Reply to: test please delete

[NickFitz]

The Middle Kingdoms have become infested with Habsburgs! It’ll take centuries to get rid of that lot

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Tea has been some M&S chicken thighs in a spicy Korean glaze of some kind, with chips. Quite nice, though the suggestion that it would serve two seems unduly optimistic

The cooking instructions were weird. After twenty minutes, I was ordered to “Remove from the oven, increase the temperature, and cook for a further ten minutes.” I don’t know how the people of M&S live their lives, but I can increase the temperature of my oven without taking the food out first

This was accompanied by E1 of Police Interceptors: Taking Down the Shoplifting Gangs

I have no idea why they mention Police Interceptors in the title as although there are occasionally coppers in cars, it consists mostly of CCTV, suspect interviews, and detectives talking about detecting

[xoggoth]

Usual old farty day, Mahjong this morning, local cabaret this afternon with ll1 followed by call in at ll3 place. Did me usual loony dancing at the cabaret and a lady who organised it came over and asked for my phone number, not sure what I've got meself into there.

[NickFitz]

Tech Debt day has been fairly quiet. It usually starts with a team-wide huddle on Slack for an hour or so to chat about any stuff of interest, but a lot of people had gone to London for the planning meeting yesterday and were travelling home, so that didn’t happen. However, I had several automated security PRs for dependency updates in our project’s codebase to deal with. These are usually quite straightforward: check tests have all passed, merge, maybe go and poke at staging to check it’s all still working, release. However, our codebase has a couple of Heisenbugs that only manifest in CI, and today they manifested a lot

Another problem is that running all the tests on CI takes a while. The Heisenbugs tend to manifest about fifteen minutes into the process, so there’s a lot of waiting around and restarting the tests if there’s a failure. Usually it passes the next time, but today they kept on failing repeatedly

And as there were several PRs, more time was consumed by the fact that once one was merged, the next one in the queue had to be updated from the main branch, and had to run its tests again!

So I ended up leaving the final PR running its tests when I set out for Not-as-Big Sainsbury’s to do the shopping at lunchtime. This was accomplished, and the PR had passed by the time I got back, so I was then able to finally get all the updates released to production

Only after that did I have time for lunch: pâté on toast

Immediately after, we had a meeting with the UX designer to consider some visual changes the users had asked for. Luckily, he wasn’t too bothered by any of them, largely because he knows it’s an internal tool and is expected to be decommissioned next year anyway

I’d already made most of the changes so although it’s not really Tech Debt, I just did the last two and pushed them up, and will shove them on hotfix for the end users to marvel at. And that will leave me with about an hour to fill with some straightforward and unimportant task

[sadkingbilly]

I only just saw this - thanks for reminding me!

nae borra

[WTFH]

TURN IT OFF!!

I only just saw this - thanks for reminding me!

[sadkingbilly]

Morning all
just back from a few days in jockineseland <braveheart emoji>, and very nice they were.
good to catch up with old pals/bandmates.
I see the taxdodgers are in a frenzy again. oh, dear.

Morning all
Overcast but dry out, slept in until around 6am, so a foreshortened walk has been had.
Noticed that the waterbutt I use to top up the pond was full, so am currently topping up the pond. Need to remember to turn that off later - someone remind me please!

TURN IT OFF!!

[ladymuck]

Morning all

Cloudy and dull. Breezy. Currently 17 degrees with a high of 22 expected. Barometer up to 1027 mBar.

Sunrise 05:01; Sunset 20:55 BST

Officially back at the coal face this morning. Not much going on. More AI generated slop from a couple of the consultants.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Thursday.

Damply dry.

Grey.

Sunless.

Not quite verging on chilly in here at 16.2 deg, 15 in the kitchen, 15 in the leanto.

1020 mBar, 30.12 in Hg, 765 Torr, 14.794 psi, (up from 1017 last night), 70% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 28th of March 2020 AndyGarbs managed to get a post or two in edgeways amongst Brillo's drivel.

Walk (unabbreviated, towpath) walked in the grey gloom and light drizzle. More water in the river and the canal now.

Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: Weimar. More jollity & fun.

Just watched a thing on Daily Beast where a doctor reckons Trump will use nukes.

