Reply to: test please delete

[NickFitz]

Tea: burger and fries

These were not just any fries, they were M&S frozen fries. They cooked well in the air fryer, though they needed a few minutes longer than the packaging said

[WTFH]

Compost arrived and they were good enough to put the dumpy bags on the grass, rather than on the gravel.
One of my meetings finished a few minutes early, so I decided to catch up on last night's animal action. The hedgehog wars continue with the big biffer biffing the other hogs. There also seemed to be some consternation that I had not put out enough food before their 21:36 hunt, although they seemed happier when they saw it at 23:45

[NickFitz]

Late lunch has been ham sandwiches, as the ham needed to be eaten and I didn't feel like making toasties

The bread was fresh from M&S as I've been there shopping for a change, pending arrival of the replacement Nectar card. Among other delights, I also splashed out on some big fancy eclairs, and came across some things described as "Chocolate Peanut Clusters" which seemed highly relevant to my interests

[ladymuck]

Afternoon all

This morning it was all blue sky with wispy fluff. This afternoon it's dull and overcast. Currently 11 degrees with a high of 12 expected. Rain forecast this afternoon / evening. Barometer down to 1007 mbar.

I didn't go to the IMAX yesterday to see Dune Part 2. I really want to see it but the prospect of an 8.30pm showing that will last 2h45m (plus adverts) was more than I could face in the end.

I haven't heard back about the flat offer, so I need to chase that. I suspect I would have been called straight away if it had been accepted. This means I need to decide: do I concede to my landlady's demand for more money and a fixed term rather than rolling two months notice, or give notice and hope that something I like comes up within the next two months. I very much dislike being pushed into these things.

This was accompanied by E1 of Pompeii: The New Dig on iPlayer. Very interesting, so I'm going to watch E2 as well

Top tip, thank you!

I also noticed that there might be more episodes of The Repair Shop, or that an old repeat? It's hard to tell...

[NickFitz]

No lunch yet because I want to go shopping, but something was amiss with my Nectar account. Upon investigation by a gentleman on their phone line (who appeared to be working from a nursery judging by the noises off) it transpired that somebody had managed to report my card as lost and request a new card, and had also somehow changed the name on the account to Joseph Smith and the email address to one from a well-known Russian email provider. Not sure just how desperate Putin is because of sanctions, but he's going to have to make do without my ~£120 worth of Nectar points as they've deactivated the account and sent me a new card

Just checked in my password manager and the password for the account is a complex autogenerated one, so no idea how they got in. But a bit of Googling suggests that Nectar's provisions against account takeover are, shall we say, not exactly best-in-class

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Thursday.

The mention of the mandolin reminds me of the "Vegomatic" which resides unused in the shed even yet, after a mere half century of neglect.

Dry.

Wanly sunny.

Blue sky in parts, mostly high overcast.

Chilly in here at 13.7 deg, 13 deg in the kitchen & leanto, 10.4 deg in the saltinghouse.

1002.5 mBar, 29.6 in Hg, 751.94 Torr, 14.54 psi, (down from 1010 last night), 77% RH (GDR hair), 67% RH (Lidl electric)

Meanwhile on the 20th of September 2019 NF had a lamb shank in a red wine sauce which was, reportedly, inordinately nice, whereas I watched "Stargate(1994)" but was somewhat unimpressed thereby, finding it a bit slow in the middle.

The shirts & smalls in the WM.

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

Cottons in the WM.

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

Freecell score: 83%, running average: 86%.

Lunch baked spud etc.

Entertainment: Gap Finders. Toast: Green Shield Stamps.

Shirts roughly iRoned & airing upstairs, along with the smalls.

Entertainment: the remainder of The Infinte Monkey Cage S18 "The Human Voice" followed by

The Infinite Monkey Cage S18 "GCHQ". The audience was Very Quiet. .

Freecell score: 91%, running average: 86%

Veronica Mars S1 E18 "Weapons of class destruction". The naughty Feeb fitting someone up for a skool bombing one.

Walk (unabbreviated) walked in the grey gloom, though I did see my shadow at one point.

Tea: chilli con carne (Morrisons) etc. Nice enough, better than the Tesco version.

Entertainment: PM

The Mentalist S2 E21 "18-5-4". The clown one with the universal hack.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Sunny and Simpsonesque start out there today, though expected to get a bit cloudier, again. Also staying fairly cool at 7°C now and reaching 10° for approximately an hour around lunchtime before getting cooler again, and possibly plummeting to freezing tonight. The barometers are decidedly down again at 992/1000mB

[WTFH]

Morning all
Up and out early this morning, managed over 10km and under 10min per km.
A bit overcast, but not looking like rain.

[NickFitz]

Read a chunk more of The Sisterhood. I don't think it works as well as Julia. The author has tried updating Orwell's Oceania, and I don't think it works.

