Optimus Benn
Oct 6, 2018 · 1 minute readsweating all the time
make it stop
oh, autumn began, it's okay
The British influence on the Transformers franchise is strong.
The British influence on the Transformers franchise is strong.
In getting myself prepared for next week’s return of Doctor Who, I have to report that, for all how it got a little too convoluted in the ‘middle’, the (chronological) finale of The Many Husbands of River Song and Silence In The Library really works and shows off that when Moffat was on his game, he was very good indeed.
(Day of The Doctor is also a highlight, even if it’s just an excuse to get Tennant and Smith in the same room for an hour while also retconning genocide of two races out of the Doctor’s timeline. Which seems relatively worthwhile. And I’ll continue to yell that Series 5⁄31 is the pinnacle of Who until I’m blue in the face)
Meanwhile, I have owned this house for almost a year now, and to celebrate, the house now has toilet roll holders. At this rate, the house will have curtains by the end of the third year. Maybe clearing the garage of cardboard boxes will happen before year five! But let’s not be too hasty.
That’s pretty much all I have right now, so I will leave you with one of the pinnacles of 1970s Top of The Pops.
Ways to tell I have become a little too acclimatized: the air conditioning has stopped working and it has been Officially The Worst Thing In the World. I’m not expecting much sympathy from people back home who endured weeks of crazy-high temperatures this summer, but eh. Especially during the nights where it turns out the house turns out to retain heat quite well (hurrah for oncoming Winter at least!), and the small parade of different air conditioning firms that have come through and made things somewhat worse.
On the bright side, Autumn officially began on Saturday and the temperature dropped 10˚C overnight. I may have danced a little jig.
Other than that, though, I think it’s been a quiet week, mostly starting to prepare for my family’s visit in a few weeks and sweating quietly in the corner of the bar downstairs. Oh, and hiding from a surprise wasp that just wanted to celebrate the end of Summer with me. The usual, then.
I did, however, succumb to the charms of the iPhone XS. I was planning on waiting until the release of the XR, but then I discovered that it’s is going to be wider than the iPhone 7…and that was that. Initial thoughts are: well, it’s shiny, the FaceID thing is weird but works very well, and the cameras do camera things. I may be getting slightly jaded about smartphones. But the battery is great!
It is perhaps a bad time to work out that your AC isn’t working properly during a day where you have all the ovens running for over eight hours and almost twenty people in the basement trying to solve a murder mystery. Thankfully, nobody fainted out! And further confirmation that Irish and Filipino attitudes to catering a home event are broadly similar1.
(feelings on the murder mystery summed up: a good night, but we think we can put together a better mystery game where there’s more involvement and things to do for everybody. We have problems. But who doesn’t want a dinner party, a murder mystery, and an escape room set in the 1920s all combined, eh?)
The rest of my rest was occupied by a last-minute jaunt to San Francisco for my orientation at Lucidworks. Feelings on that:
One unintended highlight of seeing Saint Etienne in DC on Friday? For the first time in what feels like ages, I didn’t feel like the oldest person in the room!1 The benefit of seeing a band that debuted in 1991, I guess.
I didn’t realize that Bob Stanley isn’t on this tour. I wonder if that’s a new thing or something that has been going on for a while? Still, Like A Motorway is still a brutal slab of a banger. And feather boa for He’s On The Phone! Sigh2
It was also a little odd going to DC and doing absolutely none of the tourist trappings. We have separately done them all before, so there wasn’t exactly a big desire to go visit The Mall or anything. Which I guess makes a lot of sense when I consider that I never really went to see the sights of London on most of my trips, did I?3 So instead of Abe, we went to Momofuku, instead of the Smithsonian, we found a Filipino restaurant in Arlington, and of course multiple bookshops (including Amazon Books, a strange store that inhabits the space of a former Barnes & Noble, just to ram home the point of today’s changed world).
All in all, a good way of bringing my week of ‘gardening leave’ to a close. Oh, and there was this:
Tammy’s birthday request: a funfetti cake based on the Milk Bar cake (my version throws out the cream cheese icing on the grounds that cream cheese icing is an abomination and must be destroyed. Now, isn’t a nice Italian buttercream nicer? Why, yes it is!). Unfortunately, her other request - macarons with a pear ganache had to be put on hold after all the pears I bought went bad. But they’ll get made! After the murder mystery this weekend. And then there’s the Doctor Who viewing party. And the visit from my family. Sometime…
And now? Well, I’m ruing some of my lack of productivity this week (that book isn’t going to write itself), whilst being 35,000ft up on the way to San Francisco. It wasn’t my plan to go here this week, but as it turns out, the rest of my new team will be in the city for the next few days, so it seemed a good idea to meet them. I will probably regret this decision on the Thursday / Friday trip back to Cincinnati, but I don’t think it can be helped.
Right, then. My first bit of news is that I have left Kogentix and I will be starting at Lucidworks in a week’s time! I’m joining a very interesting team at the company, and I’m looking forward to pushing the boundaries of what Apache Solr and Fusion can achieve.
