Reply to: test please delete

[WTFH]

Charing Cross.

Get yourself to Gordon’s Wine Bar.

Anyway, TFBSZ

[NickFitz]

Tea has been chicken in red wine sauce with chips and peas

Accompanied by a bit of Trucking Hell

And I see I neglected to record lunch, probably because of the excitement of the official email. It was a cold chicken leg with a bag of plain crisps. The soup has now been divvied up and has become six good-sized portions

[NickFitz]

It's turned very Simpsonesque here now, though it's still a bit breezy judging from the trees

[NickFitz]

If it's convenient, I could swing by the train station / pub / wherever and give you that Jeff Vandermeer trilogy I've been hanging onto for years

Excellent idea! Not sure what the exact plan is yet, but it'll almost certainly be somewhere around Whitehall/Trafalgar Square/Charing Cross. And if they turn out to be lightweights, I could head somewhere else later in the evening - my last train back that doesn't take forever because of electrification works is around 22:30, and I doubt we'll be knocking off and leaving the Admiralty any later than 17:00, so plenty of time for gallivanting around London

[ladymuck]

And I shall be going down to London on Wednesday where we are having a meeting to discuss "lessons learned" - though in reality, it's mainly an excuse for all of us to meet in person for the first time and let those who haven't visited the Admiralty before have a look at the place, before going down the pub

If it's convenient, I could swing by the train station / pub / wherever and give you that Jeff Vandermeer trilogy I've been hanging onto for years

[NickFitz]

Word has finally come down from on high, so we're officially ready to start shutting things down

I've decided that I'd very much enjoy taking a few weeks off to recover from this nonsense, so I'll have to work out what the correct channels are. I think I tell my contract manager, but she doesn't work on Fridays - though that didn't stop her approving my timesheet a few minutes ago

Anyway, we need at least until the end of next week to tidy things away, and I'm already off the week after. The official email includes a lot of stuff to do but very little of it is down to me, as there are managers who will write "lessons learned" documents and so on; I just need to contribute my 2p-worth when asked.

As my main insight is that it was always going to be a lot more complicated than everybody expected because management never looked at it properly before starting and wouldn't give us any people who could have told them this, it's probably best that I'm not going to be doing the final writeup

For the most part, I'll just be asking other people to dispose of stuff then waiting until they say they've done it. I daresay I can manage that by this time next week

And I shall be going down to London on Wednesday where we are having a meeting to discuss "lessons learned" - though in reality, it's mainly an excuse for all of us to meet in person for the first time and let those who haven't visited the Admiralty before have a look at the place, before going down the pub

[ladymuck]

Forgot to say: brunch was a cholesterol laden delight. Streaky bacon, scrambled eggs and bread fried in the bacon fat.

I need to make some more bread. Last week's experiment worked out well albeit with room for improvement.

[ladymuck]

Afternoon all

Dry and sunny. Wispy cloud scurrying past, occasionally being chased by a lumper cousin. Cloud cover set to increase as the day progresses. Currently 22 degrees and that's the high for the day. Barometer remains at 1004 mBar.

My weather app is showing a rainfall warning for pretty much the whole south-east corner of the UK. This appears to be for tomorrow where the forecast is 100% chance of rain, all day.

If I had enough laundry to do, today would be a good drying day.

[NickFitz]

Nothing to do before standup except glance through the Go Live checklist, seeing if there was anything we'd done that will have to be undone that I hadn't already thought of; didn't find anything

Then during standup we mainly talked about festivals, as the PM and DM are each going to one this weekend, one in London and one in Bristol

With that important matter dealt with, the most senior person present said that there'd still been zero communication from the more senior people so pending any further updates, we could just enjoy a nice relaxing Friday

I decided that I'd feel more relaxed if I knew there was a good reserve of chocolate peanut clusters around the place, so I drove over to M&S. They've been extensively remodelling the store recently, with a much bigger and shinier Food Hall now open and looking very impressive. This meant I had to spend ages wandering around working out where everything is now but despite my extreme dislike of such changes, I eventually granted it my seal of approval

I also popped into the menswear section where the same cognitive dissonance initially applied, but some wandering around in confusion paid off in the end. I got a pair of chinos, a belt, and a shirt - at which point, when queuing to pay, I discovered that they now have self-checkouts for clothes! A great improvement in my view, as it always used to take ages while the people ahead were asked if they wanted the hanger

And so home again, where the aroma of the soup has even permeated slightly out on to the landing. I've carried out an assessment and the lentils will need a bit longer, so I now need to decide which of the various delights I garnered at M&S will form lunch

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Friday.

Dry.

Sunny.

Cold breeze.

Chilly in here at 19.7 deg, 20.5 in the kitchen, 17.5 in the leanto, 16.4 in the saltinghouse.

999 mBar, 29.5 in Hg, 749.3 Torr, 14.489 psi, (up from 996 last night), 70% RH (Lidl electric).

Shirts in the WM.

Shirts out of the WM & pegged out on the line.

Smalls in the WM.

Meanwhile on the 4th of November 2019 there was yet more wood found on Oak Island, LM made soup, WTFH was unretiring.

Smalls out of the WM & pegged out on the line.

Cottons in the WM.

Shopping trip to Morrisons done dusted washed dried sanitised & put away.

Lunch: breakfast.

Cottons out of the WM and pegged out on the line.

Shirts in off the line & roughly iRoned, and airing upstairs.

Entertainment: The Infinite Monkey Cage: Neanderthals.

commentary on Fringe S1 pilot.

Smalls in off the line.

It rained so the cottons were in off the line & the dry enough were iRoned & airing whilsst the remainder went back out again.

Entertainment: Fringe S1 E3, E4.

Tea: sandwiches.

Entertainment: Fringe S1 E5, E6, E7, E8.

Sledge Hammer: the one about his "brother". Mildly amusing. I watched the pool playing one in FF without missing anything.

[xoggoth]

Earwig.

Loony lady 1 walk later and going to cinema with loony lady 3 this evening. Not been to cinema for years.

[WTFH]

Morning all

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

After a blustery and rainy night it's a sunny start, adorned with numerous discrete lumps of cloud (very similar in appearance to those symbols on the weather map) moving at pace along the line of the horizon if one directs one's gaze in a direction perpendicular to the wind. It's already 15°C and aiming for 20°, with the barometers down some more to 985/993mB

I've had the chicken carcass plus veg in the slow cooker overnight, so a pleasant aroma filled the flat when I arose this morning. The downside is that I then have to muck around first thing, moving it to whatever Stage II I have planned. But I shall now be having herby chicken, tomato and lentil soup for lunch, so it pays off in the end

[NickFitz]

Telly earlier was an episode of the Gloucestershire police night shift thing. This included a vehicle stop just before Boots Corner on the High Street in Cheltenham, just outside WH Smith and, unsurprisingly, opposite Boots

And then the book was again ignored as I extended the mazes thing so I can have a list of algorithms in the side navigation and switch between them. This made me realise that the technique I'd initially adopted of implementing the algorithm as an extension on the maze map class wasn't sufficiently flexible, so I rejigged it to use a protocol instead, which is much better

Friday tomorrow! Not sure if I'll have anything to do though, other than submit a timesheet

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Tea has been chicken jalfrezi with rice and naan

Still no word from on high, so the afternoon was very peaceful

And before tea, I had a quick play with the Swift stuff and got it to a point where it's usable for the original purpose I wanted it for: working through the book Mazes for Programmers, which I bought a few years ago but have never got around to digging into properly. The stuff I've done is sufficient for a graphical display of mazes generated by any of the algorithms in the early chapters