Reply to: test please delete

[NickFitz]

Tonight’s major motion picture premiere was Eddington (2025) in which the sheriff and the mayor of a small town in New Mexico (the eponymous Eddington) are feuding over some small town bulltulip during the Covid pandemic. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that the sheriff is into anti-masking conspiracy theories, his wife is into child abuse conspiracy theories, and his mother-in-law is into just about every conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard of. Meanwhile, the town’s teens are riled up and protesting on empty roads about BLM, though the local police force is the sheriff and two deputies, one of whom is black (and the other is into Bitcoin)… I was thinking around the forty minute mark that it would turn out to be a sententious story about social relationships and the like, and that was also around the time it started to become something much stranger and went in directions I never expected. It’s a very good film, but once it starts doing your head in, it doesn’t let up

Incidentally, I was one off when guessing its MPAA number: I guessed 55474, and it’s 55473. As you may remember, I got it right once in 2020 with Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) which was also about a cop in a small town in the USA having a grievance with local government. Maybe if I watch more films like that, I’ll get it right more often

After that, a rewatch of In Time (2011) because satirical exposés of the fundamental nature of capitalism are always worth revisiting

Finally, E1 of Pluribus (TV Series 2025– ) in which a space virus causes the entire human race to have one conjoined mind except for eleven people, one of whom is our protagonist: a writer of trash fiction with a huge fanbase. This first episode was entertaining and people have spoken highly of the series, so I have high hopes for the rest of it

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Tea has been ribs and chips, being my own recipe mango BBQ ribs

Earlier, I bit the bullet and upgraded to the latest version of MacOS. This, in turn, enabled the AI integration features in Xcode; so I bit a further bullet and took out a Claude AI subscription, started a new project, and let it rip. I’m actually quite impressed with what it’s come up with! Looks like crap, mind; they clearly haven’t trained it on the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. But it created the underlying functionality, and it works, and it changes it in appropriate ways when I ask it to add features. In less than an hour (which includes the time I was playing with what it had produced and reading the code and so on) it had produced something that is, at least, a respectable prototype at a level which would have taken me a couple of evenings to come up with

Next up will be suggesting increasingly complicated improvements to see if it hits a wall. But as I mainly wanted this app for my own use, it’s saved me a few hours to end up with something perfectly usable but which I wasn’t so interested in that I would have have bothered getting this far myself

[ladymuck]

My state of well being improved greatly throughout the course of the day. A great relief.

HWMBO says we're having 'picky bits' for dinner but there's lots of food prep sounding noises coming from the kitchen. This implies these will be not my council kind of picky bits, such as opening different shapes/flavours of crisps into bowls, but actually something resembling food.

[xoggoth]

Is that a ufemism??

If only! The light bulb was in the bathroom but she did invite me into her bedroom afterwards. To turn the mattress!!!! Bah!

Nice sunny Bluebelly walk anyway.

[sadkingbilly]

Nice old fart coffee morning at local historic place this morning. Got me, a bit, out of me brain fog after a cr**y night's sleep. Off to Bluebell walk with loony lady 1 soon. She expects me to replace her light bulb afterwards. Grumble.

Is that a ufemism??

[NickFitz]

In catching up on nerdy news earlier this week, I forgot to mention this from our old pal Diamond Geezer:

https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2...-line.html?m=1

I thought it quite informative and almost made me consider being more accurate in my sunrise and sunset times, rather than use what value my weather app provides.

Excellent stuff!

FWIW my iPhone weather app is accurate to the times for Leicester according to https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/ so your app might be fine

[xoggoth]

Nice old fart coffee morning at local historic place this morning. Got me, a bit, out of me brain fog after a cr**y night's sleep. Off to Bluebell walk with loony lady 1 soon. She expects me to replace her light bulb afterwards. Grumble.

[NickFitz]

Shopping done!

The car park and frontage of the store were adorned with things proclaiming the ominous fact that it's undergoing “improvements”, which as we all know can mean anything from moving a couple of shelves to make a bit more room for the queue at Argos to rotating the entire layout of the store by 180° about its vertical axis, then shaking it and leaving things where they land. The only change that affected me on this occasion was that a large open area had appeared where the Habitat stuff was, this having all been crammed into a smaller space, though there were also a couple of shelves of stuff that doesn’t belong at that end of the store at all, apparently put there to make sure Argos customers were still packed in like cattle. Continuing past this area to the furthest corner of the store, I found that Viz (and other magazines) no longer lived there!

