test please delete

[NickFitz]

I decided that tonight would be Alan Arkin night, so no premieres. First up: Argo (2012), in which he plays a Hollywood guy as part of the CIA operation to rescue the US diplomatic staff from Iran after the Shah was sent packing. And then the most excellent Going in Style (2017) which would have been a fine last movie for any of the stars, though it turned out not to be for any of them

Goodnight all

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Saturday.

Dry.

Grey.

Sunless.

Cool in here at 20.2 deg, 21.5 deg in the kitchen, 19.5 deg in the leanto.

1003.5 mBar, 29.633338 in Hg, 752.686899 Torr, 14.55454 psi, (up from 1002 last night), 69% RH (GDR hair), 67% RH (Lidl electric).

Tedious dream where I was in some university (probably Loobarooo) doing some postgrad course or other and failing miserably due to lack of application, with the need to return home in a car or van that didn't have an MOT, and the ins & outs of how to achieve that went on for what seemed like ages. It was a relief to wake up.

Meanwhile on the 23rd of June 2019 I watched "The Battle of Britain (1969)" whereas NF watched "Colditz (1955)" and regretted the lack of coverage of the Gingham Glider.

Smalls in the WM.

Smalls out of the WM & pegged out on the line.

Shirts in the WM.

Shirts out of the WM and pegged out on the line.

Cottons (including bedsheets) in the WM.

Lunch: baked potato with cheese and baked beans, a red corner yog, bramble jelly & marmalade on slices of Morrisons sunflower & pumpkin seed toast from bread that's been in the freezer at least 6 months & required frost beating off it before meeting the fridge, 0.91*1.55 pints of good Glengettie tea.

Entertainment: bits of Money Box, Dead Ringers, "The Desperadoes (1943, full Technicolor(tm) which was unusual for Columbia).

Cottons (including bedsheets) pegged out on the line & blowing nicely in the semigale.

Shirts in off the line & roughly iRoned, now airing upstairs.

Entertainment whilst iRoning: The Infinite Monkey Cage on The Brain.

Rest of the cottons in off the line & duly iRoned, airing upstairs.

Entertainment: Buried Secrets of WWII: E1: The attack on Pearl Harbour, E2: Peenemunde and Camp Dora: the V2, E3: Hurtgen Forest 1944, E4: Malta, E5: Papua New Guinea.

Maigret S1 E12 "The Cactus". Lapointe gets himself shot on duty. Stratford Johns (Charlie Barlow, Z cars & Softly Softly) was in this one.

The Four Just Men: The Protector: naughty psychiatrist.

Some gentle soothing music from Motorhead.

Documentary about AC/DC and the remaining Young above ground.

Apparently their first tour of the UK included a gig in that Swansea which was attended by exactly 5 people who'd won their tickets from a local radio station, presumably Swansea Sound. Hell's Bells. .

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Grey day again, currently 17°C with 20° due later, while the barometers are decidedly down at 993/1000mB. Apparently it's a bit breezy out too

Off down south in a bit

But first, breakfast! Croissants with strawberry jam, as it's Saturday

[ladymuck]

Afternoon all

Cloudy with intermittent sunshine. Currently 21 degrees with a high of 22 expected. Barometer down to 1007 mBar.

Have had a lazy morning. Started with a long lie in then I've been faffing about checking everything is booked for the trip in two weeks' time. Now I'm contemplating writing up the blog posts for the last trip (it's not an interesting blog, it's more so I have a diary of where I went).

[NickFitz]

Fairly decent journey south and back. My Mum seems comparatively well, mentally alert and so on. They're only holding off on discharging her for the moment as she keeps going into diabetic lows, and they need to get that situation stabilised

[NickFitz]

It seems the secret to getting dinner in a timely manner around here is phoning the Chinese takeaway one minute after they open. Got through on the first call, and it'll be a mere twenty-five minutes before it's ready

[NickFitz]

It seems the secret to getting dinner in a timely manner around here is phoning the Chinese takeaway one minute after they open. Got through on the first call, and it'll be a mere twenty-five minutes before it's ready

And very nice it was

It's brightening up a bit out there now

[NickFitz]

I've got my flow layout in SwiftUI working!

