The Week That Was

To sum up my week, I give to you an abridged exchange of a conversation with a Duke Energy helpline after a rather massive branch has fallen onto my roof and the power cables that run from the pole to my house:

DUKE: So what you just need to do is pull the branch off the powerlines. It should be very easy, and safe. IAN (in terror): You are asking me to pull the branch off the line? Isn’t that your job? DUKE: If you don’t feel comfortable doing that, then you can hire somebody, but it isn’t a service we generally provide—

Obviously, nobody in America grew up watching this:

(my non-British work colleagues were in awe of how hardcore the PIF is. I didn’t have the heart to tell them about Apaches or The Finishing Line¹. They just aren’t ready for that just yet)

Anyway, apparently the magic words you have to tell the electrical company are not “why on earth have you not built an power grid infrastructure where electricity cables are buried underground, you absolute idiots,” and instead “oh, my lights are flickering.” If you say that, then they come around and take the branch down for fear of damaging their precious useless cables.

Other things that happened this week:

• Having to take a plunger to the bathroom sink, resulting in all sorts of horrific black gunk going everywhere
• Finding out that a missplaced - was the reason why my model autoscaling wasn’t working correctly for the past couple of months. Didn’t have any production impact, but my goodness YAML makes you feel stupid sometimes (the error messages were so completely obtuse that they failed to help either).
• The amount of paperwork I have to find in my files just to renew my driving license in the next couple of weeks.
• The cars I was interested in buying don’t have a rear windscreen wiper, making them pretty useless in the US. I wanted to drive around in this chunky pixelated boi! But no.
• Waking up at 3:30am with my skin on fire and then, as I’m trying to go back to sleep, hearing Helvetica pawing on the carpet…which is not a good sign during the day, but especially not at night.

I know I said last week I’d talk more about the escape room, but I think I’m going to leave it until next week - we’re going to be doing a final video walkthrough of the room before we tear things down, so makes sense to go through things with a visual aid!

Oh, and expect another silly AI-related post shortly, as soon as I sort out the remaining publishing details…