#101

Aug 23, 2020

Work

Sadly, things did not really get moving. We had a sort of crisis of confidence in a live experiment, with the user-centred design people against it, and so the consensus-based approach GOV.UK teams tend to adopt broke down. We had a team meeting on Thursday to get to the bottom of the problem, but that ended with a decision to do some more comparison of our two experiment ideas and make the decision next week. At least I’m off next week, so I don’t need to sit through more meetings discussing what experiment we want to do.

It’s getting difficult to come up with dev tasks to do without knowing what we actually want to launch.

Books

This week I read:

Games

My Pulp Cthulhu game reached the end of the Masks of Nyarlathotep prologue chapter, with Nyarlathotep himself stepping in to settle matters. It went well, I think I had some really good descriptions for some things.

We’ll be doing a Traveller one-shot next, which I expect will take two sessions (though I haven’t decided on a scenario yet), and we’ll decide on where the game is going after that.

Miscellaneous

I opened a Premium Bonds account to store my emergency fund, as I decided there wasn’t much point in it sitting in my bank account earning no interest.1 Premium Bonds are a good choice for an emergency fund; you don’t want the fund to be at risk of shrinking, so investing it is too risky. Hopefully I’ll win a little money from it over the years.2

I realised that the script which backs up my syncthing files and my git repositories hadn’t ran successfully since February, as that’s when I migrated from gitolite to gitea and I hadn’t updated the URLs in the script, whoops. I’ve had an entry on my to-do list to set up alerting on backup failure for a long time, but never got around to it… so I decided to actually set it up this weekend.

I’ve already got uptime monitoring for my servers which sends alerts through AWS SNS, so all I had to do was copy that bit out of my monitoring scripts and call it in my backup scripts. Took 10 minutes to do that and then pull the updated scripts on all my computers, I should have done this when I first had the idea… I also updated my memos on backups and monitoring while I was at it.


  1. My account only pays interest on the first £1,500, and my regular balance is above that before counting my emergency fund.↩︎

  2. The £1,000,000 jackpot would be nice.↩︎