On Wednesday evening after work, the missus, myself, and our youngest daughter packed up and drove to our usual over-nighter hotel near Heathrow. And on Thursday morning we hopped a quick Virgin Atlantic flight to JFK. Premium Economy, as frankly, my arse isn’t as padded as it used to be and cheap seats are bloody uncomfortable.

A good number of hours later, we landed, grabbed an Uber, and found ourselves comfortably at our hotel in midtown Manhattan - practically in the shadow of the Empire State Building. As I note, this is our 5th trip to NYC, and the 5th to Midtown. I was hoping to stay in Brooklyn but for some reason we just haven’t managed it yet.

It ended up being a great stay nevertheless. New York is always the same: dirty, loud, expensive, tasty, and wonderful. We’re always there to eat good food, pick up snacks, get some Mio water enhancers, do some shopping, and see the sights, and in all of that it was a success.

The missus and I finally managed to walk the High Line, and visit Little Island. I bloody loved them! It would be great to do that again in different seasons so if any company would like me to work in NY for a few weeks, hit me up!

We got some excellent pizza slices, visited a Red Lobster (before they all vanish!), and went to a place my daughter recommended called The Jin as I was craving Kimchi.

Shopping-wise, I ended up grabbing some Carhartt shorts from Daves NYC, a sexy Peak Design Everyday Backpack as recommended by Cassidy Williams here, and a matching Tech Pouch.

I wanted to replace my iPad Pro with the M4 model whist there, as it would have been cheaper in U.S.A dollars, but alas, Best Buy sucked and their staff were such ass-hats it put me off.

His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs Issues

Whist I was away, I spotted an email that caused me no end of stress. HMRC was chasing me for overdue corporation tax despite me already setting up a payment arrangement. My bill for last year was about £14k but due to being “between contracts” for 3 months, I couldn’t just pay it all at once so I sorted that out before we left.

Spoke to them this morning, and surprisingly, they admitted that whoever I spoke to about it, hadn’t set it all up properly at all! It was luckily all in the notes though, so she got it handled and I was polite and thankful.

That said, it’s NOT the thing you want to deal with on vacation.

Some Deeply Obscure Technical Advice

If your using templates in Terraform, along with ArgoCD and/or FluxCD, along with pre-commit hooks that fix things like whitespace issus and end-of-file markers, don’t use a chomp() on the text.

The chomp will strip the end-of-file marker, pre-commit will put it back, Flux will detect the file’s changed so will regenerate it and try to force it back into main branch, which will require the repo branch to be unprotected. Then the next person or CI/CD running the pre-commit will start the whole process over again.

What Else? Thoughts and Blogs and Workflow.

• Webmentions, despite being such an old technology, aren’t easy to implement. Soooo much bother.

• That said, no normal human can do ActivityPub. It’s not built with the slightest concept of “ease-of-use”.

• Here are some new blogs I’m adding to my RSS feeds. I’ll get them into the blogroll and OPML file today:

  1. Ian Ames - (RSS)
  2. Ovyerus - (RSS)
  3. LD - (RSS)

  In particular, that last one had a fascinating article regarding Obsidian that I’m still looking at as I want to improve my Obsidian workflow.