Weeknotes 151

Apparently we don’t need rel=noopener and I only started adding it recently…

My car was at the garage until Friday when I decided to call for an update. Apparently they left me a voicemail message even though I have voicemail turned off…

The seeming good news is that the issue is apparently with a leaking radiator rather than some other part of the coolant system. The radiator is original so the fact it has failed now it not really surprising, and it is on the lower end of the potential cost scale.

I think it’s clear that this garage is not the most efficient business, but hopefully I’ll trade shambolic customer service for honesty, low prices, and mechanical ability 🤞

Our bathroom now has a mirrored cabinet, and the bedroom a mirror; so the house is starting to become less annoying to live in. Thanks, IKEA.

If you have multiple episodes of television series in a single file, you can name the file like ShowName – s02e17-e18 – Optional_Info.ext so Plex identifies it correctly.

We travelled down to London on Sunday to see Daniel Kitson and Gavin Osbourne perform The Ballad of Roger and Grace at Union Chapel, which is one of my absolute favourites, but I’d never seen it performed live.

Unfortunately, the whole event was ruined by a couple who tried to essentially bully us out of our seats. We queued and got seats on the end of a pew. Others filed in and filled up the rest with the exception of two spaces next to us. The couple arrived and sat down. My partner had gone to the toilet so left her bag on her seat. They asked me if I had “another coming” and that they had a “plus one” too and would there be space. I told them the seat was already taken, so it didn’t look like there would be space.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that at this point there was loads of other seating with 3 seats together to which the couple could have moved. They chose not too.

Then, over the course of the next 45 minutes they continually tried various tactics to get us to allow their “plus one”, who had yet to arrive, to sit next to them. Of course we’re happy to shift-up if the space allows, but there was literally nowhere for this person to sit. The space simply did not exist.

At one point the man told me I was “manspreading”. I was dumbfounded.

What is the right thing to do here? It’s seems like a no-win situation. If I move I’ve been bullied out of my seats and would be rightly annoyed. If I stand-up for myself, and stand my ground, the show is now ruined as I sit seething at the altercation.

We left at the interval because 1) I couldn’t enjoy the show, and 2) I was worried about missing my train back as the show looked like it was going to overrun.

It’s left me a bit shaken to be honest.

Railsconf Detroit 2024: A Co-chair’s Perspective – Andy Croll reflects on the penultimate RailsConf.

Technical Debt Is A Terrible Metaphor – Some great points on technical debt being misunderstood. Programmers also constantly misunderstand the concept in the same way that they say “refactor” instead of “change”.

Ruby 3.4.0-preview1 is out.

String literals in files without a frozen_string_literal comment now behave as if they were frozen.

This stood out; I thought this wasn’t going to be happening, but apparently it is.

I used rowspan on a HTML table this week for the first time since 1998.