Reply to: test please delete

[NickFitz]

Tea has been lamb chops with chips and beans

Slightly cold, because with my usual excellent timing I managed to get it ready for 19:05. So I left it to go and have a look at the eclipse for ten minutes or so, and kept popping back for another look now and then while I was eating

The eclipse glasses I got worked very well - it was impressive to see 90%+ of the disk obscured. It got nice and gloomy too, with the light turning odd and the sky turning a darker blue colour that seemed different to what normally happens of an evening. I remember noticing the same things in 1999

[xoggoth]

Yeh, the eclipsey thing is real and that culander trick does work, I can see multiple partly hidden circles now.

WTF? BBC says the eclipse has reached it's peak across UK. No it hasn't! Got a way to go here, about 1/3 covered when I checked 15 mins ago.

Oh! I must have missed the peak, seems brighter now. Never seemed particularly dark.

[ladymuck]

It's turned cloudy here so viewing the eclipse is a non-starter. Having to watch the Royal Observatory Greenwich live feed on YouTube.

[NickFitz]

Just had a look through the eclipse glasses I bought the other week, and there’s a definite chunk out of the edge

[xoggoth]

Oh yeh, Iv'e got an old welding shield but probably not worth risk. Eclipsey thing just about to start.

The things about using a bit of cardboard with a pin hole or a colander didn't make sense to me but gave it a try. Put a big piece of white wooden panel down bottom of garden and used the colander. Wierd! The images of the sun are 3 dimensional, they look spherical, like pearls.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Great discussions on reddit on whether it's safe to view through two #10 welding filters.

One is definitely not dark enough, two seems fine.

Three and it's "where the feck has the sun gone?".

[NickFitz]

Afternoon denizens

I overslept a bit this morning! Only just had time to get through the usual morning rituals and settle down to work

It’s 29°C here and very sunny, with an expected high of 31° - I think that’s slightly less than was being predicted for today earlier in the week, though tomorrow’s forecast is still 34°. The barometers are down a touch at 1011/1019mB

Lunch has been some M&S cold cocktail sausages

I gather those who believe the media are lying about everything, or who regard ChatGPT as the fount of all wisdom, will be blinding themselves this evening by staring directly at the sun - or possibly using binoculars if the AI tells them to. I got around to ordering some proper eclipse glasses online, and have also been investigating the possibility of sticking one set of them over the phone camera and setting it up on the little tripod to get some photos. Apparently this can be done without damaging the sensor if one’s sensible about it. Anyway, the phone’s a few years old and I’ll probably be getting a new one this year or the next, so I don’t mind taking the risk

Mind you, it’s possible the sun will be behind the roof of the very big Victorian villa a couple of doors down

[ladymuck]

Morning all

Blue sky. There was a wisp earlier but it's gone now. Thankfully there's a snifter of a breeze. Currently 27 degrees with a high of 33 expected . Barometer steady at 1024 mBar.

Sunrise 05:42; Sunset 20:30 BST

Doing a couple of hours' presenteeism for billing purposes while seeing what more substantial gigs may be out there. Also having a look at training / certificate updates in case an extra bit of paper will chivvy things along a bit.

[xoggoth]

Scrabble with old lady neighbour soon. Usually do my walky late these days to avoid the sun but have to do earlier today cos of this eclipsy thing. Have to find somewhere dark and woody.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Wednesday.

Dry.

Sunny.

Blue sky clear as a bell. Should be 10 10ths cloud cover by 1800 since there's something going on in the sky.

22.2 deg in here, 24 in the kitchen, 21.5 in the leanto, 19 out the back, 18.9 in the saltinghouse.

1014.5 mBar, 29.96 in Hg, 760.9 Torr, 14.71 psi, (unchanged), 61% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 2nd of April 2020, between 15:31 and 16:32, barrydidit, eek, LM, MrMarkyMark, NF and I popped in, with NF remarking that it had just reached the dizzying heights of 12 deg C and there was a shortage of red lentils and rice.

