however, as both systems work differently and require separate integrations to work. This work will take me a little while yet but an initial test worked out OK.

I wrote the diary for yesterday at the dinner table as it appears I have already begun to fall behind!

I finally finished reading the Prison Doctor book I’ve had sat around for months. It’s an OK read; quite matter of fact without any real overarching themes to chew on. A doctor tells her story of retiring as a GP only to be lured into the world of being a prison doctor at a variety of places including Wormwood Scrubs. If you have any interest in what that might be like, it’s worth a read, but it’s reasonably depressing as it highlights the sorts of problems prisoners face and how it’s just a never ending problem.

Started Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop and only made it a chapter in before I had to go to sleep. I’m a bit out of practice at reading novels, and particularly ones with language as flowery as this. I did encounter a cute bit of 1930’s slang, however, with “foregonners” which is their time’s equivalent of saying things like totes emosh, I guess.

Had sausages and chips for tea.