Reply to: test please delete

[ladymuck]

The day got progressively cloudier and greyer but no rain even though I thought it might.

Currently enjoying the latest series of Extraordinary Portraits.

[NickFitz]

Ribs and chips for tea

That’s the last of the homemade ribs out of the freezer. Time to make some more!

[NickFitz]

That’s the week done!

We didn’t have any security updates or team-wide tech debt stuff to work on, so the other dev suggested having a look at some continuous integration improvements she’d started on when I was off the other week, though she admitted she found it really boring! I managed to get some things working that had been broken and left some useful diagnostic info about other things, and she’ll carry on tomorrow with the help of one of the other devs who knows a lot more about it than either of us but had too many meetings today to be able to help

[NickFitz]

Fish finger bap (wholemeal, red sauce) for lunch

Still sunny but the cumuli are increasing in both number and volume

I was going to dash down to Not-as-Big Sainsbury’s to do the shopping over lunchtime, but then remembered I’ve got a parcel from the Folio Society due any time now. Might go this evening instead, or might just leave it till tomorrow

[ladymuck]

Car Tax is due on 1 June. It seems to be going up £15 a year. Now up to £445 for the pleasure of all those pot holes.*



*yes, I know car tax isn't spent on the roads and it just goes into the general pot so it can be spent on consultants

[ladymuck]

Morning all

Sunny with many lumps of fluff cluttering up the sky. Currently 13 degrees with a high of 17 expected. Warming is expected over the next two days. Barometer up to 1017 mBar.

Sunrise 05:22; Sunset 20:34 BST

A quiet day, meetings wise. Might have to do some work.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Thursday.

Dry.

Vaguely sunny.

Blue sky in parts.

17.2 deg in here, 17.5 in the kitchen, 16 in the leanto.

1009.5 mBar, 29.81 in Hg, 757.2 Torr, 14.64 psi, (up from1009 last night), 61% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 26th of March 2020 NF, LM, quackhandle and I popped in, NF had cracked hands due to all the hand washing mandated by Bunter & co.

Woke at 05:00 yet again, read book, read other book, returned to the land of nod. Curiously the dream before waking included a smell. I can't remember dreaming a smell before. It was a smell of, er, sweat. From, er, a lady. .

Walk (unabbreviated, towpath) walked in the sunshine.

Lunch: brunch. Light in the meekrowavey worked ok this time. .

Entertainment: Scamwatch. Sliced Bread: one related to we keyboard warriors: ergonomic keyboards and mice.

Judging by the ergonomic kb I bought from Maplin 15 years ago, they ain't much good.

Developed a ganglion on my right wrist 20 years ago and used the experience to learn to use a mouse left handed.

Fixed the turntable motor on the old microwave, so its turntable duly spins.

Got the old old microwave up from the garage & fixed its turntable motor so that now duly spins.

Just need a new bulb for said oven & it's all done & dusted, washed, dried sanitised & put away.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

It’s a sunny start with just a few wisps and strands of cloud here and there and a distant clump of cumuli, low on the southern horizon. It’s 7°C with an expected high of 15°, and the barometers are nominally up (but hovering around the same sort of level) at 1004/1012mB

Thursday!

It’s tech debt day, so the morning will start with a chat about this and that across the wider team, followed by any important security updates to our app’s dependencies. After that, I’ll let the other dev decide as it’s her last one of these. There’s almost certainly some aspects of the app that she’s wanted to get tidied up but never had time for, so it would be good to deal with them as they’d be a useful way of picking her brains about various aspects I’m not as familiar with

Though all that is assuming the wider team doesn’t suddenly decide we should all focus on some big issue thing that affects the lot of us, like standardising our Continuous Integration configurations or something

[WTFH]

Morning all

Light cloud, but a pleasant temperature for the walk.

[NickFitz]

I finished Goodbye Mickey Mouse. It’s good; a kind of USAAF counterpart to Bomber. Then I move on to his XPD, which is one of his spy stories

Thursday tomorrow!

Despite having Monday off, this has felt like a long week. I need another holiday

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Beef and Gunness casserole with chips for tea

Quite a pleasant and fairly sunny evening out, though a bit breezy

[NickFitz]

Lunch has been a bratwurst with the usual trimmings

Cloudier now than it was, but still some blue bits here and there

Earlier, there was a kerfuffle between a crow and a magpie. I think the crow had gone poking around at the road end of the block opposite, and the magpies nest in one of the trees there. I was only in time to see the magpie chasing the crow away, both of them settling on different levels of the front of the block with the magpie taking the high ground. So I don’t know if the crow had been attempting to plunder the magpies’ nest, or if it just got a bit closer than they liked and was chivvied away out of an abundance of caution

I felt a bit sorry for the pigeon that was just flying through there and got caught up in the middle, with the crow and the magpie swooping around on either side of it. It looked quite taken aback as it took refuge in the trees along the edge of the big lawn

[ladymuck]

Morning all

Cloudy with some gaps. Currently 11 degrees ('feels like' 9) with a high of 14 expected. Slight chance of rain. Barometer steady at 1013 mBar.

