Reply to: test please delete

[NickFitz]

I have no idea why the word “held” appeared in my description of my lunch. I can only assume Apple Intelligence (geddit?) thought it was a good idea to shove it in there, even though it makes no sense. I think I’ll turn “AI” off once I work out how to

Tonight’s major motion picture premiere was The Family Plan 2 (2025) because, fool that I am, I thought that they might have learned from their mistakes with the first one. But once again it was too slow about getting started, though I suppose it was a little bit better about it. The London bit included them diving down the alley between the Coliseum and the back of the Harp (which many people say is the narrowest alley in London, though it’s about an inch too wide to claim that crown), which I know very well, then running to meet their kids at St. James’s Square, and onwards to a tourist bus which took them to Piccadilly Circus. By this point, I was thinking that it made a nice change that the movement around London was quite realistic; when I worked at Capital Radio on Leicester Square, I used to head over to the Harp after work, and via St. James’s Square to Fuzzy’s Grub for lunch, so I knew all this was doable. And just then, it cut to show the bus crossing Westminster Bridge from south of the river and past the Houses of Parliament

Anyway, as happened with the first one, it ended up with the last bit of the film being pretty good. They should try doing that all the way through

After that, I needed something less wholesome than Apple’s idea of entertainment. So I rewatched The Terminator (1984). Now that’s a family plan! Also, jokes about smoking, which I don’t suppose we’ll ever see again

Finally, the next episode of Alien: Earth which is a flashback episode to the events on the spaceship that (spoiler alert) brought the alien to Earth. Good bit of backstory, I thought

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Tea has been lamb steaks with chips and beans

And lunch was held a sausage and bacon baguette with red sauce

The laundry completed, but I think the mattress topper and pillowcases benefit from having a bit of space to themselves, as at the end they were completely dry except for some spots where they were still very damp. So I ended up splitting the load anyway and giving each batch an extra half hour or so

And I’ve been digging into the new forum software, working out how to do various things. Quite a productive afternoon on that, all in all

[WTFH]

Let us know if it blows the bloody doors off, like. .

Handily (or not) it's the other one.

[DoctorStrangelove]

HWMBO and I are off to dinner at The Stafford this evening, where Michael Caines is doing a soft launch of his new menu

Let us know if it blows the bloody doors off, like. .

[ladymuck]

Afternoon all

Sunny with occasional lumps of fluff. Currently 13 degrees ('feels like' 11) and that's the high for the day. Rain expected overnight and there's a heavy rainfall warning in my weather app. Barometer at 1009 mBar.

Sunrise 07:41; Sunset 15:58 GMT

Busy day of meetings. No real work done. Got a headache developing.

HWMBO and I are off to dinner at The Stafford this evening, where Michael Caines is doing a soft launch of his new menu at the bargain price of £45 for three courses. We are encouraged to arrive half an hour early for our booking, to avail ourselves of canapes and aperitifs.

[NickFitz]

Mattress topper and pillow cases in the wash

I’ve decided to see how well they dry together, rather than washing them all then splitting the load across two drying sessions. This process seemed to produce quicker results in aggregate with the old washer-dryer, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the new one can handle it all in one go without a massive increase in the time required

[NickFitz]

Shopping done!

I had a personal Nectar Price on Pukka steak slices but they didn’t have any

In fact, they never do have any at Not-as-Big. There’s an empty box on the shelf, but I’m starting to think it’s the same one every week. They just dust it occasionally and leave it there to make customers think it’s their own fault and they should have got there earlier

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

There’s some bands of cloud towards parts of the horizon but it’s generally a blue sky out there. There’s a bit of a breeze though, so the current 8°C “feels like” 2°; and the 11° due later is expected to accompany “rainy conditions” before teatime. The barometers are down a touch at 997/1005mB

I don’t need much shopping and could get away without going for any at all. But popping down the road to Not-as-Big Sainsbury’s will give the car a chance to get warm, and help keep the battery topped up after a fairly chilly week, so I’ll do that in a bit

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Friday.

