test please delete

[NickFitz]

KFC leftovers for tea

To go along with it, the second episode of To Think Like a Killer on iPlayer

[NickFitz]

The bodies continue to pile up in XPD

Goodnight all

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Tuesday apparently.

Dry.

Was sunny, now grey.

Was blue sky: now grey.

Verging on chilly in here at 16.1 deg, 17 in the kitchen, 14 in the leanto, 10 in the saltinghouse.

1012 mBar, 29.88 in Hg, 759 Torr, 14.6778 psi, (up from 1011 last night), 59% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 27th of March 2020 Neighbourhood watch lady checked that NF was ok, NF, LM, WTFH and I popped in, and I discovered there's jam making sugar with added pectin, oddly enough intended for making jam. Who'd have thunk? We never used that in our house. (That's "we" as in "my mum").

Well the knee performed well last night: I was out of bed about half an hour after retiring since the knee was complaining like billyo: much ibuprofen and paracetamol and whisky (single malt) got me through the night though not much sleep was had.

Might get some vodka since it seems a bit wasteful using single malt for anaesthetic. .

Washing frenzy in progress.

Some kind bird shat upon two of my pillowcases so they've been rewashed in the sink with powder and bleach to kill everything, then the spindrier was dug out of the saltinghouse and pressed into use for the rinsing stage of things.

Shirts in off the line as they're dry enough to meet the iRon after brunch.

Lunch: Brunch. Entertainment: the joys of the Weimar Republic and the lunacy of the Treaty of Versailles surrender document getting things ready for 20 years later.

Aha: "Elkins in Israel: 5: The Granite Grandmother": looks like this is the talk that I remember from 40 odd years ago. I think Michael Elkins relates how one of his children was ill and Golda brewed up some potion or other which Elkins duly despached to the toilet where it stained the porcelain green. I also think he was the chap who said "Of my Athens they have made a Sparta". Naturally enough I can't find any of this on line & no doubt the Beeb wiped the tapes decades ago. One of the talks was in The Listener August 1983.

Fecking knee is hurting again. More drugs needed.

Most of that requiring the attentions of the iRon received it & are now airing upstairs. The cotton twill shirts were, perhaps, damper than I'd realised, but they'll air ok.

During this labour a big contretemps between a couple of magpies and a couple of jackdaws took place right outside the window: dunno what the jackdaw had done but it was attacked & pursued across the gardens by both magpies. They were Not Happy.

.

Listened to Michael Elkins on Desert Island Discs. Goodness me, he was a socialist and as far from Bibi the Nazi as one might imagine.

Bit of the repeat of Am Dro which I didn't know had returned. It clashes with Sergeant Cork so that ain't happening.

Book.

Wassup Docs? on R4.

Tea: soup etc. Nice enough. Entertainment: PM.

Am Dro S10 E2 on iplayer. Oh look: Pontardawe where a long long ago GF used to have her evil way with me. And he's right, you can see Swansea Bay from up there. .

Book. Other book.

Sky Arts: Ian Fleming: the curse of James Bond (2025).

Sean Connery vs James Bond. Well it's on.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

It’s cloudy but more layered with bigger gaps this morning, so the sun manages to get through occasionally as it ascends the heavens. It’s 7°C and aiming for 14°, and the barometers are back up a little at 1003/1011mB

I made a couple of posts on BlueSky last night explaining one aspect of working in the games industry in the late 1980s. These were in reply to an account I’ve followed since Twitter days, somebody who’s really into reviving retro hardware and software, as well as doing things like porting Doom to run on a pregnancy test, and has a large following as a result. Normally, I might expect a couple of likes and maybe even a reply or two. This morning, I find I have “30+” notifications over there

Better go and see what they all want

[ladymuck]

Morning all

Blue sky, some wispy bits, breezy. Currently 12 degrees with a high of 17 expected. Cloud cover set to increase as the day progresses. Barometer up to 1016 mBar.

Sunrise 05:14; Sunset 20:42 BST

Last day at all my coal faces for a week, as HWMBO and I are off to Cadiz for a little holiday tomorrow (flying Heathrow - Paris - Seville, as that's perfectly sensible).

[WTFH]

Morning all
Sunrise was 5:30am, and we had a very pleasant early morning walk. Sun still shining with no hint of a breeze, and a farmer is muck spreading somewhere nearby.