Sunrise 05:24; Sunset 20:33 BST

Decided against going into the office and changed the in-person meeting to a Teams one. All the other meetings today (of which there are many) are on Teams.

[WTFH]

Morning all
Overcast, and spitting at 6am. This quickly stopped and it's not brightening up, but still cloudy.

Had sold some stuff on eBay and used their own postage - which this time was with InPost - someone I've never used before. I go through all the process and it tells me to drop off at my nearest point. According to their website, my nearest one is temporarily closed, and the next nearest was a newsagent in another town, but those were the only two they listed. The newsagent that was "open to 10pm" closes at 6pm, and I was there at 7pm last night, so I turned round and came back home.

Decided to check this morning and put in the postcode of the newsagent to see where the next nearest was. Turns out that the local Tesco and Lidl both have drop off points, but the website doesn't tell you that if you put in my home postcode.
Off to Lidl tonight then.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Wednesday.

Dry.

Grey.

Sunless.

17 deg in here, 17 in the kitchen, 15.5 in the leanto.

1009 mBar, 29.796 in Hg, 756.8 Torr, 14.6343 psi, (unchanged), 65% RH (Lidl electric).

As per yesterday: Meanwhile on the 26th of March 2020 BR14, LM, NF popped in, with NF having filled his fridge & freezer, and BR14 having chilli con carne, and LM watching something about the Corby poisonings. And whilst LM heard some pot banging for the NHS, NF heard nothing where he was (much the same around here IIRC).

This morning's dream before waking saw me sacked from some job or other, then driving into ?Swansea? to get a little part time job in some electronic junk emporium. Getting a bit fed up with all this now.

Walk (unabbreviated, towpath) walked in the grey gloom. Had a wander around the charity emporia in Neath, always a bad idea: one closed & empty and another closing, two books bought: one the Silverberg expansion of Asimov's "The Ugly Little Boy", and a local history tome about the dim & distant days when we dug stuff up, made things, and exported same from the docks, and Swansea had a mere six railway stations.

Lunch: brunch, during which the turntable in the meekro wavey stopped going round.

Entertainment: poking the meekro wavey turntable to see if it would start going round again: it didn't. Thing about Alvin, the submersible, not the Stardust.

Now wondering if the meekro wavey down in the garage still works. .

Well the heaty up meekro wavey bit still works but the goey roundy bit is fecked, and in addition the lighty uppy thing is knackered so you can't see it not going around. .

There was a £40 idiot level offerering in Argos a couple of weeks ago, but naturally enough it's now disappeared. Striking when the iRon is hot springs to mind.

£49 from B&M: staggered home. The light flickers. Dunno how long that's going to last but I can't face trudging back down there today. . Other than that it's ok.

Extracted the motor from the old meekrowavey: there's a little metal patch underneath that lets you get the motor out without dismantling anything else. Looks like the motor is toast since it takes no current.

There's a little bench vice that I use when soldering stuff: said vice was lubricated with Lidl teflon loaded oil: it was seized solid: took half an hour of potching down in the garage to get it free again. Can't understand it: the slide was rusty. Cleaned it all off, greased it with MS3 grease & applied a little engine oil. We'll see how that lasts. Not impressed with the results of the previous oiling. WTF? Not mineral oil in the teflon oil can or what?

Tea: Tesco battered haddock etc. Cooked in the new meekrowavey: nice enough. Light does more than flicker: it goes out altogether.

Entertainment: Some bollox or other on R4. PM. More bollox. Tomorrow's PM will be totally bollox free due to election rules. .

"Out of Town" with Jack Hargreaves: exploring an abandoned railway line replete with Thanet Cress, followed by a torrential rainstorm judging horses at an agricultural show. (1981). He relates that Thanet Cress came from Walcheren Island during the Napoleonic Wars following one of our less successful adventures. Recalls that he was going across the Channel after D Day alongside some Commandos who were off to fight on Walcheren Island in a bloody battle, and how many of those men never came back.

The Lugubrious One relating the Scotland Yard "The Dover Road Mystery" wherein a "tuned up" Ford Zephyr MkII shows a fine pair of heels to the Wolseley 6/80 (or the faster 6/90).

Thing on BBC4 about Porton Down. . With the late Dr Mosely.

Blaze: The unbelievable with Dan Aykroyd. "Superhuman": the chap struck by lightning 7 times. The woman who lifted a car off her son. etc. etc.

That Scottish nutter climbing mountains on BBC Alba. Feck me, I got vertigo just watching it, the mountains in this case being vertical sea cliffs on Shetland. They couldn't climb one pitch because some inconsiderate bastard had built a rocket launch site & access was banned.

A different Scottish chap, Paul Merton, wandering around one of the Scottish islands. Odd: showed two cows & two calves swimming from the main island to an uninhabited isle with better grass.

Last 20 minutes of "The Foreigner (2017)". Good honest blood soaked value. .