Early Risers.

[TheQ]

Afternoon Awl,

Loom and stand modified, but final finishing can't occur until the bolts arrive, eta 16:00-19:00

The parcel via herpes has arrived intact, pity the deliverer left the parcel cupboard doors open.

 

Lawnmower extracted from its shed, tyres pumped up, oils, etc checked ok.

Looked at  videos for changing this cutter deck drive belt, only there aren't any. It's a limited edition model, various parts from different production models.

So looked at drawings, but they weren't much help.

Had a good grovel around the deck, it needs to come off as there is a safety cover over the belt you can't access the securing bolts nor remove it with it on the mower. It appears to need just 3 bolts to remove  the deck from the mower, then 6 to remove the cover.

Drove the mower around the garden a few times to give it a good warm up and exercise.

Decided Saturday I'll attempt the belt change.

 

Ben taken down the beach again, he enjoyed that.

 

Decided not to order the card reader yet I want to do more research.

 

Ben's got an appointment for a regular check up on Monday.    The vet has informed us they want a liquid sample to check how his kidneys are on his new pills.

 

 

 

[Ozexpatriate]

3 hours ago, PupCam said:

Clearly the following options don't work or unacceptable.

 

     a)   Letting them go free (by either failing to track them down or in, really bad cases, not bothering to look for them at all)

     b)   Taking their liberty away and locking them up for a long(ish) while.

     c)   Taking their lives

Agreed. And as you point out thus it was ever so.

 

I do not believe any perceived positives for option (c) overcome the very real negatives. 

 

The point of the leaflet I linked to yesterday is that severity of punishment is not a deterrence, and the belief that increasing severity will result in less crime is wishful thinking. What is more effective is more policing - which increases the perception that perpetrators are likely to be caught.

 

I suspect that spending more money on highly visible policing would result in reduced crime and less expense in criminal justice.

 

Edited April 11 by Ozexpatriate

[PhilJ W]

Afternoon all from Estuary-Land. Had a call from my bank this morning saying that someone tried to deduct £18 from my account. It turned out to be from a discount company that offered a free trial which I found out the discounts were on things like gym memberships which I don't want. I thought I had cancelled it but on looking at their website it seems too easy to join but difficult to leave. Just as well my bank is on the ball and a call to their security department sorted matters. It seems this company is on some sort of blacklist.

[monkeysarefun]

23 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

I suspect that spending more money on highly visible policing would result in reduced crime and less expense in criminal justice.

 

 

 

Plus give everyone a crack at a proper life - provide employment opportunities and a living environment that has money spent on it  to provide decent community facilities, to repair  vandalism and remove the rubbish. 

Edited April 11 by monkeysarefun

[Erichill16]

3 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

 I see your sheriff in Florida and raise you a Presidential candidate!

 

Former President Donald Trump recently gave a glimpse into how his next administration would urge law enforcement to handle shoplifters if he wins the White House in 2024 − by shooting them in the store.

"We will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft. Very simply: If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store," he said Friday during a speech to California Republicans.

His comments drew applause from members of his party inside the Anaheim convention and he loudly said “shot” again for emphasis.

Immediately conjured up thoughts of the Looney Tunes  character Yosemite Sam.

[woodenhead]

Woke up knackered this morning - I blame YouTiube who has seen fit to introduce a gaming option to it's page.

 

So like those time wasting games that you find in the app stores for your mobile devices except on YT.

 

And they make them too easy so you keep on playing - I did 50 levels of a stupid bubbleshooter type game last night, couldn't stop could I.  It's like crack cocaine, you just keep playing, must resist.

 

However the day has been spent web application meddling and it's been quite fun this week actually doing some bona fide dev work rather than tinkering.  Time to set up a demo I think for the client.

[DaveF]

After church this morning I had a meeting to discuss both writing and actually doing intercessions to make sure I am up to speed.  It turns out I have the right books, a couple more have been suggested and duly ordered.  It was also decided that I don't need training on speaking clearly as no one has complained when I do readings - it must be from my teaching days and speaking in school halls.  So "all" I have to do now is write the prayers, starting with next Thursday's and then the ones for Ascension Day in May, then about once a month.

 

I went into town to collect my prescription, unusually the pharmacy was very quiet, then I had a walk round the shops but didn't find anything I wanted or needed.  Not that there are many shops any more.

 

This afternoon I removed a few weeds from the garden but it is still much too wet to do any serious work.  Apparently it will rain again tonight.

 

A few days ago I found some old cassettes including one of John Betjeman reading his poetry. Today I came across a USB cassette converter.  Perhaps one day I will actually digitise them so I can listen to them.

