Weeknotes #351

I finally submitted my visa extension application and was a bit miffed to discover that apparently my ‘application to make an application’ (as I derisively called it last week) finished processing on Wednesday 29 September. I hadn’t realised because I’d been expecting an e-mail saying that this occurred. Would I have been able to submit my application before the fees went up otherwise? I don’t know. It’s frustrating to think that I may well have. Hopefully the processing itself doesn’t take too long. I keep reminding myself that if we were in Australia this would take (much) longer and cost (even) more.

John came down with something during the week and was running a slight fever by Tuesday afternoon. The fever was gone by Wednesday morning but we kept him home just to be safe. He’s had a persistent sniffle but otherwise doesn’t seem too ill. Rowan has similar nasal congestion and, by Friday, Eri and I had come down with, too. The symptoms for Eri and me seem worse than for the boys and so far Emma hasn’t come down with anything. Is this a mild strain of the flu? Eri had heard it had already started to go around so perhaps that’s what it is.

I kept working on Wattle. Is this a waste of time? Probably. A more productive person would stop at where it is now and move on but I can’t help myself, I suppose. I don’t like putting things down while they’re still half-done and Wattle feels half-done, at least in terms of its documentation. So this week I spent time working on that documentation and one of the things I find is that when I write documentation about a software system, it often causes me to see flaws in the design. Perhaps flaws is overstating it. It’s more that I see incompleteness.

Does everyone remember the time before Gmail was broadly available? In order to register an account, you needed to have an invitation from someone who had one. Despite studying computer science in the early 2000s, I didn’t land an invite until it became open to everyone and by that time addresses like [email protected] or [email protected] were long gone. And so I resisted using my Gmail account for Google services (e.g. YouTube) preferring instead to use the inqk.net account I could use through Google Apps For Your Domain (later G Suite, later Google Workspace). That worked well up to the point where Google essentially made that a paid service, at which point I jumped ship and started using an ordinary, Gmail account.

All of which is a painfully long way of explaining that there’re years of video essays that I watched in the mid- to late-2010s that YouTube doesn’t know I’ve seen. And it’s for this reason that this week I found myself watching 8-year-old Lessons from the Screenplay videos. I think the one I enjoyed the most was his analysis of how Jurassic Park used its characters to explore its themes.

Last week I linked to Jeff Buckley’s ‘Grace’ and Brandon reached out to mention the similarities he hears between the Grace album and Coldplay’s Parachutes. I can’t say it jumps out as clearly to me but in listening to the album I was reminded again how much I love this era of Coldplay. I linked to ‘Spies’ a long time ago and it’s still my favourite track but ‘Trouble’ is a very close second (Apple Music).