Reply to: test please delete

[NickFitz]

After the greatly curtailed helping of wildlife stuff, I was able to pacify the apes et al. with The Elephant Queen on Apple TV+. One species in there I'd never heard of before were these fish that live in water holes. I was wondering how they got there and survived, given that the holes dry up all the time. It turns out their young grow in their eggs but don't hatch straight away, and when the elephants cover themselves in mud as sunscreen before setting off on their journey to somewhere else that still has water, the fish eggs are in the mud and stick to them, then get washed off at the destination and finally hatch. So they're fish that literally survive (as a species) by riding around Africa on elephants!

Later, I read some more of Heathern. It's a bit disconcerting how apposite this seems now, with the USA basically under martial law at the behest of a huge corporation which has used its extreme wealth to take complete control of the body politic

Extra hour tonight! Or more accurately, the hour that was stolen from us in March is being returned

Goodnight all

[ladymuck]

The fillum was very good.

We then tried to get into a local seafood restaurant for dinner but they couldn't squeeze us in so we instead went to a pub that does Thai food, and it was very good indeed. Early home mainly because the football was on.

[NickFitz]

Tea has been brought from the Turkish place, mainly because I needed to order something from there within the next couple of days to secure an £8 discount

And lunch earlier was a salmon bap. Proper salmon out of a tin, not that weird stuff rich people eat

[NickFitz]

Afternoon denizens

It's a windy day out with a lot of clouds drifting around, but also quite a few gaps letting the sun shine through pretty often. There's a chance of a bit of rain now and then, but none at the moment. It's 10°C ("feels like" 4°) which is the highest temperature for the day, and the barometers are up at 992/1000mB

There's a dearth of Saturday afternoon wildlife programming again this week. I shall have to seek out other sources to keep the apes happy

[xoggoth]

Woodland volunteery thing this morning. Bit boring, clearing stuff back from newly planted trees, but nice company and brill location.

[sadkingbilly]

Gordon Bennet. More bad news. My nice lady neighbour just phoned to say she's been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

welcome to the age of looking over your shoulder for the geezer on the white horse.
i've lost 7 friends, dotted all over UK and Europe, in the past year.
like you said.
'don't get old'

[ladymuck]

Morning all

Sunny with lumps of fluff. Currently 9 degrees ('feels like' 7) with a high of 11 expected. Barometer up to 1002 mBar.

Sunrise 07:43; Sunset 17:47 BST

Happy end of BST day, back to proper time from tomorrow.

This morning I have been for my final B12 loading jab.

This afternoon HWMBO and I are going to see Frankenstein, the new Guillermo del Toro one.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Saturday.

Damp.

Sunny.

Blue sky with high thin clouds.

Chillier in here at 15.7 deg, 13 deg in the kitchen, 11 deg in the leanto.

1002 mBar, 29.59 in Hg, 751.6 Torr, 14.533 psi, (up from 997 last night), 59% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 26th of February 2020 AndyGarbs, LondonManc, BR14, and xogg popped in, whilst NF went to the docs & came back, LM survived cooking her pancakes, and I was in with the hoi polloi.

Lunch: brunch.

Entertainment: FOOC. Bit of MoneyBox <click>

Walk (unabbreviated, towpath) walked in sunshine and showers. It's not warm out there any more. Just as well I had a scarf on for the first time this autumn. I suspect it won't be the last.

Freecell score in the ennui of a showery afternoon: 91%, running average: 84%.

Book. Other book. Other other book.

Tea: soup etc. Entertainment: 18 o'clock news.

Maigret and the Sailor (1961): the one about the harbour master shot in the head & missing for 3 months. Rather more efficiently dealt with than the Bruno Cremer version. .

Whateverthefeckelse I can find. Which is to say: nothing. There's a thing about Maxwell the Whale (did he jump or was he pushed by Mossad?). But I'm not innerested.

Podcast Thing on R4 about a German Jewish family with the usual 1930s outcome. They managed to reach this benighted land. The final half is next week.

Book. Other book. Finished other other book at last.

[NickFitz]

Tonight's major motion picture premiere was Nosferatu (2024). Very good, though if you're like me, you'll keep getting distracted by how it differs from or is the same as Bram Stoker's novel. If I'd watched the German Expressionist version, I'd probably get distracted by forming comparisons in that dimension as well, but I haven't got around to that one yet. Anyway, it's a very good film in many ways, allowing for all that

Then a rewatch of 28 Weeks Later (2007) which is definitely very good in its own right. With the release of the new one, I've seen some people pontificating that this one isn't as good as the first, for reasons which basically come down to it not being the same film. Well duh! It's a different film! It isn't the same as the first one because it isn't the first one, but it's still an excellent film

Finally, S1E2 of Alien: Earth, Mr. October (TV Episode 2025). I'm a bit confused by this; I can't work out if the people they've sent in to investigate the crashed spaceship do stupid things that will (and do) get them killed as some kind of satire about BigCorp not being as clever in selecting its employees as it thinks it is, or if it's just the scriptwriters copping out on moving the story along. Either way, the fact that I have such doubts suggests that the scriptwriters aren't doing a very good job

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Gordon Bennet. More bad news. My nice lady neighbour just phoned to say she's been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Sorry to hear that. It's not been a good Friday for you <- manly

[NickFitz]

Tea has been ribeye steak with fried onions and chips

No beans this time, as I had them yesterday and it's not as if I need the extra calories

One minor thing I've accomplished this week is moving the Mac Mini into the study and hooking it up to one of the HDMI ports on my widescreen monitor, which means I can start using it properly for development stuff. This has initially consisted of getting the WordPress stuff needed for my sister's site all set up and working

It's pretty on-brand for me to spend nearly five grand on a computer, then fail to make any real use of it for nearly a year because I can't be bothered with the enormous hassle of carrying it to another room and crawling under the desk to plug it in

[xoggoth]

Gordon Bennet. More bad news. My nice lady neighbour just phoned to say she's been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

[ladymuck]

Speaking of maps, this exhibition at the British Library looks pretty interesting: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles...0-times-84928/

Thanks! That does indeed look interesting.

[NickFitz]

Hot dog for lunch, being a German frankfurter so long it had to be split across two finger rolls, with curry ketchup

[NickFitz]

Just spent forever and a day trying to get through to a human being on the phone at HMRC

My accountants need to renew their authorisation for PAYE, which involves them requesting a code from HMRC, which is sent to the client by post, who sends it to them. But when I moved here, I changed MyCo's registered office address to theirs (and pay for the privilege). And HMRC, at least by default, send the codes to the registered office.

The accountants insist that they haven't received them, so unless HMRC somehow had my old address, where they've gone is a mystery. I'd never added PAYE to my business tax account online as the accountants deal with that, and I need about three different reference numbers to add it, one of which I don't have. I'll have to find it; it's probably somewhere in some document or email

Personally, I reckon the accountants have screwed up and binned the post addressed to MyCo; when I requested the change, they not only forgot to notify Companies House, they also forgot to notify their own finance department so they could start charging MyCo for the service. So I wouldn't be surprised if they also forgot to add MyCo to the list of "post that shouldn't be chucked in the bin on arrival"

Anyway, HMRC have made my home address the default, so now they can request a new code and it might even turn up