April / May Diary

April and May are not my most stable months, because birthday. I don’t know why, because I’m not regretting the past, nor do I wish to shut the door on it. My only problem is an extra inch on the waistline and the difficulty shifting it.

April started with Easter. So there was that. The diary says I had a cold at the start of the month, because it was effing cold.

I was at the time doing steep incline walks on the treadmill and focussing on using the hamstrings to move my legs (it’s not as easy as it sounds). Then I suddenly got a painful lower back, blamed something else I might have done, and a couple of days later realised, yep, it was most likely the hamstrings. Another visit to Petra the Sports Masseur, who inflicted six kinds of pain with her elbow and pronounced me cured. Which I was. Not doing steep incline walks again.

Towards the end of the month, what with Sis and I alternating weeks to get colds, we hadn’t had our monthly supper. So I jumped on the Interwebs... if you want to eat at Gymkhana starting between 6 and 7 in the evening, you have to book about ten weeks in advance. So I did that, and booked us in at Merchant’s Tavern for the last Friday of the month, and Pizzaro in Bermondsey towards the end of May. Pizzaro do a fried dolche de leche which may be one of the best desserts I’ve ever tasted.

We got an exciting works day trip down to Cardiff towards the end of April, and very pleasant it was too, on one of the new trains and with very few people on board. I spent most of the trip going over and over the same three or so pages of Nik Weaver’s Forcing for Mathematicians, and finally came away with a much better understanding of how Cohen Forcing works. It’s much simpler than all those complicated derivations of Boolean-valued sets would suggest. That’s the subject of another essay entirely. I vowed I would not pass off this mortal coil until I understood Cohen Forcing, and now I do.

‘They’ re-located us again in May, to an ‘Agile workspace’ along London Wall. Suffice to say, I have to find an armchair (!) when I need to get my coding flow on, and spend much of the afternoon at a sort of dining counter (!!). The actual desks and chairs are unusable. As are the second screens. So I’m back to using the laptop screen, no mouse and no external keyboard. Do you know how insensitive the trackpads on a cheap HP corporate computer are? There’s a clue in the question.

For my sixty-fourth birthday, I visited my friend in Utrecht, as I always do. On the way over, I made a side trip to Zandvoort and had a nice steak at Vooges, one of the many restaurants along the beach. Saturday the weather was grey, we walked around Amsterdam, had lunch in the Cafe de Prins, and supper in the Restaurant Griftpark in Utrecht. Sunday the sky was blue and the sun was hot, so we walked around the canal and had a light lunch at the Louis Hartlooper complex, and a few hours later I made my way back to Schipol and a slightly delayed KLM flight.

I saw Deadpool 2 at Cineworld; S4 of House, and the Jack Reacher movies on my DVD.

I read Tom Holt’s The Management Style of Supreme Beings; Robin Fleming’s Britain After Rome; Slavoj Zizek”s The Courage of Hopelessness; Will Storr’s Selfie; Filip Springer’s History of a Disappearance; L David Marquet’s Turn the Ship Around; Nik Weaver’s Forcing for Mathematicians; Michele Friend’s Pluralism in Mathematics: A New Position in Philosophy of Mathematics; Øystein Linnebo’s Philosophy of Mathematics, and his co-edited collection New Waves in Philosophy of Mathematics; looked at the book of Stik graffiti I bought a long time ago. The commendation goes to History of a Disappearance: it's not a person who disappears, but a Polish mining town. It's actually quite moving at the end.

I finished and tested the MVP of my smart sync Python program, about which a couple of posts later.

I’ve been looking at G-Shocks for a while, but never quite found the right one. Side note: for a Real Watchy G-Shocks are in the Premiership of watches, not at the top with Rolex and AP / PP, but Premiership material. Then Amazon did a deal on the AWG-M100-1AER, which I decreed to be my birthday present to myself and snapped it up. Amazon delivered it the next day. Non-Prime. Not bad.

And May ended hot. So that was okay.