It’s been a good week here. I passed both my car and motorbike theory tests on Monday, so I’m moving ahead with getting both of those licenses. By the middle of November I should be legally terrorising the roads. Taking the tests was relatively unremarkable. Everyone was wearing a mask and following procedures to avoid contact, apart from this one guy probably in his 60s who looked more at risk than any of the other staff. Go figure.

Hot

It’s also been wonderfully/disturbingly hot. There’s conkers on the ground, and the leaves are falling. We are slowly entering Autumn, but the temperature been in the mid 20s every day. It’s the kind of weather that feels worrying, that hints at the growing climate catastrophe, even while it’s nice to feel the sun on your face.

My partner lives in Vancouver, and they’ve been under the smog of wildfires for the past week, the air pollution equivalent to smoking half a pack of cigarettes every day. While, as a veteran of London and a terrible ex-smoker, that sounds pretty weak, it’s still massively worrying, particularly as these fires are well south of the border. The air pollution reaches the full length of the UK into Canada.

Screenshot of a map of California Wildfires, showing fires all along the West Coast of America, with the air pollution stretching halfway up the length of British Columbia. Taken from https://www.latimes.com/wildfires-map/ on the 11th of September

As part of the introduction to my new course we’ve been asked to respond to our subject’s role in the climate crisis and I’m a bit lost. It’s hard to face the issue at all, and every time I start my response I kind of spiral. It’s largely too late to reverse a catastrophic temperature shift1, and now we just have to prepare for it. Conversations like this encourage us to talk about the various ways that we can use tools to fight these actions, satellite imagery and machine learning to spot deforestation, analysis to make our energy use more efficient, but it all feels a bit…LinkedIn. It’s like people are putting on this brave, hopeful, employable face on to confront it, and I don’t know if I can talk about climate change without admitting how terrifying it is and that I don’t know where to start.

I think a lot of this is now just background anxiety for our generation, and is definitely a contributing factor to the mental health crisis. I know it’s hard to engage with this institutionally, and I am grateful to Bath for trying. But yeah, I’ve been struggling with that.

Other things

Still, it’s nice to be able to walk into my garden, take an apple from the tree, and feel the grass underneath my feet. I am extraordinarily lucky to have access to this space, and to live here.

An apple with a bite taken out of it and the tree I took it from, a sunny day

I’m in the final few weeks of my job. We have my replacement properly lined up, and I’m starting my handover next week. We have also been having some interesting conversations about increasing the formality of the technical team organisation in the company. The extent to which you can be involved in strategic discussions in a small company is really remarkable when you are young.

My course welcome week starts next Wednesday. I also managed to register for all of the optional units that I wanted for my second semester at Bath: Cryptography, AI, and Reinforcement Learning. All of these sound like they will be ᵃ ˡᵒᵗ to deal with, but I’m really looking forward to the challenge. I definitely believe courses are for pushing yourself instead of chasing a high mark for the certificate. Obviously it’s preferable if you can do both…

The two years I’ve spent in work have really helped prove that I can meet deadlines, and work efficiently to get to where I want to be, more to myself than even to anyone else. I’m very happy about the state I’m in going in to this course. The plan is to just ensure it all goes smoothly in practice. I might write a post soon about my note taking practices and where I’m at with how I keep organised/productivity, again more to clear things up for myself than anyone else.

In other blogging news I wrote a post about setting up a virtualisation host, which will hopefully come in handy over the next year. I’m trying to spend time now to think about how to get myself set up before things become properly hectic.

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Reading List

  • The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit. I think Solnit is one of the most brilliant living writers and everything I read by her blows my mind a little more. Particularly picking out this quote towards the end of the book:

    “I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our capacity to perceive or measure and that in many cases those who trespass against you do so out of a misery that means the punishment preceded and even precipitated the crime. Maybe that’s acceptance.”

    This sense of the end that arches out beyond the horizon makes me think about one of my favourite poems by Edward Thomas where “if we could see all all might seem good”, and that’s in my head a lot this year.

  • Ex-NSA chief joining Amazon. 👍 surveillance capitalism living up to the name.
  • Who wants us back in the office. Really enjoyed this, and it’s always important to think about the way we want to do things and the motivations directing us certain ways.
  • Finding Tony Abbot’s passport number on Instagram. This from @mangopdf is brilliant. Made me laugh a lot, great story and great way of telling it.
  • Using a Raspberry Pi as a dev server. Really enjoyed this from cri.dev, also seems similar to what I was playing about with in terms of virtualisation this week. I have a raspberry pi 4 that I need to do something with so I might have a play with that at some point.
  • Underwater data-centers heading our way. Seems like a fun experiment
  • Wildfire family tragedy. This is an absolutely fucked up tragic story about the wildfires happening in Oregon. The human toll of this can’t be overstated.

  1. MOD commissioned RAND report admits in the first line that “temperatures are predicted to increase by 2.3-3.5°C by 2100, despite the 2016 Paris Agreement” ↩