Tea: beans on toast with scrambled egg. Nice enough. Entertainment: UFO bollox on Blaze. Slept through much of that. Apparently every innovation since 1947 originated in the Roswell crash. It's such a pity that the FET (field effect transistor) was patented in 1926 by Lillienthal. No doubt a time machine was involved. .

Neil Oliver's Stonehenge thing: Cosmic, man. Greenstone from the Cumbrian fells used to make beautiful stone axes. Now I know what greenstone is: it's metamorphic volcanic ash. Or something. Not to be confused with Preseli bluestones, which aren't, but are dolerite instead. Didn't fall asleep through that, which very probably says more about the UFO bollox.

Sky Arts: Classic Movies: the 3 days of the condor (abbreviated from the 6 days in the book).

"The 3 days of the condor (1975)". Excellent. I, of course, seem to remember seeing it in the cinema back in my long lost youth. . Some while after I'd read the book.

Almost Perfect Murders. Beverly Allitt. Not watching that one, thanks.

[WTFH]

Morning all
Overcast but dry out, slept in until around 6am, so a foreshortened walk has been had.
Noticed that the waterbutt I use to top up the pond was full, so am currently topping up the pond. Need to remember to turn that off later - someone remind me please!

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Mostly cloudy with sunnier spells at the moment, but the clouds are expected to predominate through the day. Still a bit breezy too. It’s getting milder though: already at 13°C (“feels like” 9°) and expected to soar to 21° this afternoon, as we build towards the heatwave that will see it reach 31° on Monday and stay in the mid-20s all next week. The barometers are shooting upwards at 1012/1020mB

Today is tech debt day, so with luck I’ll get to just do a few dependency upgrades first and can then tinker with some corner of the app that feels like it could do with some tidying. I’ll pop along to Not-as-Big Sainsbury’s at lunchtime and get the shopping out of the way, leaving the Bank Holiday weekend clear

[NickFitz]

This evening’s viewing was the rest of the Police Interceptors I started last night

And in The Middle Kingdoms, it turns out Lithuania was once absolutely huge, incorporating swathes of modern Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia; while Poland managed a very effective PR campaign by presenting itself as the bulwark against hordes from the east

Thursday tomorrow! And a Bank Holiday weekend too!

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Tea has been BBQ beef short ribs and chips

Rather than braise the ribs as I usually do, I decided to experiment a bit. So I browned them and chucked them in a roasting tin with a carrot, onion, and some garlic cloves, covered it all tightly with foil, and stuck it in the oven at 100°C for about five hours. Then I made a glaze: some cherry tomatoes, mustard, red wine vinegar, sugar, honey, smoked and plain paprika, chilli flakes, thyme, bit of Cajun seasoning, dash of soy, dash of Worcester… probably some other stuff too. Boiled that lot up and reduced it till it was a nice thick sauce, then got the ribs out. Chucked the veg away, took the meat off the bones in one piece (well, two pieces), added the juices to the sauce and reduced that a bit further, then poured it over the meat and stuck it all back in at 180°. Turned the meat a few times and brushed the sauce over as it gradually turned into a glaze, until it was nicely browned and sticky. It turned out very well; I shall try that again

Though TBH I tried a fragment of just meat and fat that was left behind on the chopping board after boning, and that tasted really nice on its own! So I could have saved myself some faffing around and still enjoyed it

[xoggoth]

Group walk this morning folowed by meet at the pub. Been doing a bonfire this afternoon, smell of smoke, need a shower.

[ladymuck]

Afternoon all

Cloudy with sunny gaps. Dry. Breezy. Currently 19 degrees and that's the high for the day. Slight chance of a shower later. Barometer at 1019 mBar.

Sunrise 05:03; Sunset 20:54 BST

Took yea olde jalopy to the garage for a look-see at the clutch / clutch pedal. Like all good car owners, I'd done some reading around the topic and waffled about clutch fluid and slave cylinders at the mechanic who most likely inwardly sighed at yet another numpty telling them how to do their job. Turns out I was right! The slave cylinder was completely dry and the clutch fluid was old and nasty. So they've flushed it all out and replaced with shiny new.

Some minor prep work done ahead of returning to the coal faces tomorrow, to make sure that there are no major surprises.

I did intend to do laundry but that'll give me something to tomorrow while I'm on billing time.