But wait, for that’s not all! The second bit of news is this: I’m writing a book. It is in very early stages right now, but in the middle of next year, Beginner’s Guide to Using PyTorch for Deep Learning should be on the bookshelves. And it’s being published by O’Reilly. I will have my own animal book! It’ll cover PyTorch 1.0 from first steps all the way to production, with a lot of practical hints and tips along the way.1
This week, though, I have a few days off before I start the new job. Which means some writing, a trip to IKEA, baking a cake, and finally to round the week off, a voyage to DC to see Saint Etienne. I am a little sad that I didn’t realize New Order were touring the US again until they literally started tweeting pictures from performances. Maybe next year…
It’s been an eventful few days, but somewhat amusingly after last week, I don’t think I can spill all the beans just yet. Not until everything is official, anyhow.
Unfortunately, that again leaves me with a somewhat barren week. Let’s check in on the state of my bourbon habit a couple of months after visiting Louisville for the first time.
Eeep. What’s more, I’ve gone deep enough into the weeds that I can tell you why Jack Daniels isn’t called bourbon (but could be if they wanted to call it that), the different strains of yeast that Four Roses use, and a good smattering of the companies that use MGP whiskey instead of distilling their own.
The good news is that I’ve already gone past the ‘Pokémon phase’. You aren’t going to get them all, even with infinite money and time. I tried to track down a bottle of New Riff’s OKI 10 or 12 year release, but as soon as the prices came back over $100, I happily closed the browser window and instead bought a crazy amount of Heaven Hill Green Label 6-Year for $25. Which will probably last me for years. And if I really want OKI for some reason? Well, most of the bars in the area still have stocks for now.
So, don’t worry; you won’t find me spending over $1,000 for an incredibly over-priced (and over-rated) bottle of Pappy Van Winkle. But I am about to move onto the crazy step: blending. What crazy things can I get up to with a Vitamix and ample supplies? We’ll see…
Hopefully more on that next week. Maybe.
It’s reached the point in the year where I feel like I wasted Summer. But it’s hot and there are so many bugs outside…and inside has air conditioning!
Yet, I did go on my first visit to Louisville, visited Cincinnati’s Findlay Market, a couple of escape rooms, and countless visits to Jungle Jim’s (look, the novelty of being able to buy a Star Bar more commonly than I could in Bicester has not worn off, okay?). Probably a good idea to get an evening in down by the Ohio River before Winter, though.
Right, I’m off to fall down deeper in two holes of machine learning and bourbon research…
One thing you can say about San Francisco is that…it’s honest? You will find yourself walking to the Financial District (abbreviated to FiDi in the California fashion, because of course it is). And you will find yourself walking by people on electric scooters, people having deep conversations about ‘their product guy’, and people carrying branded backpacks for local food delivery services. You’ll walk past fancy restaurants, the Alcatraz landings, and bars where they will happily charge you three figures for a shot of bourbon if you’re silly enough to think it’s a good idea.
You’ll also walk past people carrying their lives in trolleys, people searching through bins, and lines of mildewing duvets that occasionally twitch as you go by. There’s no attempt to hide what we (far too) optimistically call late capitalism.
And then you turn right on Mission and you’re looking up at the skyscrapers of Salesforce, Wells Fargo, and the Transamerica Pyramid. All this is what’s supposedly one of the most progressive cities in the country.
So all in all, my recent brief visit to SF hasn’t really changed my view of the place much.
Otherwise, much of a holding pattern this week. Meanwhile, I may have spent the past two weeks complaining about Ohio’s BMV transfer process, but things back down in NC seem much worse at the moment…
In other news, I have completed my bureaucratic journey to becoming a real, proper resident of Ohio. I now have a shiny REAL ID-compliant driving licence and shiny new Ohio plates for my car. And for those sad that my NC ‘First In Flight’ tag was being retired, the new plates proudly claim ‘Birthplace of Aviation’. Because apparently states fight over what credit for aeroplanes that they can stick on their licence plates.
To celebrate, I stood in a line for about 30 minutes and bought a bottle of bourbon. Not just any bottle, mind you, but the first 4-year bottled-in-bond bottles from our local distillery (annoyingly, their website has been down since Wednesday, but maybe it’ll be back up soon?). I also put these together over the weekend:
Heaven Hill Collection, Vol. 1: caramel and infused gianduja. pic.twitter.com/Om7K51KZQ3
— Ian Pointer (@carsondial) August 5, 2018
I have a feeling that there’s going to be a lot more Heaven Hill-related experiments in the near future. Turns out that soaking hazelnuts in bourbon and then making them into Nutella is A Good Idea. A plan for later in the year is to get a new batch of cacao nibs and do something similar, but ending up with a dark milk chocolate bar (idea nicked from Maverick). And also an idea to recreate a Fat Duck recipe now that I have more of a bourbon selection…
Finally, I succumbed to the cult of the new and bought a new Macbook. It’s been over three years and my old machine has been complaining about its battery for about eight months now. It’ll have a nice new life in the farm upstate, don’t worry. After running Migration Assistant and again marvelling at the idea that in this 2018 Mac, I still have so much stuff from my original iBook in 2002 lying around on the hard drive, I have settled into the new TouchBar-powered future. It is odd, when typing, to see words and emoji flash up where there really should only be a bunch of function keys.
Still, the screen is much nicer, the sound is really good, and while it’s perhaps little surprise given that it’s a 2018 machine rather than a 2015 one…it feels so much faster. Hurrah! I’m really going to miss MagSafe, though. I am clumsy enough that it has saved my older laptops on many an occasion…