test please delete

[NickFitz]

Yeh, bluddy annoying when they stop selling favourite things, used to like those low sugar apple pies, Weight Watchers ready meals and various other things I can't remember.

They’ve also stopped making the Taste the Difference mango chutney that was the basis of my delicious BBQ sauce

[NickFitz]

The Lockerbie thing seems quite good, judging by the first episode. Nice to see the Scottish police taking the FBI down a peg or two when they tried to muscle in as if they owned the place

Later, I finished reading The Parable of the Talents, in which things ultimately turned out OK

But that’s the end of that; she had intended to write three more books taking the story far into the future, but had terrible writer’s block for two or three years and had to abandon that plan, writing other books instead in her remaining years

Goodnight all

[WTFH]

Morning all
Overcast and very humid out. Just had to go check that the weather station was working... 19C, 93% humidity.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Cloudy start, but the hot weather isn’t quite over yet: it’s already 20°C and will reach 27°, though the rest of the week will stay in the low twenties. The barometers are down to 996/1004mB

I’ve got to go to the GP’s for Yet Another Blood Test™ at lunchtime. It’ll be 25° at that point, which on past experience will probably lead to the nurse pointing out that “you’re sweating and look a little flushed, do you experience these symptoms often” and having to be reminded that while she’s been sitting in an air-conditioned surgery, I’ve been walking through the park in the sun

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Tuesday.

Grey.

Sunless.

Damp, very, verging on actually wet on the garden path.

Misty: low clouds over Drummau, so it's either raining or about to rain or just stopped raining or all three of these options.

22.4 deg in here, 24.2 in the kitchen, 22 in the leanto, 20 out the back.

1002 mBar, 29.59 in Hg, 751.6 Torr, 14.53 psi, (down from 1003 last night), 64% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 2nd of April 2020, between 09:50 and 09:58, covbob, DaveB, LM, MrMarkyMark, WTFH, and I popped in.

Entertainment: Invisible Hands: the Septic Century E2 "The Prophet".

Walk (abbreviated, 3 miles) walked in the grey gloom. Pleasant enough. Brisk wind.

Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: Sky Arts: Wonderlands Part II.

Looked at the rest of my collection of photos, stone me I took a lot: dunno how many photos of rhododendron ponticum anyone needs but I seem to have taken the world supply. At least the cat photos are inneresting, much missed as she is, plus some photos of the days long gone when I had a niece and a nephew. .

Trouble is I can't remember the names of some of the people in there: 30 years ago for some of them.

It rained for at least 15 minutes. Not that it's done much in the way of good of course.

Jack Hargreaves Old Country: offing wood pigeons using decoys etc. (and shotguns). Fishing at Sturminster Mill pond: waste of time due to the water levels but the inside of the mill was inneresting: no water wheel, it uses a turbine instead: millstones for milling animal meal, some other steel plate arrangement for milling wholemeal people flour. Er, that's flour FOR people, not flour MADE OUT of people. Just so we keep things clear.

The turbine was made in 1904 by Armfield & co, producing 25 hp, twice what the previous water wheel managed. The mill itself retains the usual lethal exposed belting.

Tea: soup etc. Entertainment: PM. Blazian UFO bollox: included Milford Haven, Australia, and last but not least Jack "Oedipus Schmoedips a boy should love his mother" Parsons and Aleister Crowley. Wot could possibly go wrong? Well he did blow himself up, so there was that. Unless it was an interdimensional demon of course. .

Bab5 S2 E19 "Divided loyalties".

5: The Victorians with Rob Rinder and Ruth Goodman. Railway madness. 1840s. I was unaware that navies had used dynamite when digging tunnels, I rather thought they used black powder. Dynamite came into use in the 1870s. Merthyr tunnel was dug with it.

Blazian bollox: Mega Disasters. An alleged mega tsunami in the Med 8k years ago caused by collapse of chunk of Mt Etna. No particular evidence found that this happened other than seabed around Etna. Supposedly went as far as Palestine, but again, nothing found.

Blazian bollox: History's most shocking. The nutter who gocammed his "plane crash" & ended up in clink. Mating reticulated pythons in a Malaysian ceiling. Feck me, that could give you nightmares. Shark cage failure: white shark ends up inside the shark cage with the diver, diver survives uninjured, unlike the shark. Riding a bike through a rail tunnel only to find Thomas Not The Tank Engine coming through the other way. Car sideways under the trailer of an artic in septicland. Exploding sewers in China & Eyeran: kids put a firework down the Chinese one, chap dropped a cigarette down a hole in a pavement in the much more impressive Iranian example which destroyed the pavement & blew his shoes off. The Chinese example just lofted all the manhole covers 10 feet into the air. Why would there be sewer vents inside a building? Askin' for a friend. Concordski Paris crash. Empty parked car explodes narrowly missing a chap who was getting on his motorbike.

Fatal mistake: looked at The Middle of Lidl. . Spanner heaven.

[xoggoth]

Grey.

Sunless.

You lucky sod! Wish there was some way of getting rid of that horrible shiny thing here in the SE.

Off to old farty arty thing soon. Must post b day cards to sons.

[ladymuck]

Morning all

Damp from overnight rain. Cloudy. Currently 17 degrees with a high of 20 expected. More rain due later. Barometer down to 1004 mBar.

Sunrise 05:27; Sunset 21:18 BST

Today we're off to the Kelpies and for a ride on the Falkirk Wheel. HWMBO's niece and family (the ones he did the BBQ for) are passing through so we're meeting up. HWMBO's eldest is doing the driving. Hurray for child labour.

[NickFitz]

Sat in the waiting room

[NickFitz]

Home again!

Minus a little blood and a lot of sweat, as it’s both warm and very close out there

Several butterflies were encountered in the depths of the park. And on the way back, I made a detour to the chemist for the usual monthly job lot

Next up, lunch: yet more Popeyes hot wings from Saturday, as they were on a twofer

[NickFitz]

Another day done! There’s not a huge amount to do at the moment, as we gradually move towards maintenance mode

One interesting thing that came up though: thanks to the Machinery of Government changes announced the week before last, our official abbreviation is now four characters - in both previous incarnations, it was three. The data in the system I work on includes what is basically a representation of the structure of the entire department, as viewed in financial terms (it’s called a “chart of account” apparently), and many of the things in there include the abbreviation in their names. So is there any code that for some reason digs into those names to find parts thereof, and will break once that bit of the names becomes one character longer?

No, is the answer, because neither I nor any of the other people who’ve worked on it over the years would do it that way. In fact, none of the code cares about those names at all; they’re just for display purposes, and the data we generate with a script for our development environments just uses things like “Group 1” and so on. But while digging through the code just in case, it did occur to me that there might be something with a long enough name that adding one character would make it overflow the size of its column in the database. So tomorrow, I shall have some SQL fun constructing a query to identify any columns in any rows in all the tables that might be at risk