This week: dinosaurs! Which may continue, because as well as slightly too many Jurassic Park films there’s all sorts of other celluloid dino-wonder, including three films with dinosaurs by Ray Harryhausen, one of which has cowboys.

I used my mask! But only because I had to go pick up a bike I won. So now I have a folding bicycle, which will probably be the most practical way to get to work once our offices open again.

Pubs are opening first.

Except pubs were already open as take-aways.

And sometimes social distancing is two metres but sometimes it’s one metre, which maybe has something to do with masks.

Are you confused yet? Because I am.

Wear your mask.

Three weeks ago I noted that I could have grown a leopard since the start of lockdown. Now it’s been sixteen weeks, I could have grown a pig.

A sixteen week old human fetus is about 11.6cm long, or “the size of an avocado” according to the NHS. Lighter than an avocado, though. And it’ll be pulling faces, apparently.

I’m not sure when “lockdown” will officially be over, given we’re relaxing different bits at different times.

I’m going to count when I first go back into the office. I don’t think that’ll be for at least another month.

By then I could almost have grown a goat.

Or a human fetus to the size of a banana.

I’m not working again for a few days, hence slight delay this week.

Having finished all the MCU films back in week 8, I thought it’d be fun to watch X-Men. I was partly right (the first one is kind of fun), partly wrong (Days of Future Past is a complete mess and I gave up partway through), and partly hampered because only half of them are on Disney+ and I’m not going to pay any more for these. And I didn’t watch the two of the three Wolverine movies that were on Disney+, because by then I was bored.

I’m not going to watch the Fantastic Four films.

I did watch Blade, though. It holds up well, despite some of the worst action sequences I’ve seen in a long time, particularly in the first half of the film.

My masks sit quietly by my house keys and wallet, unused.

We’re running out of June; the start feels like either very recently or a lifetime ago.

Did a kind of socially-distant stroll around a park for a few hours with a friend on Saturday, which probably did more for my mental health than any amount of exercise or meditation or talking to people through tiny screens. Of course we weren’t really socially distant, since that would miss the point. And we weren’t consistently physically distant either, because it’s tricky to stand two metres from someone and have a conversation, and it’s basically impossible when you’re walking. We probably managed it while sitting down though.

I haven’t been out for ages, so the chances of my being a danger to her are minimal.

My masks have started arriving. So now I can go on public transport and into shops without endangering other people.

Although, again: I’m unlikely to be endangering people.

Also, it sounds like everyone has kind of given up on wearing masks.

Except on public transport, where it’s the law. Why it isn’t the law in shops I have no idea.

Today is Juneteenth, which my (American) employer declared a day of learning and reflection. So I’ve been reading and thinking, and hope my co-workers all have also.

More virtual firsts, where the London CTO group I’m part of met online in something that tries to replicate the sound experience of a party (or a pub). You can hear people more distinctly when you’re closer to them in the online space. Which is a neat idea, although the sound didn’t really taper off fast enough for me, or maybe I know some people with very loud voices. Either way, there was too much I could make out from other groups. But an interesting idea fairly well-executed for something that still seems basically in stealth mode, so I won’t link to them unless I find out that’s okay now.

And from tomorrow (I think? or is it Monday?) people living on their own can buddy up with another household in what I think is supposed to be called a “support cluster”, but I suspect everyone will think of as “sex pod”. Which would be all well and good, but you still have to go through the outside with all the idiots and the lack of masks.

Speaking of which, I have ordered some washable, definitely non-medical grade, masks. Some were from here, because they’re awesome and only partly because I know the maker. Anyway, this will mean I can retire the half-arsed thing I made out of a t-shirt, for when I need to wander around outside and protect other people from any infections I’ve picked up from the packaging of the masks.

But until most other people are wearing masks, no one will be protecting me. So that won’t be happening often. Maybe early in the morning or late at night.

It’s been a quarter of a year in lockdown. Or will have been in the next week, depending on exactly when you stopped going out. I came back from Cyprus on Friday 13th March, stayed in a hotel at Heathrow until the Saturday, and then came home. Two days later we shut our offices worldwide. So technically for me I suppose it’ll be a quarter of a year on Monday.

