November 2025: Oxen, operations, and oh so many trains
Hello friends! November has been a month bookended by ridiculous travel. At the start of the month I flew to Mexico for a work offsite, where I got to meet all my new colleagues in person and enjoy the sunrise on the beach. At the end of the month, I spent time with friends and family, and I racked up twenty-three different rail journeys over four days. (Plus two rail replacement buses.) I’m glad I had a book!
After I got back from Mexico, I had a few days off work to celebrate our anniversary with my partner. We went to see Gwenda’s Garage, a musical about a lesbian-run car repair workshop in 1980s Sheffield – a fun show, if perhaps cramming in one too many plotlines. I also took her on her first trip to IKEA, where she had great fun enjoying the many textures and fabrics, and buying some new lamps for my house.
I love cats, so later in the month I had great fun visiting my parents and their new kitten, a gorgeous ginger boi who’s full of energy and eating for six. On Saturday, I had Christmas drinks with friends, a delightful evening that was also a terrifying reminder of how little of the year is left. And my brother started teaching at the same time as I started my new job, and last weekend I finally went to see his new home and find out how he’s doing. A lot of back and forth, but all worth it.
I expect December to be similarly busy! I hope you can all spend time with your loved ones as we hit the festive season.
What have I been writing?
I had some fun this month, writing Can you take an ox to Oxford?, which explores the limits of Oxford’s new congestion charge. Any day now, I’m sure the city centre will be overrun by oxen-drawn carts.
I also wrote a few fragments of the work I’ve been doing to clean up my local archives: Detecting AV1-encoded videos with Python and Cleaning up messy dates in JSON.
I’ve mentioned my social media archiving project several times; you should finally get more detail on this soon! I’m putting the finishing touches to a trio of posts that explain the social media project in more detail, which I expect to publish next week.
And just three “today I learned” posts:
What’s making me smile?
🗽 Zohran Mamdani’s won the New York mayoral election, and I enjoyed his victory speech. It’s an articulate speech with a lot of depth and nuance, which feels so different to so much of modern politics. He treats his audience as intellectual equals, not as simpletons who need to be talked down to. That’s refreshing!
🛞 Xyla Foxlin has a delightful video about flying the Goodyear Blimp. It’s a fun watch, partly to see how weird blimps are compared to conventional planes, partly to see her absolute joy at getting to fly one.
🕵️ This month I read Finding Hester, a book written by several of my friends to track down the true identity of Hester Leggatt, a mostly unknown WWII secretary who was a pivotal character in Operation Mincemeat (both the musical and the real-life operation). I watched their research from the sidelines, and the book had lots of details and new information I hadn’t read before.
Have a great month, and I’ll talk to you next year!
Best,
~ Alex