Pupdate

My Apple Fitness challenge for June was to walk/run 225.5km, which resulted in some bonus walks for Max, despite the mostly awful weather.

Back to London

I went into London for the first time in 15 months. It was for an emergency dentist visit (which turned out OK), but it’s a trip I’d rather not have needed to make. The trains were pretty quiet, though mask discipline was sketchy – lots of chin maskers, and mouth only maskers.

Veterans Railcard

Returning to London gave me a reason to buy a Veterans Railcard. It’s a much better deal than the Network Railcard I used to get, as it provides 1/3 off a much wider range of fairs – including peak time tickets and 1st class.

Slightly annoyingly though all four times I tried to use a ticket at an automated gate it didn’t work. I get that they need to occasionally check that people haven’t fraudulently bought railcard tickets without the railcard itself, but 100% feels more like harassment than random sampling.

Daughter Driving

I wrote back in February about $daughter0 getting a Mini for her 17th birthday so she could start learning to drive. Despite all the obstacles of lockdown, and post lockdown shortages of driving lessons and test availability she managed to pass first time with no professional lessons. When she grabbed a cancellation booking at the local test centre there were only 12 days to go, which resulted in some pretty intensive practice runs around the routes we found online. So when the big day arrived I thought she was ready, and indeed she was.

It’s a watershed moment in parenting when you stop having to ferry your kids around, and they just take themselves where they need to be. We’re starting to get used to it though :)

Jabbed

The start of the month also saw me getting my second dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, not long followed by $wife getting hers. $son0 has also been able to get his first shot of Pfizer, which just leaves $daughter0 waiting for the government to get its act together for ‘children’ (as the way things are playing out with the Delta variant makes me feel that waiting another 6-7 months for her to reach adulthood isn’t a great strategy).

Raspberry Pi Stuff

We’ve been working on ‘Distributed Edge Secondary Server (dess)’, which lets people self host the services for their @ signs. Of course Raspberry Pis are an ideal platform for that, so I’ve been doing a bunch of stuff to ensure that the @ Platform works on them (and Arm more generally). I did a talk for the June Flutter Bangalore Meetup about Dart on Arm (slides here).

No Beating Beat Saber

I spent my exercise time walking instead. I expect I’ll be getting the headset back on for July.