Let me tell you how my day started
I was biking ahead of yet another storm this morning. Bearing in mind how wet I got the other day, I wore my full banana suit. I was tearing down the path when my bike suddenly shuddered to a halt.
Upon examination, a doggy poop bag had been picked up by the chain and wrapped securely around the gear shifting mechanism at the back. I mean, that sucker was cinched up tight.
For once, I wasn’t carrying my trusty Leatherman. Not even a pocket knife. What did I have?
My fingers, dear reader. My fingers.
I won’t overdramatize what happened next. I was able to pick away the neck of the bag in little bits and then advance the chain to free it. I don’t even know if there was poop in the bag.
It wasn’t like squeezing a pastry bag full of flaming dogshit, which is I’m sure the image that went through everyone’s mind. In fact, I even made it in ahead of the rain. But still – screw you, Thursday morning!
Dead Pool tomorrow! Comest thou here and choose!
November 16, 2023 — 7:47 pm
Comments: 6
Go outside and look up!
You won’t see this. I mean, you will see this, but tiny. But bigger than usual!
Actually, Jupiter was at its closest and brightest was on November 4, but Uncle B read on t’Internet that it was bright tonight and we ran outside and looked up and it sure was.
You may think a dot in the sky being slightly larger than usual isn’t very exciting, but Jupiter is special. At any given time, you can see up to four of Jupiter’s moons with an ordinary pair of binoculars.
The first time I read that, there was an unusual confluence and, sure enough, there I saw all four of them – dot-dot-dot-dot – in a perfectly straight line, evenly spaced, on the left side of Jupiter. Which looked totally fake and wrong.
Tonight I saw at least one moon, but holding binoculars to my face and staring up gave me the dizzies, so I didn’t persist.
Also visible with binoculars: NASA ladies lose their handbag in space. You can watch video of it tumbling through the cosmos. Not unheard of, but it does seem the lady astronauts lose their bags more often.
“In September 2023, the European Space Agency estimated 35,290 objects were being tracked and cataloged by the various space surveillance networks, with the total mass of objects orbiting Earth amounting to more than 11,000 tons.”
Wear a hat.
November 15, 2023 — 7:16 pm
Comments: 5
Wait…what?!?
This just landed in my inbox. I nearly threw it away thinking it was spam. I swear, I haven’t had any notification from the Home Office.
Guys. I did it! I’M GOING TO BE A LIMEY!
November 14, 2023 — 8:15 pm
Comments: 8
What’s brown and sticky?
Uncle B bought hisself a stick. Apparently, it’s a super special kind of walnut tree that can grow and fruit in a pot. He’s been deep in conversation with an expert walnut grower on the other side of the country and this is the result.
We shall see.
We were expecting another violent rainstorm today. I looked at the weather satellite this morning and reckoned I could outrun it.
I was wrong. I was absolutely drenched by the time I got to the office. It was early enough that I could peel off the outer layer and put it on radiators to dry out a bit, but I was stuck with the soaking wet jeans. Worse, my art club had its AGM this afternoon, so I stayed late. In my wet jeans.
I am shattered.
I had to do the minutes. I’m often asked to take notes at meetings because everyone tells me I take very good notes at meetings. Now, you may think this is a ploy to trick me into taking the notes because it’s an awful bore and nobody else wants to do it and…okay, maybe.
But I do take damn good minutes, and I’ll tell you my secret: I leave most of it out. I boil the meeting down to the main points and cut the crosstalk. By the time anyone else sees my minutes, that’s exactly the way they remember it going down.
The aging membership helps.
November 13, 2023 — 8:06 pm
Comments: 12
The last voyage of the Gallant Maid
We drove through the town of Rye this afternoon as they were building their bonfire.
The boat is a tradition. It harks back to olden times, when Rye was a harbor and sometimes groups of miscreants would go down to the dock and set fires. There’s a story that one ship’s captain was drinking and whooping and enjoying the spectacle, until he realized it was his own ship on fire.
The harbor silted up hundreds of years ago and the sea is miles away now, but if they can find a derelict boat, they lay it on the bonfire.
It’s a sad tradition, I think. This one even looks reparable.
Good bye, Gallant Maid, and good weekend to you all!
p.s. it looks like Rich Rostrom has won the Dick with Frank Borman. I saw it too late for this week, so you know the drill.
November 10, 2023 — 7:31 pm
Comments: 11
How things can change
I have to go out tonight, so I will leave you with the historic tale of the Lewes avalanche.
England was a much, much colder place in them there days. During the ‘Little Ice Age’ (c. 16th to 19th C) the Thames would often freeze over in Winter, hard enough that they could hold Frost Fairs on its surface.
In 1836, it started snowing in October and the ground wasn’t clear until April. There were ten foot drifts in parts of Lewes, a town along the south coast in Sussex. A particularly strong snowstorm arrived on the 24th and blew right through Christmas.
Nobody in town noticed that on the chalk cliffs above the town, a giant cornice had formed – that’s like a curved wave made of snow. A few bits came down on Boxing Day and destroyed a shed. Some townies suggested the people right below should evacuate for a while, but they didn’t. Nobody appreciated how huge the cornice had grown.