Irritatingly, the 14:00 (13:55) appointment at the barbers has changed to 13:00, so today's Movies thing will be abbreviated somewhat.

Shopping trip to that Tesco: 38 out, 4 back, no Tesco battered cod or haddock to be found, thusly it's indeterminate "white fish" as a stopgap.

Hot out there & I have to go down town at noon GMT to the barbers.

Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: Movies: nouveau horror. Not of much innerest to me as it transpires.

R4 thing about Mossadeq and the CIA and Kermit the frog Roosevelt. I wonder what the world would look like if the septics had stayed out of other people's countries instead of installing fascists left right & centre. Next ep is The Triumph of Vietnam. (Thank feck for Harold Wilson for keeping us out of that debacle).

I no longer have much in the way of hair. Number One for the win. It must be said that it's cooler & a lot less irritating than it's been recently. Though the grey and the receding hairline is rather more obvious.

Jack Hargreaves Old Country: more on that cart thing he's building. Butterflies on a hill fort somewhere in ?Dorset?. He mentions that the number of butterflies had reduced over the previous 25 years (1982). They've decreased even more since. So that's what a clouded yellow looks like, and a marbled white.

Tea: Tesco battered haddock etc. Nice enough, especially since the fish wasn't cooked to death. Entertainment: PM.

S4C: Dan Do.

Jack Hargreaves: Out of Town. Getting towards the end of these. In fact it was the last in that series from 1981 on Southern TV. More on Parsonage Down: the remaining unploughed bit of down. The history of the Beaker folk travelling from Norfolk and the other lot travelling from Lynmouth to eventually meet up at Stonehenge via the Ridgeway. I'm not sure of the ins & outs of all that but there you go.

Bab5 S3 E4 "A day in the strife". Cunning plan to destroy the station using a probe. Vir is off to Membar. He doesn't want to go.

S4C: Cartrefi Cymru: Welsh houses, starting with "Ty Un-nos", cottages put up overnight.

4: The Spy Next door: Anna Chapman story. The cold war never stopped. It wasn't the End of History.

Blaze: Britain's X files. More bollox.

[WTFH]

Morning all
CBS, etc, no rain forecast.

[NickFitz]

Tonight’s reading was the rest of The Martian Chronicles which I enjoyed enough that, as I was clearly in the mood for Ray Bradbury, I started Fahrenheit 451 and got through the first part thereof

This afternoon, coming into the bedroom to close the blinds, I was astonished to see the bedside thermometer reading 30°C. It didn’t feel that hot in here, and after a few moments I realised that the sun was shining on it. Once the blinds were drawn, it rapidly fell to 25°. Then later in the afternoon, the thermometer on the desktop was claiming it was 34.5° which turned out to be because it was right next to the mug of coffee I’d just made

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Tea: sausages, chips, and beans

Accompanied by part one of the new Murder Case from BBC Scotland, about the dog walker who was shot in the face with a double-barrelled shotgun - but the police didn’t notice straight away and decided he’d fallen over, which delayed the inquiry quite a bit

[ladymuck]

HWMBO has arrived to stay for a while.

There's an offer on a gin I like at Sainsbury's but the one near me doesn't have it in stock. Hopefully it's available in the store near Mum and I can stock up when I visit her on Sunday.

[NickFitz]

Lunch: a roast beef bap (wholemeal)

I showed the stakeholders my idea for preventing any further accidents like the one last Thursday, and they agreed it was acceptable. It’s just a case of removing some options from a form, on the basis that they need to be the default values 90%+ of the time anyway. There's a link to the existing full-blown form for those occasions when they need that, but it makes it less likely somebody will finish up there and make a mistake

So now I need to go and sort out any UI tests and so on. I’m finding that because I’m mostly making minor changes at the moment, I end up spending more time either adding or modifying tests to account for them