Damp.

Grey.

Dreary.

Sunless.

Saw a small patch of blue sky.

Chilly in here at 14.3 deg, 12.5 in the kitchen, 11.5 in the leanto.

1006.5 mBar, 29.722 in Hg, 754.9 Torr, 14.598 psi, (down from 1008 last night), 61% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 3rd of March 2020 there was much discussion of Irish forebears, birth certificates, and passports from LM & NF, whilst Brillo popped in to contribute another grandfather.

Walk (unabbreviated, towpath) walked in the grey gloom.

Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: The food programme waffling on about tea.

Book. Other book. New book.

Bit of Discovering David Fincher.

Tea: Mr Brains faggots, with peas & such.

Entertainment: PM.

Taggart. S3 E4,5,6 "Funeral Rites". The dentist one.

[WTFH]

Morning all
Overcast but warm out, the clouds are thinning. Could be pleasant day - I'd almost suggest temperatures in the teens later.

[NickFitz]

Tonight’s only telly was the rest of the Traffic Cops I started yesterday, with more lorries coming to grief. I think there was a Crouch Recovery wrecker there for one of them, in the more recent white livery with orange trim, but they didn’t show it clearly

And in The Forgotten Soldier, they’ve gone from Kharkiv to the Eastern Front - and then all the way back to Kharkiv, with the Front coming along for the ride and frequently almost catching up with them

Goodnight all

[WTFH]

Major discussion with the powers that be this evening, resulting in permission being granted for a change of car. Now waiting for a few dealer prices. One slight delay may be that I wait until April when the “luxury car threshold” goes up to £50k, but I’ll wait to see what offers they come back with.

[NickFitz]

Tea: spag bol. Very nice

[NickFitz]

Another week done! Only two more working weeks this year!

Today was quite interesting, though it didn’t involve any progress on the thing we’re working on. The service we tend to has a view which displays large tables of data about stuff, and also allows the data on display to be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet. I’d assumed up till now that this was the usual "spit out a CSV” thing, but no, it actually constructs a proper spreadsheet, with formulae in it and so on!

Anyway, the problem is that for certain datasets, the data in the download had an extra row which didn’t appear on the screen. The important values in these extra rows (we’ve identified two different sets of data it happens with so far) are all zero, so no calculations are getting messed up. But obviously it’s an undesirable state of affairs, particularly as nobody is sure if the row in question should also be seen on screen, or shouldn’t be in the spreadsheet

So I went digging into what it was up to… and discovered, to my great dismay, that the code to build the dataset shown on screen and that to build the dataset in the spreadsheet don’t seem to share a single line! There are two completely separate chunks of code, each of which is supposed to be presenting the same representation of the underlying data; and now they aren’t

Also, one of these chunks is the horrendous piece of spaghetti we had to look at for other purposes recently, which is almost completely incomprehensible and was written by people who left years ago

And, of course, we aren’t allowed to download the entire database to work with locally or connect directly to the database server because it’s Official Sensitive, so the only way to investigate is to shell into the hotfix web server and poke at things from the command line there

I managed to get down to a level where I could grab a copy of the SQL that’s generated in each case, and confirm the disparity in results. But as one case also relies on three chained DB views, rather than going to the source table directly, and both of them do loads of aggregation involving other tables, it’s still a bit of a nightmare to work through; and then one has to understand how the high level ORM code caused it to generate that SQL. But I’ve left that info for my colleague, and I wish her luck in trying to solve it tomorrow - if only because she’s off on Monday so if she doesn’t, I’ll have to try to work it out then!

[ladymuck]

Afternoon all

Dull, overcast, damp. Currently 14 degrees ('feels like' 12) and that's the high for the day. Might be some rain later. Barometer at 1013 mBar.

Sunrise 07:39; Sunset 15:58 GMT

Busy morning. Meetings, emails, etc.

HWMBO is off out this evening which leaves me opportunity to catch up on the TV I like.