If you try to Google for things that last 13 weeks you’ll mostly get human first trimester advice. (Apparently at this point a human fetus is the size of a cactus.) That’s about the average gestation of an entire leopard. I could have grown a leopard in this time.

It’s been a bad week to be a statue of a bad guy. Actually, scratch that. They’re moving around; one of them even got to go for a swim. These are statues. They’re living their best lives right now. The people they’re statues of? Long dead racists.

Still some work to do on the living ones though.

And for that matter on the ones who just didn’t think it through. Lady Antebellum are just now realising that the war their name referred to is the one fought over slavery? Maybe we need to teach more Latin.

But at least they’re owning and fixing it and not say doubling down. (Also, good on NASCAR for banning the Confederate flag, although again you might wonder what they thought it stood for up until now.)

I own two flags: Kernow and Bretagne. There was a point, probably when I was in my twenties, when I had a vague plan to get the flags of the other Celtic nations, but they weren’t monochrome which was a thing I was going through at the time. Also you have to decide where you stand on places like the north-west autonomous communities of Spain, and Norte. After a while the flags ended up in a box, and I found them again recently. They are now in a different box.

Burning is an acceptable way of disposing of a Union Flag. If you otherwise acceptably dispose of flags you don’t own, that’s vandalism.

I couldn’t figure out if the Vandals had a flag, but I’m sure they had something approximate. The closest thing I could find to Vandal symbols though were starting to get a bit…Germanic Swastika. And although that isn’t per se racist, there’s definitely something off about knocking down statues of racists and burning flags of their racist countries — while wearing that as an emblem.

Virtual picnic, more fun than I thought it would be and not million miles from an actual picnic. Even in terms of who turned up late. Although most people don’t bring a 40 inch TV to a picnic so they can see their friends but still have a big picnic blanket spread out in front of them.

Spoke to my sister and nieces.

But that’s about it for positivity right now, because America is on fire. Literally, in some places; figuratively, everywhere. Outside America, there’s much less literal fire but (at least in the UK) basically the same amount of figurative fire.

It’s June.

From virtual impro and virtual dinners to a virtual Eurovision. One of my friends compèred, and a lot of others had recorded postcards which in many cases were better than some of the weird things the countries actually put together in normal years.

And this weekend, a virtual picnic!

I decided it would be nice to be on my balcony during the virtual picnic, so I have (somewhat) cleaned it, and ordered new balcony furniture which is currently dotted around the flat waiting for me to get it out.

I’m hoping that instead of something to take up my time I can now just sit on my balcony and do nothing. However since that has literally never happened before for more than about five minutes before I got bored, I need a backup plan.

In sorting through boxes lying around from moves and reshuffles past I discovered some shadow puppets, and even some things I think I can use to make a screen. I’ve also found a couple of partly-made masks that I started about twelve years ago with a friend who has since married and had a child. So I might do something with one or more of those.

Thanks to Andrew Ormerod for pointing out The Encounter, online and raising money to help the Kuikuro indigenous community in Brazil through Covid-19. A treat, but quickly because it’s only up until Monday.

Other than that mostly still too busy to do much outside work.

Although I did try to find a recipe involving auberine, since I had an aubergine. Seriously one of the biggest failures I have ever attempted. Still not sure if the couple of substitutions were the problem or if aubergines are, as I suspected, just a really bad idea for a fruit.

I bought beer. Not quite the experience I’ve been looking forward to post-lockdown since (checks notes) week 6, which was a month ago. But it feels more appropriate to the warm weather than knocking back red wine.

Next Friday, James Lark’s new musical, Infants, is having an online preview, seeing as any other kind of theatre is basically impossible under lockdown. There’s a Facebook event if that’s your thing, which says it’ll be on Tring Productions’ website which suggests it’ll be on their YouTube channel, and I assume by next week there’ll be a TikTok link too.

Or any other art or performance, really. It’s a long weekend in the UK and the US. Enjoy it if you can.

