Reply to: test please delete

[NickFitz]

In A Game of Birds and Wolves, they’ve finally found the chap who can, it’s thought, use war games to understand U-boat tactics and work out how to counter them. Before they packed him off to Euston to get the Liverpool train, they took him into an office in the Admiralty where Churchill gave him a pep talk. No idea if it was the room that’s now called the Churchill Room; I’ve never been in there, but I’ve walked past it several times

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Tea has been chicken madras with rice and naan

To go with it, the final episode of the Boston marathon bombing thing on Netflix

[NickFitz]

Lunch has been a leftover bit of chicken and a couple of spicy lamb chops

Meanwhile across the lawn: scaffolding is going up! Not sure what for; there are some large painted areas on the facade of that block that are looking rather dingy and flaking in places, so maybe that’s being redone

There’s also the ongoing saga of the guttering and drainpipes on those 1930s blocks. They need replacing and as this is a conservation area, the council originally said they had to be like-for-like. The management company got an estimate for them to be custom-made in a cast iron foundry, and it came out to about a million quid! The reserve funds are in decent shape, but not that decent. So they were trying to get the council to allow some kind of plastic things which can be made to look identical to the existing ones, but don’t cost anything like as much

[NickFitz]

Links are up

[eek]

I’ve been meaning to go there for ages. I’m thinking go going up in the autumn to visit the parents’ grave, so I’ll try to fit it in then

I’ve probably mentioned before that my Dad worked in Derby House for a number of years in the 1950s, and nobody there had a clue that all that lot was still sitting, mothballed, down in the basement

If you can go when they are doing a tour - I didn't on one and to be frank without it the museum was a bit meh, what was behind this.

Earlier in the day we did the https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/.../old-dock-tour which was very good.

[ladymuck]

Morning all

Cloudy but sunny and dry with a gentle breeze wafting in the window. Currently 19 degrees ('feels like' 22) with a high of 24 expected. Barometer up to 1027 mBar.

Sunrise 04:47; Sunset 21:22 BST

No idea what happened to yesterday's post. I know I typed it out but evidently failed to properly post it. Anyway, it was a nice day, no drama.

Much better sleep in the cooler temperatures but my weather app says it might get back up towards 30 degrees next weekend, and maybe 33-34 next week.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Monday.

Dry.

Grey.

Sunless.

21.9 deg in here, 23 in the kitchen, 21 in the leanto, 17 outside.

1019 mBar, 30.09 in Hg, 764.3 Torr, 14.779 psi, (up from 1016 last night), 62% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 31st of March 2020 BR14, covbob, eek, LM, NF, and vetran popped in. LM had to put whisky in the bread & butter (HCB) pudding (with added fruit due to the inadequacies of the HCB and whiskey due to "someone" putting an empty cognac bottle back rather than throwing it away).

Oh, and the milk has turned so the tea is a bit lumpy this morning. . Milk met the compost heap, the tea met the plughole.

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

Slow walk down and even slower walk back: two conversations: lady who used to work in the library, and a chap who used to do the trolleys in Tesco carpark.

Now outside a mug of mediocre yet consistent coffee.

Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: Poscode thing: Manchester M1 where ICI used to R&D stuff before it all fell apart like everything else in this fecking country.

Classic Movies: The Deer Hunter (1978). Directed by Michael Cimino before the saga of "Heaven's Gate" and blowing up horses & painting grass greener. .

Leanto, kitchen, living room, and half the hall roughly vacced.

Now outside another mug of mediocre yet consistent coffee.

Other half of hall (some stuff moved), plus boxroom (part, some stuff moved), front bedroom (where nothing gets moved), back bedroom (two things moved) duly vacced

Now getting outside a mug of squash. .

Tea: Mr Brains faggots with peas & such like. Nice enough. Entertainment: PM <click>.

Blaze UFO bollox: Keksburg. Die Glocke. Kamler. Time travel. .

Bab5 S1 E15. "Grail". David Warner as a Seeker for the Holy Grail.