 

David

Edited April 11 by DaveF

[jjb1970]

I have updated my personal environmental and sustainability management procedure. This is a carefully calibrated, holistic systems based tool utilising AI algorithms and block chain digital technology to turbocharge my personal emissions reduction journey and leverage synergies across the value chain. Henceforward every time I fly I will buy an Accurascale locomotive to offset my emissions, setting an example for others to follow💪

[Gwiwer]

Afternoon all. 
 

Where am I?  Is this ERs?  The fog is so thick here it is hard to see where I’m going. 
 

Speaking of which. On watch this morning I was concerned by the progress of a small leisure craft.  Only its name and size came up on the trackers. No idea what type of craft, how many souls aboard, intention or destination. She was making around 4 knots so probably under power rather than sail. And she was perilously close to the shore and undersea reefs.
 

In near-zero visibility I couldn’t see her even at a half-mile range so Falmouth Coastguard was alerted. They called her but four hails went unanswered as she got to within 100m (by radar track) of disaster. 
 

She abruptly altered course - possibly having seen rocks dead ahead at underwear-changing range. And passed that hazard in what must have been white water. 
 

Only to then vanish from the trackers altogether as she came towards the cliffs once more. Falmouth asked several nearby fishing vessels if they could see her. In that fog they would have been lucky to see their own bow from the bridge. 
 

As the watch changed this remained unresolved but with no report of any casualty. Curious. And concerning. 
 

In other news this took place while my assessment was also taking place. At the end I was presented with my epaulettes having qualified as an NCI watch-keeper.  And with an almost 100% score. 
 

The coast will be that little bit safer now. Provided water-craft at least carry and answer a working radio!  
 

 

[Gwiwer]

6 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

every time I fly I will buy an Accurascale locomotive to offset my emissions

I find avoiding curry reduces emissions! 
 

I also find avoiding the brand name you mention reduces emissions because of the amount of packaging they choose to use. Which I choose to consider excessive in the extreme. 

[woodenhead]

13 minutes ago, DaveF said:

A few days ago I found some old cassettes including one of John Betjeman reading his poetry. Today I came across a USB cassette converter.  Perhaps one day I will actually digitise them so I can listen to them.

 

I do find John Betjeman's voice comforting, Alan Watts is another person I can just listen to.

[Dave Hunt]

As previously posted, this morning I had yet another appointment at Telford hospital. Unlike those so far this week, though, it turned out to be less time wasting, simpler, more informative and less stressful as I was seen on time, underwent an ultrasound scan and saw a consultant all in short order. The diagnosis was the I do not have a DVT but a less nasty thing called a superficial thrombophlebitis that can be treated with a heparin based cream and anticoagulant tablets but the consultant did say that it was a good thing I had it looked at as had it been a couple of inches higher up my leg or a bit deeper it could have been a lot more serious and that recent research indicates it is not as benign as once thought. As he was going through my notes, though, he started to frown and asked me to describe in detail the events of the last four days and as I did so he started cross-referring what I said with the notes then writing things down on a jotting pad. Once we had finished I saw that he had written in large capitals, "CALL XXX (a name)" and circled it with two exclamation marks added. From his demeanour as he was questioning me it was obvious that he was not happy with the way in which I had been treated and I got the impression that he was going to take issue with someone.

 

Anyway, the outcome is that my happy bunny outlook is beginning to return, which is obviously a Good Thing.

 

Dave  

[polybear]

2 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

Plus give everyone a crack at a proper life - provide employment opportunities and a living environment that has money spent on it  to provide decent community facilities, to repair  vandalism and remove the rubbish. 

 

I'm all for a policy of those "on the dole" - or whatever the correct technical term is now - actively being employed** to carry out such tasks; not only will it benefit Society as a whole it'll also benefit themselves as well.

 

** And no, the minimum wage doesn't apply - you do a forty hour week or your money gets cut.

[polybear]

Bear here.....

 

More of the same at the Hospice; for some strange reason the Manageress has decided that Bear's daily salary is a Jam Donut - sounds fair to this Bear.

Unfortunately, and whilst Bear was half-way through muchin' said Donut at lunchtime, a LDC miraculously appeared - an unopened left-over (but still well in date) from last Thursday's Birthday antics; when Bear was quizzed as to whether or not I'd like a slice I naturally did the honourable thing and pointed out that I'd already got a Donut....😢 .   Shortly afterwards a Certain Bear was presented with a lump of LDC*....with the Manageress pointing out that I hadn't actually said "no"......  😁

And then at the half-three tea break I discovered that an iced Fairy Cake had been saved for Bear......

 

(* M&S LDC - very nice, but Co-op wins....)

 

And when I got home I discovered that the last clean plate** in the cupboard was the Pizza Plate.  Oops.

I think it only fair to say the the dreaded "D" Word has gone to Ratpoo for today.

