Mark Carroll's Journal

It's been difficult for me to get around to much lately around the day-to-day needs so here's a small slice of latest events. First, the weather's been glorious lately, it almost makes it feel okay to live in Glasgow; I could get used to this. Yesterday, we took our dog L. over to Glasgow Green and today I still hope we get to bring him for a walk along the Clyde.

Recently, we got coffee with R.'s childhood friend and their partner: they were passing through Glasgow, which was great. It is interesting to see here somebody who lived so near R. far away and long ago.

Yesterday, R. observed that our mattress really isn't great in how it transmits disturbance on one side of it over to the other. So, this morning we headed to IKEA to replace our VALEVÅG pocket-sprung mattress with an ÅNNELAND hybrid mattress. I was skeptical about how well we would be able to fold our old mattress and fit it into the car but R. led and it all worked out. The council waste centre was rather busy on a sunny weekend afternoon but there was parking near the mattresses and, with the help of R.'s sons, the mattress replacement is now complete.

We also stopped at Sainsbury's, which is near IKEA. It's one of the more pleasant supermarkets to shop in: the aisles are generally wide and the self-scanning handheld device's UI isn't annoying.

I realized that I've generally been sleeping rather well for quite some time now. I think it may be the change in job: having dropped a couple of grades in responsibility, going from leading teams to taking Jira tickets, the stress is reduced commensurately.

On not-in-office days, I've been using the cross-trainer more often than not. I am pleased to be achieving this change in habits. My calf is a bit sore but, as always, ignoring an issue seems to work fine: if I don't use it as an excuse not to exercise then the exercise tends not to make it any worse. My eating has not been anywhere near modest enough but the food has been tasty so, well, there's that.

At work, I have an on-site visit in NYC coming up and I have already checked that the hotel also has a cross-trainer. It will be interesting to try getting between Newark Airport and Penn Station by rail: it looks easily achieved but is a new experience for me. We do have business Uber but I got on so badly with the Uber app and their customer service that I am happy to avoid it.

Often, I've felt as if my body and mind were moving through molasses: I can do what I must but everything's effort, whether mental or physical. More recently, that's happened less. It seems premature to link the improvement with exercising but time might tell.

I stopped to think about how I notice the price of mailing a letter in Britain. In my youth, it wasn't a cost I thought worth much consideration. So, I stopped to investigate.

The Bank of England turns out to have an excellent inflation calculator allowing users to, check how prices in the UK have changed since 1209, which warms my heart.

If I go back twenty years, apparently something costing £100 back then now costs around £175, handwaving whatever weighted averaging they do to determine that. At that time, a second-class stamp used to cost 23p so we might expect it to cost around 40p now. They actually cost 91p so it's no wonder that I'm noticing the cost in a way that I wasn't before.

I can see why this might be so. Fewer letters are mailed at all so scale may be much worse. No doubt we have the cumulative effects of various government austerity drives. Perhaps there's simply been incompetent management. After all, somebody ought to be paying large sums of money to the many innocent postmasters who were so culpably wronged by senior personnel over many years.

Recently, in discussing other-media spin-offs, I was reminded of the three trilogies of Babylon 5 novels, which were decent enough that I would be happy to reread them. However, they are long enough out of print to be enough effort and money to obtain that I shan't bother. It seems a shame that such things just fade away.

Back when I first read them, I hadn't appreciated how that kind of book, like most manga, falls out of print, never to be reprinted. I don't know what ethicists might think but I would be quite open to a rule that put into the public domain any work that was once openly and widely available then was not similarly reoffered for a long period, assuming no conflict with the public interest.

A few years ago, driving from Portland, ME, back down to Belmont, MA, on Hallowe'en, we experienced a heavy blizzard. This Easter Sunday here in Glasgow, the morning started off with a lovely blue sky then gray turned to sleet then to handsome snowflakes that are settling. Update: Now the sky's back to blue.

The snow could at least confine itself to winter. I still vote for using R.'s citizenship to live on a tropical island instead! Fortunately, our dog L. is wholly unfazed by rain and snow.

I am a fan of manned spaceflight. If we are confined to this planet only, especially if we remain such poor stewards and with such capacity for destruction, then we will be limited and eventually gone, leaving nothing behind but artifacts.

I was concerned for Artemis II, fearing that something like Apollo 8 was a jump too far too fast after a long fallow period, and that showhorses had too greatly replaced sober experts in program management. It was with considerable relief that I watched the astronauts achieve orbit and I am glad that their time in orbit has provided the confidence for their present journey onward to the moon, incidentally arriving at around the dates of first contact for Star Trek and Babylon 5.

I do not know if my children will get to see us establish a longer-term presence on the moon, perhaps even among asteroids, but I can dream. In the meantime, at least I can reasonably hope for the astronauts' safe return.

