Updated 2026-10-02, in Tartu. Previous version was eight months stale and still said I was learning to solder.

Now

Paid work

I am in the middle of a two-week job for a small operator in Riga: an acceptance check for a batch of nineteen boards they bought second-hand, which mostly means establishing which of the nineteen are actually the same model. Three of them are not. It finishes on 6 November.

After that I am free, and I am looking for one job of up to four weeks starting any time from 10 November. I am not taking anything that begins in December. The work page describes what a job involves and the kinds I turn down.

On the bench

• Whether the mean-stay metric from the September note survives a kernel move off the 6.6 series. I have the shelf server on the newer line and the desk machine held back as a control, and I will not write anything until both have thirty quiet days on the same measurement. That puts it in December at the earliest.
• A rewrite of my own measurement scripts so that the window length, the repeat count and the machine state end up in the output file rather than in my notebook. This is the third attempt. The first two died because I made them general.
• An attempt to measure what an idle network link actually costs at the card, not at the wall, which so far has produced a number smaller than my meter’s error and a lot of respect for people who do this properly.

Not doing

• In August I shut down the mail server I had run for nine years and moved the address to somebody whose job that is. It was a good nine years and I was the single point of failure in it.
• No new programming language this year. I have a list and the list can wait.
• Not on any chat platform for work. Mail, and a terminal when there is something to look at.

Desk

The two machines described on the notes page, an inline mains meter that cost rather less than it should have, a keyboard from 2014 that has outlived three computers, and a paper notebook where every measurement gets a page with the date and the machine state at the top. The notebook is the part I would be most upset to lose.

Outside

Learning to make bread properly, with a scale and written notes, which my partner finds both funny and predictable. Twenty-two loaves so far; the hydration column in the notebook is the only one that has mattered.

Earlier versions of this page are kept in the now archive, back to late 2024, mostly so I can watch how seldom the plan survives contact with the year.

This page exists because people kept asking whether I was free, and the honest answer changes about four times a year. If it has gone stale again, tell me.