#108

Work

This week we continued working towards our first live experiment for GOV.UK Accounts. Most of the backend work is done or in review (just one feature to go), and the frontend is progressing. Things are a bit behind where I’d hoped they would be, I think I need to get better at planning (and communicating those plans) so that if I’m off for a week the work keeps moving smoothly.

Books

This week I read:

• Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks, the first of the Culture series.

• The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, the second of the Culture series.

  I’d read both of these before, many years ago, but I’ve not read all of the Culture books, so I decided to go through the series from the beginning. They’re good, definitely easier to read than Malazan, and entertaining. I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say that these are “the standard by which modern sci-fi is judged” (as one of the book reviews says), but definitely good stuff.

Network rebuild

I am cursed to always be a couple of components away from being done. As the cables I needed were still a little while away, I decided to upgrade to a Ubiquiti router, switch, and access point, which would arrive in time.

The cables arrived on Tuesday.

The switch arrived on Wednesday.

The router and access point… have been lost by UPS.

The latest tracking update for that package is “In Transit” from Tuesday. On Friday I got in touch with the local UPS depot, who couldn’t find the package in their warehouse. They told me to contact the sender “who will hopefully send you a replacement” while UPS search for the package. Great.

Link Roundup

No links this week.