• It’s a funny time of year. We’ve had so much hot weather, the trees think it’s autumn. The grass hasn’t grown significantly in weeks. Every tree is stressed because the lack of groundwater and dropping leaves as it hunkers down ready for a sleep over winter. I expect those growth rings to be tiny this year.
  • Yesterday morning was blown up by my internet connection going down at 3:30am. Five years ago, I invested in some Unifi equipment in the house. Mostly to get around the fact that mesh networks are shocking in our house of mixed materials. Glass, stone, and steel do not make a good environment for radio signals. Mostly, the system has been excellent, but being a Prosumer brand, it is more complicated than it probably needs to be. Plus, I’m interested in networks and tech, so it’s a bit of a perfect storm. A few years ago, I went deep in on it and now, of course, I can’t remember how I set it up.
  • Turns out the downtime was nothing to with me but a broken router down the road that was dropping packets. Cool, cool. But that doesn’t stop the lizard brain yelling ‘IT’S BROKEN’ in my head over and over to get it fixed and, if need be, buy a new router. Which, of course, I don’t need. Over lunch today, I spent the time watching a YouTube video of Unifi’s new shadow mode and having redundancy and network high availability. But in my house!? To be fair, we do absolutely cane the network. With two people working at home, two teenagers, and then all the streaming on top of it, we probably chew our way through a couple of TB in a month. If the internet goes down, there will be mutiny. My fault or not. Should I place my future wellbeing and harmonious family life in the hands of a few hundred quid to have redundant internet? You know, maybe.
  • I’m off out riding with some friends shortly. Warm, no wind, country lanes, good company, and an opportunity to sit at zone 2 for a couple of hours? Yes please. I’ll probably skip the pint afterwards. Seems weird to burn a bunch of calories to then replace them with empty ones.
  • I’m off to see G Love and Special Sauce next week with Emma. I was first introduced to them in university by my housemate. I’ve since seen them a bunch of times and they remain a firm favorite. It’ll be interesting to see the make up of the crowd. Like when we went to see Leprous in January in London. The crowd was so diverse, I was sort of shocked. Every walk of life was welcomed with a smile. Mind you, it’s always been like that at metal gigs. There were just more shorts (with socks) and sandals than I remember. But that’s cool. Each to their own.