The Daily Parker

It's hard to believe Parker has been gone a whole year. I miss you, buddy.

 Lunch yesterday, at the Iron Duke in Hampshire:

The place is so named because it's on the Duke of Wellington's estate. The current Duke lives just a few kilometers away in a somewhat modest house (at least according to Queen Victoria) whose driveway is 5 km long.

Walking to and from lunch looked like this:

I ended the day at the Southampton Arms as I typically do at least once when visiting the UK. Shortly after arriving and opening a packet of crisps, Marty here came over to investigate:

His attitude toward me shifted a bit when I wouldn't give him any:

I'm flying home this afternoon to my own dog and my own bed, two things I really miss.

My lunch spot, the Trafalgar Tavern in Greenwich:

Lincoln's Inn Fields, by the Sir John Soane Museum:

Lincoln's Inn Fields gazebo:

Today: Hampshire and Gospel Oak.

Just a quick observation: since I last visited London two years ago, almost every business I've encountered has gone cashless. Coffee shops, pubs, the Transport Museum, all cards-only. In 2019, most of the smaller places preferred cash.

No real consequences, other than not needing to withdraw Sterling so far this trip. When I get home and sync up Quicken, I expect I'll have a little work, but again, not a biggie.

Oh, hello. I think we've met:

That's why I try to sit on the right side of the plane coming into London. This morning, it worked out well.

After getting to my hotel I crashed for more than two hours, so by the time I got outside again it had gotten gloomy and a bit chilly. Perfect London weather! And really interesting light on St Mary Le Strand:

And just off to the right of the church, Somerset House has built a skating rink for the winter:

I'll re-edit the photos when I get home. Phones aren't the best platforms for photo editing.

I'm leaving the country today, for the first time in almost exactly two years, and I couldn't be happier. I miss my Ancestral Homeland. And the list of Covid-related travel requirements, while annoying, make sense to me. In fact, because I return Sunday, I timed my (£39 FFS!) UK 2-day test to double as my US 3-day test.

Before I take off, and consign poor Cassie to 103 hours of desperate loneliness (albeit with her entire daycare pack), I want to comment on two news stories.

First, the Chicago Anti-Cruelty Society has temporarily waived adoption fees because adoptions have declined 33% in the past three months. "The rescue organization is housing and caring for more than 420 animals and has 140 animals in foster care," Block Club Chicago reports. I foresaw this at the beginning of the pandemic: people feeling lonely and isolated adopting pets that they wouldn't want when the pandemic started to wane. It really pisses me off, but after all, we live in a selfish, consumerist society that views dogs and cats as disposable.

Second, the New York Times reported Monday on how President Biden's infrastructure bill will help Chicago's West Side—but thanks to conservatives in the party scything away hunks of it, it won't help enough:

[T]he protracted negotiations over both spending packages have forced Democrats to cut several initiatives partly or entirely: tuition-free community college, a clean energy standard to combat climate change, billions of dollars for affordable housing assistance and measures to lower the price of prescription drugs.

Places like the West Side may still receive record amounts of federal assistance. But the tug of war leading up to Friday’s passage of the infrastructure bill — and still looming as Congress awaits a vote on the $1.85 trillion social-safety-net package — has delayed the party from what may be an even bigger challenge: selling the investments to voters.

Another issue being closely watched by Chicago community groups, an initiative to replace lead service lines that can cause toxic drinking water, will receive $15 billion in the infrastructure bill and could get another $10 billion in the social-safety-net package, according to environmental groups that have negotiated with lawmakers. That is well short of the $60 billion sought by industry experts and the $45 billion Mr. Biden originally proposed.

I get that legislation takes time, and when your party has a majority of exactly one—and that one is the Vice President—you won't get everything you want. But if Republicans would remember that they represent Americans and not just other Republicans, maybe we could have done better.

All right. Off to the longest doggie day care Cassie has ever experienced...

My 8am meeting with colleagues in London had to wait until 9:30 because Comcast screwed the pooch this morning:

Reports indicate the system was down, or at least unsteady, in areas stretching from Chicago to Philadelphia, New Jersey, and South Carolina. Looking at DownDetector, issues had been reported earlier in the Bay Area, but it’s unclear if those are connected to the problems people saw this morning.

Comcast has released a statement regarding the outage. According to a spokesperson, “Earlier, some customers experienced intermittent service disruptions as a result of a network issue. We have addressed the issue and service is now restoring for impacted customers, as we continue to investigate the root cause. We apologize to those who were affected.” It appears that most of the people who reported problems have confirmed they’re back online. There’s still no word on exactly what caused the problem or how many people were impacted at its peak.

In Chicago, the outage affected thousands of people from about 7:30 to 9, by which time I'd already relocated to my company's Loop office.

Oh, and on the day before a trip, my bank called to let me know their fraud department killed my primary credit card. They hope the new one arrives before I leave for the airport.

Yay.

It's 22:20 on the last day of my sprint, and I have finally completed the refactoring project I started at the beginning of the sprint. And...bing! "Azure DevOps [Build Succeeded]" email. Whew!

Tomorrow we'll have a boring release of last sprint's code, since it has sat quietly in our Production Build pipeline just waiting for me to push it to the Production Deploy pipeline for two weeks.

Sometimes this happens. Both the (delayed) release tomorrow and the refactoring this sprint solve two major problems that prevented us from moving forward on development. But wow, until I cracked the nut on this code, it was not easy.

The Department of Health and Social Care now allows visitors to the UK to satisfy their testing requirement with a £22 lateral-flow test, rather than the more expensive (and invasive) PCR test:

Eligible fully vaccinated passengers arriving in England from countries not on the UK’s red list can take a cheaper lateral flow test instead of a PCR from today (24 October 2021).

Lateral flow tests must be taken as soon as possible on the day of arrival in England or at the latest before the end of a passenger’s second day and can now be purchased from the list of private providers on GOV.UK from as little as £22 – significantly cheaper than PCR tests.

Anyone testing positive will need to isolate and take a confirmatory PCR test, at no additional cost to the traveller, which can be genomically sequenced to help identify new variants. PCR tests can be accessed free of charge by ordering in the usual way through NHS Test and Trace – via nhs.uk/coronavirus or by calling 119.  Test providers will be expected to advise people to self-isolate and direct people towards the NHS Test and Trace booking page.

This also means I can pick up a test from a provider and take it back in my hotel room, rather than schedule an hour-long interruption in my day.

About a month ago I bought a Netatmo Smart Weather Station, which has both indoor and outdoor Internet-connected sensor arrays. The indoor array includes a CO₂ gauge, which taught me last night that my gas oven produces lot of carbon dioxide:

Now, 1360 ppm doesn't pose a serious health risk, but you can see how quickly the CO₂ shot up when I turned the oven on and how slowly it dissipated.

The other thing I've learned is how stable my indoor temperature is when the weather is cool but not cold. The outside temperature has stayed within the range 8°C to 13°C for the past week, and my indoor temperature hasn't budged from 19°C by more than one degree. We'll see what happens Wednesday when the outside temperature goes below freezing.