Tag Archives: shopping

On getting very excited about buying cables

So, there it is, I managed one poorly-written but intriguingly structured post, wherein I covered a number of topics, I had the full and earnest intention of doing another (hopefully somewhat better) post the following Friday, and of course there was no post. None more posts happened. Now, there was a surprisingly good reason for that, which is that I got my fibre broadband, which was great, and then I had to connect it to my own Synology router (I believe in accessing my Internet primarily through my own hardware, and using the supplied modem/router as just a modem), a product that I recommend at this point, it has some fantastic features. This was fine in theory, and it had worked well with the Virgin Media cable modem, but… It didn’t quite work with the fibre broadband modem/router. It was odd and unreliable, and definitely not fast (it looked like a DNS problem). So I spent last Friday trying everything, and eventually reinstalled the Synology router completely, and it worked and everything was wonderful and fast, and it was late and I was tired and I didn’t write anything. It’s not an excuse (even if it looks a lot like […]

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I said that tonight, I would write something. Anything. I would overcome the writer’s block from the past… how long? I don’t know. A few months? No, more. Many months? Oh no, much more. A year and a half, like a Cadbury’s Milk Chocolate bar made of time, regret, missed opportunities, and the bitter but exciting cacao of mild adventure. I want to make this the new habit, an hour every Friday night of writing. Now, I did thwart myself somewhat this evening by promptly going to the shops and spending several hours buying an awful lot of food that I don’t really need. I needed tissues, cheese, and some ‘yellow food’, which is to say food that spends most of its existence in a freezer, and which a nutritionist would describe as ‘out of scope of their area of interest’.

Normally on a Friday I would have other things to do, and generally that’s a single thing, a thing that I would describe as a having a hobby where I spend forty five minutes driving out to somewhere where I’ll be stuffed into a barrel and rolled down a bumpy hill for fifty minutes while intermittently getting kicked. If you’re not sold on that idea, then there’s something wrong with you, because I’ve been doing this for years and apart from often promising myself to stop doing it forever, I’ve kept at it because the buzz of when it does work out is really quite acceptable. Gambling hours of my Friday night on the chance of an Endorphin hit.

So there it is, that’s why I’m writing again. I got straight into it, I didn’t first redesign the website first for several days like I usually do, I got straight into articulating excuses and burning my bridges. So that’s a welcome bit of growth over the past couple of years. Hopefully I’ll follow up with some searing commentary about my divorce, or getting up early, or life in a post-pandemic world.

The one with the bike tyres

So I bought some new mountain bike tyres, an exercise into which I put the usual amount of effort that I do into buying something like this; I started many months ago, I researched, I compared, I agonised, I procrastinated, I reasoned, I weighed, I balanced, I came up with a business case, I came up with a counter-case, I researched, I compared, I agonised all over again, and finally the tyres went out of stock because time moves on and Schwalbe had enough time to rotate their product line and had no fucks to give for my careful research process. But it is coming into Winter now, and the tyres that came with my bike are more suitable for dry conditions. They grip the mud dearly and don’t let go of it, and it makes for interesting times in the mud. And they’re a pain to clean afterwards, for the little cycling that I do (especially now in lockdown, because once again, that is where we are). They arrived on Thursday. The bike is a ’29er’ which means that it has the great bike road bike-sized wheels that the young people like, and I much prefer folding tyres, which […]

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