Nothing on BBC1,2,3, or 4 that requires more than 2 braincells: ball game bollox with an ancient topgear thrown in for good measure.

Blaze: History's Mysteries. More bollox. Roanoke: the colony that disappeared. Sounds like the Native Americans had the right idea with that one. . Kill 'em all, it's the only way to be sure. . The Black Dahlia.

[NickFitz]

The Western Approaches museum in Liverpool has an permanent exhibition on the Wrens - it was about the best part of the museum.

I’ve been meaning to go there for ages. I’m thinking go going up in the autumn to visit the parents’ grave, so I’ll try to fit it in then

I’ve probably mentioned before that my Dad worked in Derby House for a number of years in the 1950s, and nobody there had a clue that all that lot was still sitting, mothballed, down in the basement

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

It’s a sunny start with only the merest of wisps in the sky. Much more tolerable though: currently 15°C after an overnight low of 13°, and not getting any worse than 22° - and that only for a while in late afternoon. The barometers are sharply up at 1013/1021mB

The bedroom was down to 21° when I went to sleep, and about 22° when I awoke. There was enough of a cool breeze that I even closed the big window and chucked a wrap across the foot of the bed for fear of getting chilly in the night! Might have to get the summer duvet back out at this rate

[WTFH]

Morning all
Got a bit damp while out walking earlier.

[eek]

The Western Approaches museum in Liverpool has an permanent exhibition on the Wrens - it was about the best part of the museum.

[NickFitz]

The watery wildlife returned to the telly today

This evening, I watched 24 Hours in A&E

And tonight’s reading was more of A Game of Birds and Wolves, in which there was a brief history of the founding of the Wrens in WWI, their disbanding afterwards, and their hasty re-founding in WWII. Apparently fifteen thousand women applied to join the initial intake of fifteen hundred, which was a problem as the Admiralty didn’t have anybody to handle the applications, as they hadn’t employed any women with sufficient naval experience to do that yet

There’ve been a couple of references to the Operations Room under the Admiralty where stuff was plotted on the wall (not to be confused with the Operations Room at the Western Approaches in Liverpool from which things were actually controlled). I assume that was in the space in the basement that’s now divided up into various meeting rooms, but I’ve never been down there - on the few occasions I’ve been to the office, we were upstairs

I’ve spent almost all of today wrestling with getting the forum running on AWS for testing purposes. I’m about there now; just got to work out some bottleneck that’s making one step of the data import crawl along at a snail’s pace

Monday again tomorrow. Everything I’ve been working on recently was done and dusted last week, so I’ve got to start in on some other stuff that the other dev largely finished before she left, but which involves liaising with other teams to get it into action

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

I'm reading a book about Ada Lovelace. I've only just learned (maybe something everyone else knew) that the Analytical Engine (i.e. world's first computer) was never actually built, and Lovelace's program never run until many years later on a modern emulator (where a bug was found!). I feel quite cheated.

Yes, Babbage was renowned, or perhaps notorious, for having marvellous ideas but never finishing anything

[mudskipper]

I'm reading a book about Ada Lovelace. I've only just learned (maybe something everyone else knew) that the Analytical Engine (i.e. world's first computer) was never actually built, and Lovelace's program never run until many years later on a modern emulator (where a bug was found!). I feel quite cheated.

[NickFitz]

Tea has been the last of the beef short ribs in Guinness thing, with chips

That’s been sat in the freezer for ages, but it’s about time it moved out and made space for something else

It was quite cold when I was finally able to eat it, as the router seems to have succumbed to a touch of heatstroke at some point last night. It’s working OK now, but various things had ended up using the 4G backup wifi. In particular, the stereo-paired HomePods I use for sound from the telly had become so confused that one of them was refusing to switch from the 4G wifi while the other had realised it should go back to the normal one. Even powering off for a few seconds didn’t help, and in the end I had to unlink them from my phone and restart them as if from new. This was a pain as it meant standing near them holding my phone and confirming things while they got themselves set up, though to be fair it does go very smoothly with the minimum of questions. Anyway, with that done, they were back to working OK and I was able to return to my lukewarm food