test please delete

[NickFitz]

To keep the apes happy, we watched the first episode of Chimp Kingdom on Netflix, about a very large group living in a rainforest in Uganda

Tonight’s reading was A Game of Birds and Wolves which is about the war games developed by a team of Wrens at the Western Approaches in WWII to develop better tactics to counter U-boat wolf packs in the Atlantic

The bedroom was back up to 28°C earlier but there was a decent breeze, so I left the big window completely ajar for a couple of hours which brought it down to just over 25°

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Sunny spells with lots of cumuli clumping around the place looking scenic. It’s 21°C with an expected high of just 23°, and there’s a strong breeze making it “feel like” 18°. The barometers are steady at 1003/1011mB

The bedroom got cooler overnight! It was down to around 23° when I awoke, from 25° when I went to sleep. And the breeze is currently helping it cool down even more

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Sunday.

Damply dry.

Sunny (wanly).

Blue sky in parts.

23.6 deg in here, 24.5 in the kitchen, 22 in the leanto, 19 outside, 20 in the saltinghouse.

1009 mBar, 29.796 in Hg, 756.8 Torr, 14.63 psi, (up from 1005 last night), 57% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 31st of March 2020 AndyGarbs, covbob, eek, LM, NF, vetran, WTFH and I popped in. NF was doing hard sums about the electric & gas readings whilst I was reading The Mitrokhin Archive which was at the stage to naming all the useful idiots giving away bomb secrets to Stalin.

Washing frenzy in progress. It spotted with rain just to celebrate. .

Defrosting fridge again. Contents of said fridge now in Lidl(tm) electric cool box thing and the freezer. Couldn't find the power supply I usually use so pressed another one from Ye Olde Sloughe of Desponde into use.

Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: yahoo news about the Orange Mother****er as is my wont when Di Ti Di is on R4 & I can't be arsed to find anything else.

Those things at the requisite stage of dryness & requiring the attention of the iRon have received & are airing upstairs.

Entertainment: Archive Hour: The Home Guard, first broadcast 2003. Goodness me, I never knew there was a Home Guard Act 1951 when "they" imagined that the Home Guard might be able to defend against Soviet nukes. Disbanded 1957.

Fridge is still defrosting. Maybe I should do it more frequently, preferably before there's enough ice to support a polar bear.

Fridge defrosted.

Tea: baked beans with cheese & baked spuds. Nice enough.

During washing up & cleaning out the fridge it started raining, so the two items still on the line met the TD which still took 15 minutes to dry the feckers.

Fridge cleaned & reassembled.

Entertainment: TPTV: The Directors: Howard Hawks.

Some bollox on 5 about TV shows from the 1970s, including the toe curling Parkinson interview with Helen Mirren (whose name I had to look up FFS , my ongoing brain rot is becoming irritating).

Some bollox on 5 about the summer of 1976 (which I remember) and the autumn deluge of 1976 which I don't.

Blaze: The Danny Trejo Unearthed Mysteries thing. More bollox. Oh look: there's a Roman villa in that Engerland place, who'd have thunk? I suppose the Romans had a mere 400 years to build one or two. After all, whatever did they do for us?

Followed by bolloxy UFO bollox on DMAX. The Truth is Out There apparently. This one was about a load of septics in Kelly fighting off LGMs in 1955.

Roy Noble visiting Penderyn and environs. Including the distillery. 2016.

[NickFitz]

Tea has been the last of the beef short ribs in Guinness thing, with chips

That’s been sat in the freezer for ages, but it’s about time it moved out and made space for something else

It was quite cold when I was finally able to eat it, as the router seems to have succumbed to a touch of heatstroke at some point last night. It’s working OK now, but various things had ended up using the 4G backup wifi. In particular, the stereo-paired HomePods I use for sound from the telly had become so confused that one of them was refusing to switch from the 4G wifi while the other had realised it should go back to the normal one. Even powering off for a few seconds didn’t help, and in the end I had to unlink them from my phone and restart them as if from new. This was a pain as it meant standing near them holding my phone and confirming things while they got themselves set up, though to be fair it does go very smoothly with the minimum of questions. Anyway, with that done, they were back to working OK and I was able to return to my lukewarm food

[mudskipper]

I'm reading a book about Ada Lovelace. I've only just learned (maybe something everyone else knew) that the Analytical Engine (i.e. world's first computer) was never actually built, and Lovelace's program never run until many years later on a modern emulator (where a bug was found!). I feel quite cheated.

[NickFitz]

I'm reading a book about Ada Lovelace. I've only just learned (maybe something everyone else knew) that the Analytical Engine (i.e. world's first computer) was never actually built, and Lovelace's program never run until many years later on a modern emulator (where a bug was found!). I feel quite cheated.

Yes, Babbage was renowned, or perhaps notorious, for having marvellous ideas but never finishing anything

[NickFitz]

The watery wildlife returned to the telly today

This evening, I watched 24 Hours in A&E

And tonight’s reading was more of A Game of Birds and Wolves, in which there was a brief history of the founding of the Wrens in WWI, their disbanding afterwards, and their hasty re-founding in WWII. Apparently fifteen thousand women applied to join the initial intake of fifteen hundred, which was a problem as the Admiralty didn’t have anybody to handle the applications, as they hadn’t employed any women with sufficient naval experience to do that yet

There’ve been a couple of references to the Operations Room under the Admiralty where stuff was plotted on the wall (not to be confused with the Operations Room at the Western Approaches in Liverpool from which things were actually controlled). I assume that was in the space in the basement that’s now divided up into various meeting rooms, but I’ve never been down there - on the few occasions I’ve been to the office, we were upstairs

I’ve spent almost all of today wrestling with getting the forum running on AWS for testing purposes. I’m about there now; just got to work out some bottleneck that’s making one step of the data import crawl along at a snail’s pace

Monday again tomorrow. Everything I’ve been working on recently was done and dusted last week, so I’ve got to start in on some other stuff that the other dev largely finished before she left, but which involves liaising with other teams to get it into action

Goodnight all

[eek]

The Western Approaches museum in Liverpool has an permanent exhibition on the Wrens - it was about the best part of the museum.

[WTFH]

Morning all
Got a bit damp while out walking earlier.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

It’s a sunny start with only the merest of wisps in the sky. Much more tolerable though: currently 15°C after an overnight low of 13°, and not getting any worse than 22° - and that only for a while in late afternoon. The barometers are sharply up at 1013/1021mB

The bedroom was down to 21° when I went to sleep, and about 22° when I awoke. There was enough of a cool breeze that I even closed the big window and chucked a wrap across the foot of the bed for fear of getting chilly in the night! Might have to get the summer duvet back out at this rate