Weeknotes 34

While making coffee with C in my arms one morning, he suddenly lunged for the Chemex, spilling a slurry of hot water and coffee grounds as I shouted “no no no no no!” A stunned E declared she would now call me Shia LaBeouf but thankfully that has not happened.

I can’t mention Shia LaBeouf without recommending Rob Cantor’s song about the true story of an actual cannibal.

I’ve been making sourdough bread since March 2012 long before it became cool, even encouraging others to get into it but my recent bakes have not been good.

My starter has been underactive and overactive, the bulk fermentation has been both too long and too short. More often than not, my bread is what Murray would call “a tasty cowpat”.

As others got into baking, measuring their dough temperature with infrared thermometers and making their own blend of flour based on exacting protein levels, I was dismissive, believing only in some woolly notion of technique. Those bakers now produce consistently great loaves; each of Leo’s bakes is more beautiful than the last.

Perhaps I should get with the times and be less “son-mat” and more molecular gastronomy.

After correcting some typos in last week’s notes, I enabled Vim’s spell checking. The following bit of configuration now highlights any misspelt words in Markdown files:

autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.markdown,*.md setlocal spell spelllang=en_gb

E tells me I should look into something called a “word processor”.

I changed both this site and the Ghost Cassette website to have a more consistent vertical rhythm. I found this little snippet of CSS to display a baseline grid extremely useful when trying to debug spacing issues:

body {
  background: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3) 1px, transparent 1px);
  background-size: 100% 24px;
}

C’s latest discovery is clapping. I recommend everyone indulge in a round of applause every meal and at random times throughout the day.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Phoebe Bridgers as her new album “Punisher” came out this week. I dearly hope her 2018 album “Stranger in the Alps” is named after the censored TV edit of “The Big Lebowski”.

I’ve been thinking about the streetlight effect and problem solving. There are many versions of the story but here’s “Nasreddin’s ring”:

Mulla had lost his ring in the living room. He searched for it for a while, but since he could not find it, he went out into the yard and began to look there. His wife, who saw what he was doing, asked: “Mulla, you lost your ring in the room, why are you looking for it in the yard?” Mulla stroked his beard and said: “The room is too dark and I can’t see very well. I came out to the courtyard to look for my ring because there is much more light out here.”

As a software developer, I wonder if there is a trap as you solve similar problems over and over again during the course of your career. Do you become more likely to take any problem and turn it into a familiar one even if it’s not appropriate?