 

(** Ok, so there were lots of "normal" clean ones waiting to be unloaded from the Dishwasher - but we'll gloss over that little snippet).

 

BG

[Sidecar Racer]

5 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

b) never called my bluff by asking  me what a taunting actually involved..

 

 But when he grew up and found out what it meant he kicked the **** out of you .   😡

[Coombe Barton]

... tomorrow is marking and putting people up for academic misconduct. ...

https://johncolby.wordpress.com/2024/04/11/covid-up-flu-down-attentive-students-yes-really/

[Tony_S]

33 minutes ago, Sidecar Racer said:

 

 But when he grew up and found out what it meant he kicked the **** out of you .   😡

Matthew said he always felt we were fairly strict parents. However after he returned from Canada he said he had changed strict to “caring”. It just so happened he had met various people that year who had really dysfunctional parenting. 
I remember one discussion we had after a rather traumatic parent teacher evening at secondary school. I said something like I was  rather disappointed he hadn’t told us about the problems with certain subjects (we had asked). Years later he said he felt bad that I was disappointed and would have preferred to be shouted at. It was quite hard when he was in his mid teens trying to give him some opportunity to follow his own interests but his epilepsy wasn’t that well controlled then so we would take him places rather than get a bus. Later he then realised we’re not controlling or strict , just concerned. 

[zarniwhoop]

Well, I'm starting to think I'm making some progress - not yet close to the forbidden things, but in sight of spending more time trying to play me guitars. I usually keep such late hours that it would be unfair to the rest of the street to practice.

 

Long post, feel free to ignore and please don't offer me supportive emoticons, I'm just writing this down to get it out of my system 😀

 

And the reason for this ?  In the early 2000s I started using what I will call a linux distro - it's actually more of a glorified How To, with the emphasis on learning. In those days, the usable software you could build and run on a desktop was limited. After a while I got into editing the main book. Later, there was a shortage of people to handle the "other things you can build" (desktop and server packages). I got snuckered into that and gradually stopped updating the original book. So far, so good. But I've never done computer studies. Gradually I picked up TeXLive (a programming language for creating prints or PDFs) after somebody noticed that the way we bootstrapped it left a few binary programs. Managed to find (old) examples of using those parts, created test files, and ended up doing all the updates for those.

 

About three and a half years ago, with another guy, I instituted Security Announcements so that people who actually use the distro can avoid vulnerabilities. I'm pleased with that part.

 

Then about 3 years ago  one of the main toolkits went to "releases are for paying customers only, becoming public after 12 months" (they needed to persuade users to move to their latest version, but the main free software user has only just done that). In the meantime, the engine of the web browser was a fork of chromium and therefore had to be available under the GPL license. And web browsers, along with the infernal javascript processors, are things which need to be up to date in the current Wild West of the internet.  But no releases, clone the main part and the sub-tree whenever it looked as if they were ready for a release, then try to get it to build on a current (arguably bleeding-edge) system. Much of the hard work had been done by other distros, otherwise I would never have got anywhere with it. Now, that is all over, back to using releases.

 

But meanwhile the number of packages and releases has grown astronomically and there are knock-on effects from updates to the rust language (one of the guys seems to be up to speed with that, but I don't understand the fixes he finds) and that slithering language (Python-3.12 - that really is bleeding edge, it breaks a lot).

 

In the end, I could not keep up with it and I started losing track of which steps in a process I had, or had not, done (e.g. did a final security advisory this afternoon, forgot to pull the current git tree, created the advisory, tried to push it, discovered I was out of date. Fortunately I was able to renumber it, fix up the links, and push. I'm now on extended leave of absence, and learning to ignore things.

 

Now to turn one of my guitar amps up to 11 😈

 

 

 

 

[Erichill16]

51 minutes ago, zarniwhoop said:

Well, I'm starting to think I'm making some progress - not yet close to the forbidden things, but in sight of spending more time trying to play me guitars. I usually keep such late hours that it would be unfair to the rest of the street to practice.

 

Long post, feel free to ignore and please don't offer me supportive emoticons, I'm just writing this down to get it out of my system 😀

 

And the reason for this ?  In the early 2000s I started using what I will call a linux distro - it's actually more of a glorified How To, with the emphasis on learning. In those days, the usable software you could build and run on a desktop was limited. After a while I got into editing the main book. Later, there was a shortage of people to handle the "other things you can build" (desktop and server packages). I got snuckered into that and gradually stopped updating the original book. So far, so good. But I've never done computer studies. Gradually I picked up TeXLive (a programming language for creating prints or PDFs) after somebody noticed that the way we bootstrapped it left a few binary programs. Managed to find (old) examples of using those parts, created test files, and ended up doing all the updates for those.

 

About three and a half years ago, with another guy, I instituted Security Announcements so that people who actually use the distro can avoid vulnerabilities. I'm pleased with that part.

