I'm off on a long-distance trip today, one I bought a ticket for several weeks ago. I have thus become very invested in what today's weather might be because a miserable outlook can wreck a good day out. My visit to Durham in 2015 was destroyed by heavy rain all day, my 2024 trip to Rugby left me soaked through and my 2018 spring break in Cornwall annoyingly coincided with The Beast From The East. What weather would Saturday 22nd February 2025 bring? BBC's weather website provides a forecast up to 14 days in advance, so on Sunday 9th February I refreshed the page and went "oh". Cold and wet, no sun, not ideal. And then it changed its mind again on Tuesday (full-on sunshine) and again on Wednesday (wet). Here's a summary of how the BBC forecast for today's weather changed over the space a week. That was two weeks ago. I then carried on checking throughout last week. Obviously it's a lot easier to forecast the weather as the day approaches, but to have got it right six days in advance is pretty good going. It's particularly good given that today is a brief sunny respite between two wet days, with yesterday seeing a heavy band of rain cross the region and tomorrow promising the same but with gales. It would have been all too easy to get the precise timing of these frontal systems wrong, but the BBC weather forecast has correctly identified 'Friday wet, Saturday dry, Sunday wet" since five days ago. Met Office weather forecast for today at my chosen destination. They don't provide the BBC's forecast any more, theirs is separate and has been since 2018. They also don't provide a forecast until one week before a particular date, not two. So consistent has the message been, from both the BBC and the Met Office, that I've known since Sunday that I'm in for a dry mild day trip today. Hurrah! It isn't always this cut and dried, nor are both forecasts always in agreement, but they've both played a blinder over the last week in getting today's weather right. Indeed if I were to draw your attention to just one fact, it's that long-range weather forecasts are usually bolx. This is especially true if you work for a clickbait website and spot that some unreliable forecast has promised a slight snow flurry in six weeks time - please put your keyboard away and stop trying to hoodwink us with ill-judged certainties. But even the BBC's weather forecast can't be trusted two weeks out, it's just a low-probability best guess, which'll be why they never ever look that far forward on TV. One week ahead, though, might just be spot on... which is why I'm currently speeding out of London towards sunny and mild, hurrah!

Image by Austin Chan If you’re reading this, you’re thinking, “I’m too late,” or “Other people are so much better at this than me,” or, “Why bother?”  You’re probably feeling defeated, depressed, and a special kind of self-loathing that comes with awareness. You know that you shouldn’t feel this way. It’s not constructive. But you […] The post This is the perfect time appeared first on Herbert Lui.

The major roadworks at the Bow Roundabout continue, which is worrying because the final resurfacing works are due to begin on Monday night. Instead the inside lane on Stratford High Street is still coned off for much drilling and scraping, so they'd better get a move-on. Also I found the road closure notice for next week's resurfacing works at the back of the local paper and it's quite complicated. It takes seven paragraphs to explain that the entire roundabout and all its slip roads will be closed, then four more to explain that access to McDonalds will be maintained by marshals waving traffic the wrong way along the bottom of Bow Road. Reassuringly 'works will be phased such that some restrictions will only apply at certain times', so traffic may get off lightly on certain nights. Less reassuringly 'the Order will be effective between 24th February 2025 and 24th August 2025 every night 9:00 PM to 5:00 AM, or until works are completed, whichever is sooner', which is a six month period rather than the actually-planned four nights. I guess TfL's legal team prefers to over-estimate so they only ever have to place one Works Order in the paper, but that is a serious over-over-over-estimate. Previous updates: #0 #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10 #11 #12 #13 #14 #15

When I was entering the job market in early 2023, I caught up with my friend Fadeke. She had just started a really good job at DigitalOcean. She shared her process with me, and let me know that she did fewer than 20 job applications. This quantity was a really helpful anchor for when I […]