For example, Orwell has Julia as a mechanic servicing the novel-writing machines in the Ministry of Truth: "He had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner." In this, the novels are written by AI, and there's a token mention of her using a spanner to remove a panel and fiddle with the wires in some kind of computer. Where are the oily hands coming from in that scenario?

Worse still, it seems to be understood by Outer Party members that Big Brother is some kind of AI supercomputer, and that's what's watching people through the telescreens. I'd say it's a major point that Big Brother is supposed to be a real person, and any suggestion to the contrary would be crimethink. And I'd argue that it's the fact that the people on the other side of the telescreens are people that helps to make their presence so menacing. Also, how did the Party manage to develop such advanced technology by the 1980s?

Then there's a character who's supposed to be aged around sixty, yet is supposed to only have a notion of what life was like before the revolution because she heard about it from her parents. As she would have been born around 1924, and Orwell's Oceania is implied to have come about as a result of a war after the Second World War and probably in the 1950s, she would have her own adult memories of life before Ingsoc. In fact, she'd be only ten or twenty years younger than party elders such as Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford, who'd been senior party members alongside Big Brother but were arrested around 1965, broken by the Ministry of Love but then released as an example to others, and lived out their last days drinking at the Chestnut Tree Café where Winston himself had seen them in his adulthood. So if Winston is about forty and has dim early childhood memories of the revolution, a woman who's twenty years older than him must remember life before quite clearly.

So not as impressed by this one

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Tea tonight was leftover Turkish mixed grill

This was accompanied by the Brighton night policing thing, reminding me why I don't like Brighton very much. And then a couple of episodes of a new thing on All4, Murder Case: The Digital Detectives which is the usual sort of murder documentary thing, but with an emphasis on the evidence gleaned from phone data and the like. No great secrets revealed, but the second one made some interesting use of Apple Health data

[xoggoth]

on a surprising number of zombie and

Sounds like my sorta lady. I'm a zombie addict.

[ladymuck]

Afternoon all

It's been a dull old day, much cloud and little sunshine. It's currently 10 degrees and the high was 11. Although no rain was forecast, I swear there were a few spits and spots. Barometer is down to 1016 mBar.

I was at the office today. It wasn't a bad day because I'd generated something for me to do that kept me occupied.

Received a call from the letting agency about the flat, to go through the offer and be encouraged to "improve" it, which I resisted. There is another offer from a couple with a small child who viewed it just before me. My viewing was delayed 5 minutes by their tardiness in getting out of the building. It all depends on what the landlord wants, I guess.

I have a ticket to see Dune Part 2 at the IMAX this evening. Part of me can't be bothered to trek over to Waterloo and have a late night.

[NickFitz]

Lunch: corned beef hash. Very tasty

This was also an excuse to christen the thing-dicer I bought the other day, basically a mandolin with knobs on that can slice, julienne, and dice. Worked very well at chopping a few small spuds into little chunks

Meanwhile in stalking news, there was a delivery for the lady with the colourful hair from the ground floor sitting in the hall when I got back from the blood tests, so naturally I Googled her; I'd figured she was probably an academic, like the Pepys expert who used to live across the landing. Turns out she's actually a movie producer and screenwriter, and has also worked as a makeup artist on Strictly Come Dancing, and on a surprising number of zombie and sci-fi films (though IMDb describes many of them as shorts)

[NickFitz]

Back from the surgery, where we went through the annual ritual about units-per-week and also discussed my surplus of weight and deficit of exercise, before getting to the highlight of the day: blood

At least the walk there and back closed the green ring

Due to the flooding earlier in the year, the ground floor is still unusable, so access is via a back entrance on higher ground which opens on to the first floor. Apparently the idea of the ground floor being so far below the surrounding ground didn't raise any alarm bells with the architects about where water might collect

Anyway, this means having to cut through the university campus to get there, so that made a change. Forty years ago, I was just about to start taking my finals there

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Wednesday.

Sunny.

Blue sky.

Dry.

Chilly in here at 14.3 deg, 13 deg in the kitchen & leanto.

1015 mBar, 29.97 in Hg, 761.3 Torr, 14.72 psi, (down from 1019 last night), 77% RH (GDR hair), 67% RH (Lidl electric).

Glad to see the board is running like a slug on mogadon again. .

Meanwhile on the 20th of September 2019 NF was making scotch broth whereas I went shopping.

Walk (unabbreviated) walked in wan sunshine & very little blue in the sky.

Five lawns duly mown. Knackered now.

Lunch: scrambled egg etc.

Entertainment: 37 seconds of Y&Y. 15 mins of TWAO due to obnoxious politicians waffling on. It went <click> A Lot..

No butterflies today, unlike the unidentified example yesterday and the Peacock on Monday.

Freecell score: 88%, running average: 86%.

Veronica Mars S1 E17 "Kanes and Abel's".

The Mentalist S2 E20 "Red All Over". Malcolm McDowell as a nasty con man.

Walking Victorian Britain. I fell asleep for part of it.