So I wandered round and eventually discovered they’d been moved to where they should have been all along - just by the front door near the newspapers, next to where the kiosk used to be

With that anomaly resolved, I proceeded into the food-bearing areas, where it seems nothing has changed… yet. How long this happy state of affairs will last, and how long it will take to rewire my brain if they completely change everything, remains to be seen

The journeys there and back took a few minutes longer than expected due to several lots of roadworks along the way, but it wasn’t too bad. And upon my return, my preferred parking space was still free!

Time for lunch now

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

I awoke, unalarmed, just after 9am after a pretty decent night’s sleep

It’s sunny with clouds, and expected to either stay much the same or get cloudier. The warm spell is over: 7°C now and only getting to 11° later. The barometers are up a touch at 1008/1016mB

Off to Big Sainsbury’s shortly. I’m not sure I need that much, as I’m onne again at the point where I need to reduce stocks in the freezer to let new stuff in. But Viz is out, so there I must go

[ladymuck]

Morning all

Cloudy but bright. Currently 9 degrees with a high of 12 expected. The sun might make an appearance. Barometer up to 1022 mBar.

Sunrise 06:17; Sunset 19:50 BST

I am feeling much better today. Headachy from about 5am and tablets still having little effect. However, when I got up, the mere act of being vertical seems to have helped massively, only for the 10am meeting I'm covering for someone at Gig1 to be cancelled. Gig3 still haven't got their act together about what I'm supposed to be doing. Smile and invoice

[DoctorStrangelove]

^^^ OM.

Morning.

Friday.

Dry.

Wanly sunny.

White sky.

NotQuiteSoChilly in here at 15.5 deg, 15 in the kitchen, 13.5 in the leanto.

1016 mBar, 30 in Hg, 762.1 Torr, 14.736 psi, (down from 1018 last night), 64% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 24th of March 2020 AndyGarbs, covbob, DaveB, LM, vetran, xogg and I popped in, all duly staying at home as instructed by The Wisdom of Bunter.

Another morning of waking at 05:55 FFS. Read book until 07:00 or so, then returned to the land of doze for a while until the wireless woke me up with the sound of the zionists busily bombing Lebanon.

The dream before waking involved avoiding crashing artics on the motorway whilst driving my dad somewhere. Odd.

Walk (unabbreviated, towpath) walked in the chilly grey gloom. Two conversations: Elaine's mum up near the Calor gas place, and Martin in Penydre.

Have I mentioned the grass snake two days ago on the towpath?

Or that the swans have laid 8 eggs this year?

Well if I haven't I have now.

Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: some bollox or other on R4. TWATO.

New washing line installed: in a rush of blood to the head I joined the old rope to the new rope with some heat shrink and lo! the ladder wasn't needed, just pulled the old rope through & the new rope followed.

I'll have to remember that trick for next time.


Tea: Mr Brains faggots. Nice enough. Entertainment: PM.

PBS: 10 things that went wrong with Titanic.

Book.

Taggart S9 E7,8,9. "Death without Dishonour". The cab wars one with ex SAS nutter plus another nutter.

[WTFH]

Morning all
TFIF, etc.
Cooler with some light cloud, but a pleasant walk was had.
Haven't had any meaningful rain for a few weeks so last night we had to water some plants along with topping up the pond as there is pond life in it.

[NickFitz]

The war isn’t going well for Russia, not helped by the constant and chaotic changes to the government. But while his influence certainly isn’t helping matters, it isn’t all Rasputin’s fault - the Romanovs are proving that they’re perfectly capable of completely screwing things up without any help

It’s Viz week, so tomorrow morning involves a trip to Big Sainsbury’s

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Tea has been lamb steaks with chips and beans

And to go with this, the rest of the motorway cops thing from yesterday

[NickFitz]

Another week done!

Not the most productive of weeks, given that it’s only been two days of work. But I got some useful stuff done on Tuesday, and the other dev and I collaborated on a worthwhile debugging session this afternoon trying to track down an anomaly somewhere

She’s off next week and I’m off the week after, in both cases because of our respective birthdays!