Last week I wasn’t working, and largely avoided using a computer where I could, hence no update.

I did watch all of the MCU films from scratch, in a slightly random order. I now have Unfashionable Opinions, and vaguely toyed with writing a post about how I don’t like most of the ones other people like, and trying to figure out why most of the characters act opposite their nature in Captain America: World Police, and when exactly the spirit of the early films dies (I think it’s partway through Captain America: The Winter Soldier), and when the new spirit appears (it might be after the opening of Black Panther, but I suspect it’s in the middle of Doctor Strange’s training). But that felt like effort, self-indulgent, and not very interesting.

This week started quietly at work then ramped up as I started working on the current big pitch.

Therefore, I’ve been too busy to be bored.

Although sufficiently tired to favour mindless tasks over trying to read or do much in the evening. So I’ve finished restacking all my books, which I started while bored back in week 7. Slightly more accurate calculation now says I need far fewer extra shelves than I thought. Fairly soon I’ll get bored enough again that I’ll buy some new bookcases, which will then give me endless tiny tasks of moving books so they’re in sensible places.

They still make furniture, right?

This is the end of week 9, so the weeknotes numbers don’t line up any more. But I’ll say that again a different way: I’ve been working from home, and (except for the first few days) isolated now for over two months. Boris Johnson keeps seeing his shadow. Someone should steal it.

A much quieter week, which is possibly the wrong way round as I’m now on holiday for a week. So trading a week where I mostly talked to people at work for a week where I won’t talk to people at work at all is only really going to work if I remember to talk to other people instead. Whereas if I’d talked to other people this week as well then I’d be all set for a week on my own ignoring the world completely.

The world deserves to be ignored, and not just the Matt Hancock bit who is still obsessed with mobile apps. Also, his quoted line “to reassert, as much as is safely possible, the liberty of us all” will do wonders for reminding politicians why they employ speechwriters.

Bored, I started to reverse my trend from a while ago of stacking books horizontally. I honestly don’t care about what it does to the spines (except for a very few volumes), but it’s just damn inconvenient to get them out when you want one.

I’ve done a back of the envelope calculation that I need another eleven shelves to take up the extra books that were previously better filling the available vertical space.

Fortunately I have space for more bookcases after clearing out a load of old boxes and storage bits and pieces back in week 4.

Made an approximation to carbonara today, amazingly for the first time. I now have a much better idea of how to do it next time, and yet another reminder of one problem with recipe books, specifically the one about onions.

If you generate URLs in your site that contain personal data (say an email address in an auto-login or confirmation link – although please don’t do that) then at least set Referrer-Policy to no higher than origin-when-cross-origin (you can also do it via meta). The default will leak personal data to the servers containing third party resources you load, such as Javascript libraries, even if they do nothing with it. Worse, security researchers will accuse you of sending data to Google, and no one wants that.

1. This doesn’t seem to prevent cross-origin loaded Javascript from reading document.referrer, although it really should do.

2. Chrome 84 will change the default, due July 2020. Firefox you can change the default policy in config.

3. Or use Content-Security-Policy to prevent anything cross-domain from loading in the first place.

It’s May. Just in case you’d lost track.

Impro over Zoom went well, aided by the three of us having improvised together now for the best part of two decades. We recorded it, so I need to listen back and see if there’s anything worth putting out there as a lockdown episode of Totally Made Up Tales.

My first Zoom dinner party, or rather steak without the restaurant and, for one person, without the steak. Also went well, although not quite as fun and fluid as it would have been face to face, partly because it was six people but only four screens. And the group of three kept on passing the wine amongst themselves, which broke the illusion.

I’ve started making a list of things I want to do at the end of lockdown. Little things, to celebrate. Top at the moment is ordering a pint of lager and drinking it, ideally outdoors in the sunshine.

Tired of finding things to do with cauliflower, which seems to be about 30% of my vegetable boxes by volume. I made some soup, which is okay, and I’ve found uses for another giant head of the stuff. But it’s just not a good enough vegetable for the effort. Please weather, send me a new vegetable season.