[NickFitz]

Lunch was the very last leftovers from KFC

Sick of their stuff now for another couple of months. I always order too much thinking it’ll come in handy for lunch during the week, but can’t stand the sight of it by the time I’ve done with it

This afternoon, I realised I’d accidentally missed off a pretty crucial bit of the app. It works fine when I’m testing stuff by sending direct HTTP requests and the like, which is what I do most of the time. But when one actually used the button in the web page, as normal people will, a crucial step had been missed

Easy to wire it up though; everything necessary was already there and working, so I just needed to add a couple of lines and it was sorted

With work done, it was time once again for the monthly trek round to the chemist’s. I thought it would be warm as it’s very sunny and Simpsonesque out now; I even debated whether to bother wearing a coat. But it turns out there’s a very cool and very lazy breeze that was blowing right at me as soon as I got around the corner

Once home, I remembered to set the bread maker to work on a white loaf, which I’ve forgotten to get it doing for a couple of days

And with all that out of the way, perhaps I’ll finally have time to work out what to have for tea

[ladymuck]

HWMBO cooked up some duck and made a very delicious plum sauce.

Watching this week's MasterChef.

[NickFitz]

Tea was beef & Guinness casserole with chips

This was accompanied by the third part of the HBO documentary about the French trader. Definitely stitched up by the bank, but it doesn’t seem as if he’s going to dodge some prison time

And finally some more of XPD, which I’ve nearly finished. I suspect nobody is going to come out of it well, assuming anybody comes out of it at all. At least one of the characters has managed to die of natural causes rather than with the assistance of one or other of the intelligence services involved

It’s sprint planning tomorrow, which will consist largely of me being given responsibility for various things the other dev has been working on but will be leaving unfinished when she leaves at the end of the week. Not her fault, mind; it’s stuff where nothing can be done because it depends on somebody in another team who’s on leave, or somebody has to decide how they want something to work and hasn’t. At least she’s done an excellent job of documenting everything she can think of. Having read it all, I now know a lot more about what we’re supposed to be doing than I have done up till now

Goodnight all

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Wednesday.

Heavy showers overnight: blue sky now & sunny with it.

Cooler still in here at 16.3 deg, 15 in the kitchen, 14 in the leanto.

1002 mBar, 29.59 in Hg, 751.6 Torr, 14.53 psi, (down from 1007 last night), 61% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 27th of March 2020 openstrike, LM, and NF popped in, as did I, whereas eek popped in a lot on a bug hunt and my purchasing mistake of gluten free wheat free spag was unpleasantly unpleasant and totally free of any taste whatsoever.

The night passed eventually, with The Knee behaving perfectly until half an hour after retiring to bed, whereupon the pain returned. Sleep, such as it was, happened downstairs in the chair whilst wrapped in the duvet and supplement by paracetamol and ibuprofen, plus ibuprofen gel.

Now I'm up & about it's ok again. A small mercy.

Intermittently hammering down. Blue sky & sun again now.

Book. Other book. Both read standing in the intermittent sunshine in the dish farm cum boxroom.

The drugs were wearing off towards the end. .

Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: R4 waffling on about 3D printed guns. A good idea if you don't mind losing the odd hand or eye now & again. . Back in the day they used to be called "zap zip guns". ("The Zap Gun" is a novel (of sorts) by PKD).

Curiously enough I discovered the other day that my eyesight is now so poor that I see at least two backsights, and an inderminate number of foresights on my ancient (it was old when I bought it half a century ago) BSA Airsporter. I don't know if I'm strong enough to cock it any more. The grooves aren't deep enough to take a decent telescopic sight.

Going grey again now.

Book. Other book.

Raining. Sunny. Raining. Sunny. April showers in May.

The orchids in next door's lawn are sending up flower spikes. There seems to be even more this year than last. It's inneresting (to me) that they're about 10 days later than the orchids across the canal. Might be due to the frost pocket effect in the garden.

Tea: Tesco battered haddock etc. Nice enough. Entertainment: PM.

STOS S1 E28: "The city on the edge of forever (1967)". Foxy Joan Collins again. Only she & Shatner still above ground. .

Thing on S4C about Field Names in north Wales. Bet I was the primary audience for that. .

"Out of Town": 1981: shooting wood pigeons. Fishing for next to nothing. More killing things. He's dressed in the top half of a Brit para's camo, with the trousers from the German camo, both from the 1940s. Apparently they just wouldn't wear out. .

Possibly the thing about temperature on BBC4.

The unbelievable thing on Blaze. More bollox. "Unusual rituals". Drinking cobra blood. Stinging ant gloves (Amazonia). Mummifying yersen when yer still alive. Vanuatu bungy jumping using vines. etc.

"A Foreign Field (1993)" with Leo McKern, Alec Guinness, Lauren Bacall. And a jam pot.