Weeknotes: Double Double Helix Staircases

A Sunday in February 2020

Weeknotes 9.

Gatsby - I’ve been using Gatsby a lot at work for the last few weeks. It’s a flexible static site generator that’s able to create pages from different content sources. We use it a lot with the Contentful API to build pages. The downside is that I find it’s GraphQL functionality less well documented and I’m unsure of what expected behaviour is for some queries. Some query operators that I wanted to use were missing (such as filtering results on the length of a property).
Overboard - Polygon’s Overboard is one of my favourite YouTube channels. I had the giggles throughout their play of Wavelength and it convinced me to order the game.
Perfectly balanced - I was around friends this weekend playing Pandemic Iberia. We beat the game, just. The last four moves turned into a complex logic puzzle that we talked about for twenty minutes. Me and Pauline often play Pandemic with two player-cards each to make it more complex when there’s just the two of us. I’m in awe at how well balanced the game is - we often win or lose by a single turn.
Double helix staircase - Most days on my commute, I change from rail to the Underground at Finsbury Park. I take one of the two spiral staircases that lead to the southbound Victoria and Piccadilly line platforms. The layout of the station never made sense to me and I always struggled to know what way to turn from the stairs to the to tube platform. I found an older plan of the station¹ and it all clicked - what I thought were two stairwells was just one with a set of two stairs inside intertwined in a double-helix. If you take one stair you need to turn left onto the Victoria line at the bottom, you turn right from the other. There’s another double-helix staircase to the northbound platforms too.
Coding fonts - I like the look of the new Jetbrains Mono font but was put off trying it because of its coding ligatures. I feel similar to the point in this post - symbol-merging ligatures add in ambiguity which programming fonts otherwise try to avoid. I saw there is some demand for a non-ligature version and it might be possible to disable all ligatures in Atom. I decided to stick with Consolas for now.
WD40 ALL THE THINGS - I’ve been using WD40 to fix lots of stiff or squeaky door handles. I don’t understand how, but it even helped a door that wasn’t closing properly. I aspire to own as many types of WD40 as Paul Mucur.

The plan just shows a single staircase in each of the stairwells, more recent work re-added the second (there’s a plan on page 8 of this PDF). ↩

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