Britain has many nice fancy buildings and engineering marvels whose origins coincide with the the height of its colonial era. I surmise that the colonies were exploited such that their wealth turned into shiny domestic things. In visiting Paris and seeing the many old, grand buildings, and noting that France also had many colonies, I wonder if my theory holds analogously there too.

Glasgow's Victorian buildings seem to have developed a bit of a habit of collapsing and burning down. I can't help but suspect that, as we all end up as second-tier powers, it's nice to have the shiny things (if we don't think about why we have them) but there's going to be decreasingly many, no longer is there means to create them. They're valuable but perishable leftovers of a past era.

I did not feel like thinking or moving at all this morning but, after enough resting, by this afternoon a little energy had accumulated. I did file my 2025 FBAR with FinCEN and went on to figure enough of my US taxes to discover that a combination of higher thresholds and lower income (I was made redundant last year then took a new job on a lower base salary) means that I should be able to skip itemizing deductions. This is great news because the calculation of pro-rated foreign tax paid on not-excluded income, and of mortgage interest paid (not easily obtained from Barclays), all converted from GBP to USD for when each happened, is quite a pain.

I also did some travel and attraction ticket planning for our coming trip to Paris, last time I was a tourist there we still had the Carte Orange. I even (finally) got around to responding properly to an e-mail from a relative. Maybe I'll yet get around to opening and filing pending mail.

At the weekend, I happened to be further up the Clyde at the right time to see the bow of a new Naval frigate being transported up the river to the shipyard where the warships are assembled. I didn't know what kind of ship it was for at first, I learned that later online.

Glasgow has a great city center, rather walkable and with the subway for longer hops. Next to Central Station is a fancy building some decades older than the converted Victorian mill that I live in. At least, there was, until a vape store somehow caught fire. Now there are cordoned-off streets, the smell of smoke, and a considerable number of sad, shocked people and even more rather inconvenienced ones.

I have no love for vape stores in the first place, I tend to avoid patronizing establishments that expand their range to vapes. Given vapes' propensity to catch fire in waste processing centers, etc., goodness knows who thought it a good idea to allow a vape shop to locate next to a critical transit hub in a historic landmark whose construction substantially predates fire safety codes. Perhaps we shall find out, with luck when I am not feeling grumpy and vengeful.

My commute may be quite unaffected: when I pass close to the area of the fire, I'm in a subway tunnel on my way to Queen Street, the other main railway station; I hope that tomorrow's train to Edinburgh isn't overly crowded by passengers displaced from Central which won't be open yet.

I refueled our car this evening, I figured that gas prices aren't dropping anytime soon. In probably 2003 I tried holding off filling the car with gas, back when I drove an old Ford Crown Victoria (with around a seventy litre fuel tank), but eventually I had to give in and pay the higher prices. At least, with mostly just driving around the city in our hybrid in the near term, today's gas should last us for a good while.

Update: My morning train's quite full but I arrive comfortably early enough to have snagged a seat easily. A pox on the selfish passengers who use their coat and bag to occupy two seats while others are still boarding.

Recently, I stumbled upon an article about Commodore Business Machines' line of calculators. I have owned plenty of Commodore hardware, going back to the PETs that my secondary school retired, but no calculators. I was amused to read that, back in the 1970s, some calculators were marketed as being electronic slide rules. I still have my father's slide rules, he also had a desktop mechanical calculator and, later, one of the first version of the TI-30, with the red glowing digits that would show some thinking going on as it evaluated a trigonometric function.

I determined that I might enjoy occasionally using a decent ancient scientific calculator, ideally with a reverse-Polish interface. However, looking around online now, I don't see any particularly sweet spots in what one can buy of Commodore's calculators. I like how, say, the Commodore SR-4190R even has hyperbolic functions and probability distributions but it's not as if examples in good condition remain abundant and rarer models like the M55 appear indeed to be inconveniently rare.

Remembering mst3kmoxie's HP 12C, which can calculate some of the financial things that now form part of my day job, I explored the alternative of investigating the older HP and Novus range. However, things like the Novus 4510 don't seem to have existed in the UK and international shipping costs plenty. In dropping the nostalgia and taking a look at modern offerings, I discovered the SwissMicros DM15L which could be fun to play with. They seem to be out of stock right now but, worse, Parcelforce fees for importing one would mean it wasn't worth it.

So, the obstacles are broadly those of availability at all, or of getting the calculator from there to here. Ah well, it's more an idle fancy anyway rather than a pressing need. I seem to be in the wrong place and considerably the wrong time.

Having learned of exchanges of fire in the Middle East, I can't help but worry for the innocent people in the region. Further, I found myself quickly jumping to: what's the off-ramp for Iran? Whenever attacked, it responds. These exchanges typically fizzle out but if Trump welcomes distraction from Epstein then goodness knows how far this will go before he lauds himself for some paper victory.

Incidentally, it occurs to me that if Oriental is a rather Western-centric term for a region then Middle East is no less so.