Monthly Update: October 2024
Oct 3, 2024
This last month was a lot less eventful than some of the previous ones. A lot of business as usual, though even business as usual always has some interesting wrinkles.
Relay
Work has been going well, I feel like I’m making an impact and getting to work on some interesting problems.
This technically happened in August, but one fun event was getting to spend a night in our London sortation center. (It’s called “sortation” in the logstics business, not “sorting”.) It used to be the case that non-sortation employees would get to help out when they visited, but I think they stopped doing that because we were so bad and slow at it, so I was only there to observe.
Sortation is basically a giant MapReduce shuffle step in real life. Coming into the sortation center are truckloads of parcels from retailers. They get unloaded from the trucks, scanned, and put onto a conveyor belt. They’re sorted first into very coarse areas based on where in London (in this case) they’re being delivered and then secondarily into bags that will form the basis of routes that couriers will pick up for delivery. Once all that’s done and the bags are sealed, the bags are again shuffled to the loading dock where a different set of trucks and vans arrives and picks the bags up for distribution to locations around London.
Seeing the whole process in person is great. You get a visceral sense of what actually happens to a parcel, but also you get to see all the weird bits and little inefficiencies and stuff. I made a few little improvements to the software they use after visiting (and some of the other folks I went with are working on some major improvements), which is nice for them but also means they know that when I tell them I can help them in the future, they’re likely to actually get something out of it.
Covid
I did come down with Covid for a week in September, which wasn’t super fun. On the plus side, our family has developed a protocol for this: I spend all my time in the back garden and interact with everyone by shouting through the open doors to the dining area, and then during the week I work inside with the windows open and leave a half hour before anyone gets home.
As with the last time this happened, the protocol worked! Nobody else in the house caught it, and the weather cooperated nicely so that I didn’t have to sit out in the rain.
As a side note, I’m always blown away by how expensive at-home Covid tests are in the US. We can buy them in boxes of 25 for less than £1 each here.
Gaming
I’ve done three drafts of Duskmourn, the new Magic set that released a week ago, and I’ve been enjoying it a lot. I’m not a big fan of the setting, either the modernity or the horror aspects, but the gameplay is really interesting. I also got to attend a prerelease at our local game store after having missed the last two, which is great fun; it’s a small local store so the owner knows me and Mr. 8 and is always very welcoming. Everyone enjoys Mr. 8 being there, and he’s getting a lot better at the game.
Otherwise, Kat turned me onto Void Stranger, which is highly recommended. It’s a puzzle game, and I don’t want to say more than that, just go play it.
Books
I’ve been stuck on the same book all month, This Earthly Globe about a Venetian geographer during the Age of Discovery. It’s actually quite interesting but I haven’t felt super motivated to read it for whatever reason. On the plus side, it has this passage about adventures in early public libraries:
Meanwhile, they put in place a punitive system of fines that has been, in varying forms, the bane of university students and researchers ever since. Ramusio took on the unpleasant task of collecting the money. Thanks to Bembo, they also obtained a brief of excommunication from Pope Leo X for those who did not return books.
And I think that’s all the interesting happenings for this month. I’m hoping to write at least one thing before my next monthly update, so look forward to that!