w/e 2023-10-29
On Wednesday Mary and I traveled to London where we said goodbye at Paddington. The next day Mary would be flying to Nepal for her trek. If, as usual, all goes smoothly I won’t hear from her again until she arrives back in Kathmandu in four weeks’ time. It’s the longest one yet! I continued on to less exotic Essex for a couple of days at my parents’.
Then last night I was in London where I saw the (temporarily?) re-united Allo Darlin’ play, supported by the previously mentioned Fortitude Valley and Mammoth Penguins.
They were all fab and it was a lovely show. There’s something retro-feeling about 3- and 4-piece guitars-and-drums bands, with very normal looking people in normal clothes, performing on a proscenium arch stage. It felt almost like a school concert, which I was thinking even before four parents of band members (I assume) sat in the RESERVED seats in front of me and filmed the show on their phones.
Catchy tunes and friendly vibes. A lovely start for my first gig in nearly four years.
§ This morning I had a lovely London breakfast with Tom & N and then… as I checked out of the Hub-By-Premier-Inn later in the morning it was pissing down and I had no plan of how to fill the six hours until my train left the city.
I’d thought about seeing a movie but, ugh… I love going to the cinema but it feels increasingly like a bad choice. There’s the long standing issue of paying too much money, and having to sit through a load of ads first, and then hoping the audience won’t be annoying. But now all the films I thought about seeing are either streaming already, or about to be. This makes me feel more of a mug for paying £18 to see a single movie-and-ads, when I could spend less on an entire month of streaming, with no ads.
So, staring at the rain, tired and aimless, I realised I could reschedule my train ticket and… just leave London sooner? So I re-booked, at no extra cost (I should hope not – it was already £50 for a single, booked two months in advance!), got the trains (one of which was delayed, standard), and was back in time to drive home in daylight.
A bit of a shame to have wasted a rare few hours in the city I’d been excited about being in not long earlier but… I don’t know. I wasn’t feeling it.
§ After two weeks my Backblaze backup has now uploaded only 0.587% of 547GB, but 26.1% of 1,560,516 files.
The Backblaze app is terrible. I want to be able to easily check what it’s backing up (so I know it’s not missing anything, and also not backing up unnecessary things) without having to search through a giant hidden text file. I want to be able to set exclusion patterns without having to manually edit a hidden XML file.
§ That’s it.