I'd started with some sample code from a tutorial blog post by some bloke, which was useful for getting my head around the way the Layout protocol works. But when faced with "real" circumstances, it failed almost immediately; depending on the width of the container, the last item would overflow to another line, one row past the calculated height. I ended up refactoring it massively, breaking all the core functionality out into more easily testable functions, and then completely rewriting one of them; and in the end, that process exposed one of the unspoken assumptions in the code, which I'd say was a valid one for a basic tutorial but which was never going to be acceptable for production code. So I rejigged it to not make that assumption, which was trivial to do after the refactoring, and now it's spot on

Time for a beer and a movie in celebration, I reckon

[NickFitz]

Tonight's first major motion picture wasn't a premiere because I saw it in the long lost Granada Cinema in Bedford in 1977 in the company of my Dad and my brother; but although I have it and watched it on DVD a few years ago, this is the first time since that evening in the cinema that I've seen it in widescreen HD, because it's only just been released in that format. And it is… {drumroll}… Capricorn One (1977), the film that gave birth to far too many conspiracy theories. They knew how to make a thriller then; amazing action when it's right, quiet suspense when that's right, but not a second that isn't essential to the story - and what's more, you know as you watch it that it's all essential. No longeurs that leave you wondering what they're for and only make sense later here <- smoking in acknowledgement of the four heavy glass ashtrays on the tables in the meeting room set that's used several times even though nobody smokes in the film, because it was the 1970s so of course there would be ashtrays

And continuing with the True History of NASA, a rewatch of Hidden Figures (2016)

And again with the True Stories: a rewatch of Gravity (2013)

Harking back to the flow layout stuff, I think the reason I feel so happy at having sorted it out is partly because I now know I understand that stuff, and partly because it means I've overcome what felt like a fairly major hurdle in building the app I want to make; but I think it's also partly because it's actually very elegant and simple to do this stuff once you understand that aspect of the SwiftUI framework. And that gives me confidence in SwiftUI itself, because it implies that it is, in and of itself, elegant. You can't create elegant solutions with an ugly framework

Goodnight all

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Sunday.

Dry.

Wanly sunny.

Cool in here at 19.8 deg, 20.5 deg in the kitchen, 19 deg in the leanto.

The duvet was pressed into use last night.

1009 mBar, in Hg, Torr, psi, (up from 1007 last night), 68% RH (GDR hair), 64% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 24th of June 2019 SimonMac's cat#7 was being deticked, covbob was watching the Teletubbies, and the Jewish History thing had moved on from the library.

Freecell score: 100% (of 11), running average: 85%.

Lunch: baked potato with cheese and baked beans, a red pippy corner yog, bramble jelly x2 and marmalade x1 on slices of toast (more bread that had the frost beaten off it), 0.91*1.55 pints of good Glengettie tea.

Entertainment: The unbelievable truth. The food programme: be green, shoot some deer. TWTW (which very nearly went <click>). The archbish thing which rapidly went <click>. GQT which went <click> when I went shopping.

Shopping trip to Morrisons done dusted washed dried sanitised & put away.

A Spitfire just flew over.

That thing on BBC1W about 1978. Nothing inneresting happened in 1978 from the looks of it, apart from endless rain.

Tea: that soup & rice thing, a yog, some stewed gooseberries, 0.91*1.55 pints of good Glengettie tea.

Entertainment: Maleficient Discovering Al Pacino on Sky Arts.

Joy of Painting.

Joy of Painting.

NASA's unexplained files on DMAX S3 E5: Plan B if Apollo 11 goes wrong; capsule goes off course returning from ISS in 2008 due to faulty explosive bolt; titanium sphere containing organics retrieved from the stratosphere in 2013; cuts to a space suit glove during EVA around ISS in 2007 due to micrometeoroid impacts on exterior handles & grips; the disappearing moon of Saturn which appeared to disappear when Cassini looked at it back in the day, turns out to be due, as per his theory, to it being half black, half white; the Venus "scorpion" shown in photos from the USSR's Venus lander in 1981.

America's Book of Secrets with Lance Reddick not on this week: Evidence of the unexplained: dear old Parsons, the rocket man; assorted UAPs, etc. Amusing enough and devoid of the Ancient Astronaut lunes.