test please delete

[mudskipper]

Our boiler chose today to break.

Pressure switch.

Fortunately it was fixed quickly and expensively.

I think our boiler has cost at least 3x its installation in repair bills.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Tonight’s entertainment was a rewatch of…



Predestination (2014) is an excellent time-travel thriller. In terms of temporal paradoxicality, it’s pretty tricky, but the film does a fine job of presenting the entire story: the problem is how hard your own brain finds it to accept that the sequence (if that’s the right word) of events do, in fact, make their own sense, even if it’s not the sense you’re used to

And that simultaneously makes it sound more complicated than it is, while ignoring how complicated it is. Where’s the “It bent my brain, but in a good way” smiley

Anyway, hugely recommended

Goodnight all

Having located and extracted the aforementioned "Gravity", somehow it didn't feel quite right, so "Predestination" was duly extracted & viewed, bearing in mind the recommendation above.

Predestination (2014) - IMDb

I'd forgotten over the intervening period that it was written by Robert Heinlein, which makes a pleasant change from poor old Phil Dick getting ripped off & abused.

It was rather good, though reminding me of "The Man Who Folded Himself".

Which I find, with some interest, was written in 1973, so it's 45 years or so since I read it.

The Man Who Folded Himself - Wikipedia

Tonight's 2nd feature was last week's eps of "The Good Place" which was laugh out loud funny in parts.

In other other news, it's fecking snowing, though it seems to be far more fecking snowing in the front garden than it is out the back.

Considering the hassle and stress caused by the washing machine last march when I attempted to wash stuff when it was snowing, I think I'll give it a miss until the thaw.

https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-cont...ou-Zombies.pdf

[NickFitz]

The soup came to fruition, and was extremely nice accompanied by a couple of thick chunks of the multi-seed loaf

There are three further large portions, which have been duly apportioned to receptacles ready for the freezer once they’ve cooled.

And the database stuff is finally sorted… I think. One minor edge case with certain complex emoji, but they don’t get used much here anyway, and I also strongly suspect it’s actually a bug in the PHP multibyte encodings module, and quite possibly fixed in later versions.

It’s all a bit hairy, mind, including dropping and recreating primary keys and secondary indexes (apparently they aren’t called indices in this context) on a number of tables. They’re compound things including text fields defined to hold up to 250 or 255 characters (yay for consistency). Those become potentially four times as long in four-byte UTF-8, which is too long for the 1000-byte limit on keys when combined with whatever the key combines them with.

But they’re almost all strings that are limited at the vBulletin application level to shorter lengths, or parts of vBulletin itself that aren’t going to change; and the longest actual value in any of them is 84 characters. So I redefine the compound thingies to only use the first 200 characters, and it’s fine

So I’ll probably write that all up and get the SQL scripts over to admin tomorrow.

[NickFitz]

Tonight’s blockbuster was a rewatch of San Andreas (2015), which I have previously described as "a terribly bad film on so many levels". I must have been in some kind of mood that night (which, as it happens, was also the first time I watched Predestination) because although it has many flaws, they're just the generic ones all films of that kind have (including the precocious kid) and, taken on its own terms, it's quite good fun really

And then an episode of The Good Place; I've been neglecting that, so I'm still in the early part of season 2.

Goodnight all

[WTFH]

Morning all
TFIF, hoping the plane can take off and land tonight.

How’s the ‘rentals, Nick?

[DoctorStrangelove]

Watched San Andreas. It is a terribly bad film on so many levels.

So, then I watched Predestination.

I watched the first couple of episodes of Survivors

They were written by Terry Nation. Need one say more?

Liked "San Andreas" a lot, silly as it is.

"Predestination" is a tribute to R. Heinlein's talents as a writer.

"Survivors" is rather good, though the presence of Fancy Smith* doesn't really make up for the lack of Cyberpersons and Daleks.


*Z Cars. Brian Blessed. "Gordon's Alive!"

[Scruff]

BMI Runnymede this morning. 3 Cervical nerves to be denervated this morning.

Driving here was fun in The Beetle.

Ah well, a day no invoice.

[mudskipper]

BMI Runnymede this morning. 3 Cervical nerves to be denervated this morning.

Driving here was fun in The Beetle.

Ah well, a day no invoice.

Good luck - hope it goes OK.

[original PM]

Well managed to make it into Manchester today

After 2 days of being stuck at home due to snow.

Not sure why I bothered seems everyone else works from home on a Friday

oh well.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

No snow here. None. So much for that

Grey out, and not mild at about 1°C

But no snow.