Toby Atkin-Wright

O2 to Giffgaff. Having been with O2 since the day that the original iPhone was released, my annoyance with them has built to such a level that I thought I’d give Giffgaff a go instead. I know they come from the same place, but their website exudes honesty whereas O2’s just feels a bit weaselly.

Ubuntu to Alpine. At work most of our team’s Docker containers are running Ubuntu-based images, but as our projects grow and as we think about permanently-remote work on variable quality internet, it becomes obvious that bandwidth will be more important in builds and deployments. Alpine images are oh so much smaller. Our Ruby images seem to migrate reasonably, whereas some Python libraries have been a right pain. In general, some things are just tricky to build on Alpine. But I think it is worth it.

Phusion Passenger to… Puma? I’ve been running internal Rails-based apps on Passenger for many years, but what once felt friendly and self-configuring on physical servers now feels clunky and painful in Docker. So I think it is time to go for a simpler serving tech.

Oh, and our local chip shop Dino’s has started doing mushy peas again. Why would mushy peas be a casualty of the lockdown? Maybe we’ll never know. But they are back now, so I had chips and peas for tea.

kateaw and I received our second doses of the Pfizer vaccine first thing on Monday morning. We were lined up, well spread out, in one of the corridors of the St Andrews Community Hospital just after 8am.

The first dose had left me feeling dozy and my arm sore for three days. This time the effects were a bit more pronounced; I was sleepy all day Tuesday and it has felt like every muscle has been aching. Still, could be worse. The crib sheet tells me that a rare side effect is “temporary one-sided facial drooping”.

I took advantage of the relaxation of the rules this week to be a little more confident about going out. The only indoors places I’ve been to in the past 14 months have been for medical appointments, but I felt very daring and adventurous this week as I made a brief trip to Morrisons, and then a briefer trip to M&S for food shops. What luxury to be able to shop in person rather than ordering online. End-of-aisle specials! Yellow-label bargains!

I might go shopping again. Later in the summer, maybe.