There was a collection of ramshackle homemade cottages in the path of the avalanche. It came down on the 27th – not in a landslide, but as a huge chunk – and buried them alive. There were 15 people at home, mostly women and children, of which eight died. A hundred and fifty turned up to dig the bodies out.
Lewes is in my sort of latitude. In my 27 years coming here (lordy, has it been that long?), I’ve never seen a snowfall worthy of the name. The most I remember was about four inches (and, typical of places that don’t often get snow, it paralyzed everything).
Honest and truly, I’m more worried about the possibility of another ice age than I am warmening, which is most welcome.
November 9, 2023 — 5:24 pm
Comments: 3
More effective spam hunting
The last year or so, spam on my main account has been driving me crazy. Gmail is good about filtering, but my regular account that lives locally is not. On average, I’d get 60 to 100 spams a day, and if I didn’t bother to log in to my main machine for a few days…what a mess!
I discovered Outlook has advanced manual filtering, but I flailed around for a while trying to work out how to craft a filter that would catch the bastards.
At first, I tried filtering based on subject words, like Costco or Southwest or rewards, but that meant multiple, multiple filters that changed over time and the risk of stopping a legit email that contained a stop word.
Then I tried based on certain words in the sender’s address, which ultimately worked but had a learning curve. The filter completely ignores the informal part of the address (Costco Smart Shopper or Southwest Rewards). It has to be something in the @ itself, and those were always different.
Or were they? I noticed the name@name.name was different every time, but the top level domain – .boats – was always the same. Poor old .boats is a legitimate TLD for, like, boat people. So I set all .boats email to go into quarantine, and viola.
How the spammer latched on to it and what the advantage is to do it this way, I can’t figure out, but my filter worked like a charm. Until today, when a flood was back in my inbox. I checked and there was not a single .boats address among ’em – it’s now all .lat. Poor old Latin America, but easy fix.
That suggests to me the majority of my spam is coming from a single source. Oh, and the nrsc – for god’s sake filter out .nrsc for the next year.
Now that legit filters out all of my spam, except this guy:
ypyz2015@163.com is the spammer. He’s an oriental gentleman trying to sell me engineering. His address is always the same, but the sender’s address is always different. Outlook seems blind to the second address on send on behalf, even though it’s an Outlook thing.
Why, yes…I do talk like this at parties.
November 8, 2023 — 7:08 pm
Comments: 3
Ow! My butt!
Oh, man…I’ve just sat through an interminable Zoom meeting. My backside ain’t built for this.
At the start of the meeting, I was invited to try the new AI Companion, which I was told would create a synopsis of the meeting for me.
“Great!” I think, “it can do the minutes!”
It can’t, no. It can tell you things like whether your name was mentioned, which I guess might be useful if you were reading news on your phone the whole time and wanted to know if you’d been assigned a job.
I asked it to catch me up and it gave me a one-paragraph synopsis of a 90-minute meeting – which, to be fair, was surprisingly accurate. But useless.
It sounded like something a gifted middle school student would turn in for a book report.
November 7, 2023 — 8:24 pm
Comments: 3
We got us an aurora
I hate to send you to the Guardian, but they’ve got the best picture of the aurora borealis over Stonehenge. If double exposures count.
I’ve never seen the aurora here, but it’s not that unusual. Look at the picture and you’ll see why. Our spot in the sunny south of England is directly across from Hudson Bay. The only reason London isn’t Saskatoon is a vigorous gulf stream.
That, by the way, is how the eco-loons are trying to explain why global warming means we’re so goddamned cold in England these days. They say currents of water? air? are pushing down on the gulf stream.
That’s right, global warming is making Britain colder. Is there nothing it can’t do?
I actually had someone tweet at me the other day, “oh, did you think climate change would make it warmer?” And I’m like, yes? So what was all that stuff about no more snow and 1.5°C and penguins bursting into flames?
Anyway, if I can be arsed to go outside, I’ll have a look for them. They’re only this far south for a few days.
November 6, 2023 — 7:27 pm
Comments: 5
Is it gin o’clock yet?
Oh, man, I’ve had a booger of a day. Power was down at work, which I didn’t realize until I got there.
When the power is out, the fire alarm keens like a wounded animal. The intruder alarm makes a series of two high, two low beeps until you plug in a certain code, which shuts it up. For half an hour.
Our phone now goes over ethernet, so no incoming calls on the landline. I managed to rig my cellphone as a wifi hotspot and get some mail in and out on the laptop, but none of the apps I use to control things would work. The solar panels realized they were offline and began to whimper softly.
Couldn’t buy a cup of coffee and couldn’t have paid for it if I did.
I don’t think our lords and masters have thought through this “make everything electric” business. Especially while they’re blowing up our sources of electricity.
No electricity, no digital money, no universal ID, no social credit score. We are ruled by idiots. Have a good weekend!
November 3, 2023 — 7:34 pm
Comments: 11