The week started in a tent in some woods near Tunbridge. Last day of a 4 day camping trip with wife. Packed up and home by 11 am. Kept it together and got everything unpacked, put away, laundry done and hung out on the line. Completed the first one of these posts. Went out on my bike. 47k done. Missed out riding the whole time we were camping even though I brought my bike with me. Not a bad thing. I think I needed the rest.
On Tuesday I was out on my bike again. 60k done. I’ve taken to having my camera with me when I ride. Not going to go into why bring a camera when I can take pictures on my phone. I shall leave that for another time. Even though I had both with me I rode past a great scene without using either of them. Five or six young teenages at a bus stop. Sitting together in a row. Each sat sideways on, feet on the bench, knees bent and propping up the kid in front of them. All but one who looked very bored, were gazing at their phones. A picture would have been better than this description. A lesson for me in noticing stuff and acting quickly.
I was listening to Real Roots Radio on the way round. I really liked a few tunes I heard by Cedric Williams and Barry Issacs. This would lead to countless hours during the rest of the week adding music to and sorting through my digital collection. Started with a compilation album. Return to Umoja. One track on it by Cedric Williams. Band Camp had a few by Barry Isaacs. That gave me the idea of ripping a few CDs from the sizeable collection I built up years ago. Queue an hour or so remembering how to use abcde (A Better CD Encoder) and tweaking the config.yaml for that. This led to converting a heap of MP4 files to Flacs and working on updating my Beets library.
This opened up what became a huge time-sink on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
Not fully distracted enough by the music based activities on Wednesday I decided to also browse through a ton of personal blog posts. First from JC Probably’s blogroll then Manu’s People and Blogs series. Inspired, I put in some time to add short codes to automatically create and centre thumbnails for images added to new posts I create here.
Pleased to say I did get out for a 50k ride on Wednesday with a local cycling buddy.
Back to work on Thursday. Couple of meetings. One breakthrough on a project that had become stuck in a bottleneck. More wrangling with beets / fingerprinting accousticIDs. More ripping CDs. No ride.
Friday was another work day. I think I improved my understanding of what defines supported living settings for registration purposes, and what defines them as specified accommodation under the Care Act. In short I now believe that registration with the CQC is not a prerequisite in the determination of whether a suported living setting falls under the heading of specified accommodation under the Care Act and the Care and Support (Ordinary Residence) Regulations.
Got some helpful feedback on a query I answered about section 117. This was about a simpler way to explain the connection between the assessment and eligibility with the impact mental health issues can have on any “health” issues identified.
Responded to another query to do with an increase in needs, allocation of resources, assessment and support planning.
Reflecting on all this now and it seems I was more productive than it felt at the time.
Stayed up till 2 am on Friday night. More wrangling with my music library and Beets. The fruits of this and all the other time spent on it this week was about 25 GB of duplicate files (music and cover art) plus a load of empty directories being removed, and a lot of files fingerprinted for acoustic ID, thus improving the meta data in each. It was also Band Camp Friday so felt justified buying a load more tunes. Happy days! Too wrapped up with all this to bother going out for a ride.
Saturday. Made a good start on this post mostly between dropping off and collecting the youngest from football training. Spent a few hours on bike maintenance. New back wheel, cassette, chain and jockey wheels. The high screw on the deraillieur was very stubborn. Sprayed on some WD40, gave it some time to penetrate but still could not budge it. Luckily I managed to index the gears with just the barrel adjuster, and the B screw for the largest sprocket. I replaced an 11/34 cassette with a 11/36 and needed to widen the gap between the top jockey wheel and the 36 tooth sprocket a little bit. Went out for a ride. Realised I’d threaded the chain round the derailleur wrong. Back home, a quick fix, and out again for just over 60k. Few more 1/4 turns to the barrel adjuster on the way round and all seems good.
Rode a 200k DiY audax on Sunday. That’s the 23rd monthly 200k + ride for the ongoing RRtY. Took a fair few photos on the way round. Not inclined to look through them now. Bit tired. Gonna drink tea, watch TV and have an early night.
The week is done.