test please delete

[NickFitz]

That's the Scotch broth divvied up, yielding four additional hearty portions - not as much as I sometimes get, because it was only a half-shoulder of lamb and not a very big one at that

[ladymuck]

No tellybox this evening. I instead read a bit of this week's Private Eye and listened to several episodes of The Compass (a BBC World Service jobby) - Changing World, Changing Bodies and The Senses from last year. The former being about how our bodies have adapted (or not) to being largely sedentary blobs and the latter being about when our senses go wrong and the super power that is synaesthesia (except for the poor chap who gets tastes in his mouth to words - 'Maureen' tastes like lumpy vomit but Tottenham Court Road tastes like sausages, fried egg and toast).

[NickFitz]

What with all the rushing around tonight, there was just the remainder of yesterday's Traffic Cops watched whilst dining

Still not Friday tomorrow. Not convinced about this five-day working week thing

Goodnight all

[vetran]

Afternoon

You've missed changing your Christmas avatar

A fox is not just for XMAS. I thought it was too rude to mention it!

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Another bright start out there *blinks*

Currently 14°C and expected to get to 19° later; but then the showers putatively arrive any time from late afternoon onwards and continue through the night. Barometers decidedly down at 999/1007mB

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Grey.

Dark.

Dank.

Dreary.

Dreadful.

Dire.

Drizzly.

Grey sky.

Wet.

20.4 deg in here so slightly warmer.

1000 mBar, 29.53 in Hg, 64% RH.

Thursday.

Oh I do like this proper summer weather.

And I'm absolutely knackered.

No unabbreviated walk for me today, it's back to the short one.

In fact, so short it disappeared completely.

Freecell score: 89%, running average 84% (84.105%).

Lunch: Heinz lentil & ham soup with nonblue Morrisons wholemeal sunflower and spelt bread, bramble jelly sandwich on same, a red corner yog, 0.91 pints of good Glengettie tea.

Entertainment: Car SOS: Toyota Celica.

A bit of Engineering Disasters or whatever on Forces TV, I'd seen it before.

A disasterous Freecell score: 79%, running average 84%.

Trucking Hell S3 E14: no Rory.

Tea: chilli con carne with rice, some mango slices, a yog, 0.91 pints of good Glengettie tea.

Entertainment: Discovering Richard Dreyfuss.

Made the mistake of watching "The Joy of Painting" which had its usual hypnotic effect of sending me to sleep, and upon waking I felt almost drunk, staggering about like I was half cut.

Bargain since I haven't touched a drop for months.

Having a swift one now to continue the feeling.

Elementary S6 E9: "The Adventure of the Ersatz Sobekneferu".

Skin A&E on 5*.

[ladymuck]

Morning all

It felt dull when I got up but when I looked out of the window, there was blue sky visible and fluffy cloud scurrying along at quite some pace. Less windy at ground level. Dry until the caretaker decided to get his hose out. Currently 18 degrees with a high of 21 later. Rain expected this afternoon. Barometer down to 1009 mBar.

Today's Kantar diary fact is:
Harry Houdini spends 91 minutes underwater in a sealed tank before escaping 1925

[ladymuck]

What with all the rushing around tonight, there was just the remainder of yesterday's Traffic Cops watched whilst dining

Still not Friday tomorrow. Not convinced about this five-day working week thing

Goodnight all

Five-day working weeks are awful. I loved it when covid first hit and we were put to three-day weeks. It only lasted a month before TPTB realised that (a) working remotely wasn't impacting performance and (b) taking 40% of the week out meant that all the projects were being delayed because no-one was willing to work longer days to make up for it. Oh there was a (c) they weren't losing any revenue and indeed were doing very nicely, thank you Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, due to supporting quite a lot of the covid medical trials.

[NickFitz]

FFS. Big barney with the other developer, because he thinks we should fetch the entire contents of a database table into memory, manipulate it in application code, and end up throwing away the 98% of it that we never needed in the first place. I think we should use (very simple) SQL queries that fetch precisely the data needed and no more, then not have to write all the code to do the manipulations in the first place

Apparently this is my fault because I failed to raise it when reviewing some of his code several weeks ago. As I've pointed out, I assumed that the unnecessary complexity was an artefact of having nothing but flat files to work with then, and that we'd get rid of all that once we had access to the database and could offload the work. But he's convinced that his over-engineered, over-generalised code shouldn't be changed, and that avoiding placing unnecessary load on the database is old-fashioned and outdated

Now the project manager is having to find somebody from another team to come in and adjudicate, even though I have working code (still using his thing, just bypassing most of it) that does exactly what's required

I suggested somebody from the team that's responsible for the database, as I reckon they'll automatically come down on the side that minimises the load on their kit

[ladymuck]

I'm feeling a bit chilly in my little office this morning.

However, Tado says the temperature is 21.3 inside and my weather app says it's 20 outside.