 

Then about 3 years ago  one of the main toolkits went to "releases are for paying customers only, becoming public after 12 months" (they needed to persuade users to move to their latest version, but the main free software user has only just done that). In the meantime, the engine of the web browser was a fork of chromium and therefore had to be available under the GPL license. And web browsers, along with the infernal javascript processors, are things which need to be up to date in the current Wild West of the internet.  But no releases, clone the main part and the sub-tree whenever it looked as if they were ready for a release, then try to get it to build on a current (arguably bleeding-edge) system. Much of the hard work had been done by other distros, otherwise I would never have got anywhere with it. Now, that is all over, back to using releases.

 

But meanwhile the number of packages and releases has grown astronomically and there are knock-on effects from updates to the rust language (one of the guys seems to be up to speed with that, but I don't understand the fixes he finds) and that slithering language (Python-3.12 - that really is bleeding edge, it breaks a lot).

 

In the end, I could not keep up with it and I started losing track of which steps in a process I had, or had not, done (e.g. did a final security advisory this afternoon, forgot to pull the current git tree, created the advisory, tried to push it, discovered I was out of date. Fortunately I was able to renumber it, fix up the links, and push. I'm now on extended leave of absence, and learning to ignore things.

 

Now to turn one of my guitar amps up to 11 😈

 

 

 

 

Don’t really understand your post but obviously it’s causing you some grief but hopefully it will get sorted.

Good luck.

[Winslow Boy]

3 hours ago, Gwiwer said:

Afternoon all. 
 

Where am I?  Is this ERs?  The fog is so thick here it is hard to see where I’m going. 
 

Speaking of which. On watch this morning I was concerned by the progress of a small leisure craft.  Only its name and size came up on the trackers. No idea what type of craft, how many souls aboard, intention or destination. She was making around 4 knots so probably under power rather than sail. And she was perilously close to the shore and undersea reefs.
 

In near-zero visibility I couldn’t see her even at a half-mile range so Falmouth Coastguard was alerted. They called her but four hails went unanswered as she got to within 100m (by radar track) of disaster. 
 

She abruptly altered course - possibly having seen rocks dead ahead at underwear-changing range. And passed that hazard in what must have been white water. 
 

Only to then vanish from the trackers altogether as she came towards the cliffs once more. Falmouth asked several nearby fishing vessels if they could see her. In that fog they would have been lucky to see their own bow from the bridge. 
 

As the watch changed this remained unresolved but with no report of any casualty. Curious. And concerning. 
 

In other news this took place while my assessment was also taking place. At the end I was presented with my epaulettes having qualified as an NCI watch-keeper.  And with an almost 100% score. 
 

The coast will be that little bit safer now. Provided water-craft at least carry and answer a working radio!  
 

 

Does this mean we have to salute you each time you post?

[zarniwhoop]

16 minutes ago, Erichill16 said:

Don’t really understand your post but obviously it’s causing you some grief but hopefully it will get sorted.

Good luck.

Thanks. It caused me some grief for a long while, I'm just persuading myself to let it go.

[Ohmisterporter]

Brought Kath home this afternoon, hopefully that is it until her next appointment in four weeks time. She can now sleep peacefully with only my telly watching to bother her. However, she quickly sorted that one. 

[Erichill16]

Evening All,

Much skipping has happened as I try and get the books in order.

Thoughts with @Dave Hunt and hopefully recovery will be ‘unremarkable’ from now on.

Goodnight

[Gwiwer]

1 hour ago, Winslow Boy said:

Does this mean we have to salute you each time you post?

The depends upon how many fingers you propose to use 

[BSW01]

Good evening everyone 

 

Well, the predicted poor weather never materialised, instead we had some sunshine. But I decided that I would stay with my original plan and add the dropper wires to the 3 way point. Before heading out though, I wrote an operating schedule the point, as well as a ‘truth table’ to assist in planning the switching of the polarity of the 3 crossing vees. Once I’d drawn it up and double checked it, I realised I could make even simpler. 

 

2 of the vees (circled in yellow and green) can remain connected as if they were one, this is now circled in red. The yellow and green will be the same polarity, when diverting left or going straight ahead. When diverting right, the polarity of the green and blue will be the same, the polarity of the yellow doesn’t matter, so that too could be the same as the green. So, that just meant I only needed to solder on 2 drop wires, instead of 3. Hopefully, the photo below hopefully explains it a bit more. 

 

ION

 

After dinner, I phoned the surgery to get the results of last week’s blood test, unfortunately my PSA has risen again, it now stands at 17.8, instead of 14.76. At this rate, when I my next PSA test in July, which I’m sure will take me over the ‘20’ threshold set by The Christie, I’ll have my medication admended and be put on an extra drug.