Reply to: test please delete

[NickFitz]

I finished Endurance tonight. Shackleton & co. made it to South Georgia, due to Worsley’s remarkable navigational skills. But once there, with their boat damaged in getting ashore, they faced a further problem: the nearest place to get help was twenty miles away on the other side of the island, and the only way to get there was over the mountains and glaciers in the middle, which had never been crossed by humans before. But they did it! So they were (eventually) able to get a ship and head down to Elephant Island to rescue the rest of the crew

ClientGov are sending me a new laptop, and it turns out it’s arriving tomorrow, some time before 13:00. This is annoying as it needs to be signed for, so I’ll have to wait in for it, and I wanted to get the shopping out of the way in the morning

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Tea was brought to me from Nando’s in the end

I didn’t have anything in that I fancied so I thought of going round to the chemist’s for the monthly prescription, which needs collecting, and then on to the kebab shop. But that would have involved going out in the rain so I didn’t

Viewing so far has been the first half of the first episode of Twisted Sisters: Madness & Manslaughter on Five. This is all about that incredible business on Motorway Cops back in 2008 (when it was still on the BBC) with those two Swedish women who were running around the M6 and got hit by cars, plural - only for them to somehow manage to get back up and run around the motorway some more. One of them then got hit by a lorry, with the other punching to the ground a copper who was trying to stop her jumping over the central reservation. And when they finally caught her after much chasing back in forth in the live lanes of the other carriageway, she exhibited superhuman strength that made it almost impossible to restrain her. At the time, the Beeb ran it as a special episode in primetime within a few days of it happening, and the footage remains just as astonishing today

They’ve tracked down a load of the people who ended up involved - the cameraman, coppers, medics, ordinary drivers who helped restrain them, and so on. Interesting stuff

It all ends tragically, as the title suggests, but that’s a few days to a couple of weeks down the line

[xoggoth]

I went shopping, driving through badly flooded bits constantly, it's been pouring down all day.

[NickFitz]

The week is done!

I was thinking of going shopping but it’s raining and dark and generally seems a bit miserable out, whereas it’s expected to be dry and possibly even sunny in the morning, so I’ll put it off until then

Now I need to decide what to have for tea

[NickFitz]

Lunch: leftover pork cutlet in a bap (wholemeal) with apple sauce

I managed to dodge the more tedious bits of tech debt so the morning’s not been too bad

[ladymuck]

Morning all

Dull, overcast, raining. Currently 10 degrees ('feels like' 8) and that's the high for the day. Rain set to continue for the much of the day. Barometer down to 1003 mBar.

Sunrise 08:00; Sunset 16:22 GMT

One meeting done (at 9am!) which was very informative actually. My next isn't until 3pm (different client). For some reason, Thursdays are always very quiet.

HMWBO will be arriving early this evening to stay for a couple of weeks.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Thursday.

Damp.

Grey.

Sunless.

Chilly in here at 12.3 deg, 10.5 in the kitchen, 9 in the leanto.

997.5 mBar, 29.456 in Hg, 748.2 Torr, 14.47 psi, (down from 1000 last night), 65% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 12th of March 2020 LM, Brillo, AndyGarbs, NF, me, and WTFH popped in. There was a Storm Coming.

Walk (unabbreviated, towpath) walked in the grey gloom. Took the umbrella to make sure no elephants appeared. I use the elephant trap to make sure it doesn't rain.

Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: That Evans chap's Bottom Line all about the dot com bubble and the impending AI bubble.

Sliced bread: chocolate. Lead and cadmium in same.

Ooooo, this is fun:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11321977/

Just as well I don't eat much chocolate then, innit? .

Book. Other book. I wonder if I'll ever feel like finishing "Robots and Empire" because it's doesn't seem altogether likely at the moment and there's a pile of Other Asimov books awaiting a reread, which doesn't exactly bode well. .

Tea: beans on toast with a big frankfurter to replicate the tin of beans with little sausages. Nice enough.

Entertainment: someone waffling about something. PM waffling about the latest Nazi turncoat plus Amol Rajan fecking off from Today, so it wasn't all bad news. .

"William Tell The Emperor's Hat (1958)". xogg referenced this some time ago. Goodness me, Willoughby Goddard was Gessler. Another production from the early days of Lord Russian Emigre.

Book.

Sky Arts: Discovering Alan Rickman.

Lucy Worsley's Victorian Murder thing on BBC not Wales at 23:00.

[WTFH]

Morning all
Overcast with heavy showers and 8C. I was dressed appropriately for the showers in my new (Devon made) stockmans coat, but then it didn't rain on us at all.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

There’s some clear sky at the moment but it’s expected to cloud over in short order, and rain is likely (65% -> 85%) to start around ten and continue into tonight. Milder again though, being 5°C already with an expected high of 7°. The barometers are down again, to 990/998mB

Thursday! It’s the fortnightly tech debt one, when we concentrate on boring things like ensuring security updates have been applied to servers and so on. I hope there isn’t much of that to do as I’d rather crack on with the thing I’m working on

[NickFitz]

In Endurance, they moved from their first landing place on Elephant Island to another spot where they were very slightly less likely to be washed away, though it’s only marginally better in that respect. And as this clearly isn’t good enough for the long term, Shackleton and five other men have set off in one of the boats to try to make the 800 mile voyage to South Georgia to get help. The men left behind are having a pretty miserable few months, though there is occasional entertainment such as the medic having to cut off somebody’s frostbitten and gangrenous toes, and also lance an abscess on another chap’s buttock, from which he drained over two pints of “foul-smelling liquid”

Thursday tomorrow!

Goodnight all

[NickFitz]

Tea was some sausage casserole thing that’s been in the freezer for ages, with chips

I can’t remember making the casserole so I'm not sure what was in it! It was rather nice though

This was accompanied by some Police Interceptors

And I also found time to muck around a bit with RealityKit and SwiftUI, making an interactive thing to help me get a better feel for how quaternions relate to Euler angles

[ladymuck]

All meetings done. Some write up to do but I think I'll clock off and do that tomorrow.

[xoggoth]

My planned walk today, possibly followed by drop in on ll2, ruined by damn road closures.

[NickFitz]

Lunch: Heinz oxtail soup and white toast

Thankfully, we’re pretty meeting-free today: there's one with an external supplier this afternoon about importing some data that will probably only take a few minutes, my one-to-one with the DM after that has been cancelled because neither of us could think of anything to discuss, and there’s the weekly departmental senior management one that I just use as an excuse to have coffee and biscuits whilst listening to them tell us all about stuff that mostly isn’t relevant to me

[ladymuck]

Morning all

Clear sky but a little damp on the ground. Much cooler at 3 degrees with a high of 7 expected. Cloud cover set to increase as the day progresses. Barometer up 1013 mBar.

Sunrise 08:01; Sunset 16:20 GMT

Another day mostly comprising meetings.