Early Risers.

[Winslow Boy]

21 minutes ago, Gwiwer said:

And that is why I never delve into Dr. SWMBO's sewing box!  If I picked one out her reaction would be "Wrong Thread" 

 

 

Never thread where angels fear to thread. Or words to that effect.

[Barry O]

It rained.. a lot.. for most of the day. Pah!

 

Great news @New Haven Neil and Debs!

 

You would think that the communication of good news would be easier to do than bad news....

 

Sleep well

Baz

[southern42]

@New Haven Neil and Mrs NHN - fantastic news.

 

' night all and nos da.

Polly

[monkeysarefun]

1 hour ago, TheQ said:

I suspect being Aus, the frogs are human killers too..

 

 

I was watching a UK youtuber earlier doing a food review of a Chinese restaurant in Mansfield(?)

 

Gotta say, I've never  had a Chinese restaurant meal here come with chips!

 

 

 

 

 

Give me venomous frogs any day 😀

Edited May 14 by monkeysarefun

[Tony_S]

36 minutes ago, monkeysarefun said:

Gotta say, I've never  had a Chinese restaurant meal here come with chips!

I don’t know about other parts of the country but chips appear on many Indian and Chinese takeaway menus.  We don’t order any meals but I sometimes look at the menu leaflets that get pushed through the letterbox. 
Tony

Edited May 14 by Tony_S

[pH]

I’ve eaten in a Chinese restaurant on Clydeside which was adapting their cooking to local tastes. Several main courses were cooked in cream sauces.

[monkeysarefun]

20 minutes ago, pH said:

I’ve eaten in a Chinese restaurant on Clydeside which was adapting their cooking to local tastes. Several main courses were cooked in cream sauces.

The video I watched also mentioned that there was "curry sauce" available to put over the Chinese food  if preferred.

[zarniwhoop]

I'm amazed at you guys who rarely remember dreams. Admittedly I wake up a lot, and sometimes I have spells of a few days where I don't remember any dreams.. But then again, I often remember parts of dreams (sometimes recurrent) much later. Where there are people in my dreams, often they are my parents (Dad died in the late 1990s, Mum died 14 years ago), or people I either worked with or cycled with (so, more than 20 or 25 year ago, not people I've seen or spoken to more recently.

 

I also get a lot of what I call "half asleep" memories - thinking about something and then realising that I can't follow the thread of what I was thinking about, or images (like photographs) for a few seconds when my eyes are closed and I'm dropping off.

 

Of course, from time to time I get scary dreams which cause me to wake up (although I would not call them nightmares, I wake to stop it getting too bad). But don't most of us ?

 

But the oddest dream was a few days ago - @iL Dottore was in it at one point and we spoke (no, I don't remember what we spoke about) - he's the only identifiable person I remember dreaming about whom I've never met.

 

However, the worst part is that when I'm trying to do computing / programming-related stuff (in the most general sense) I end up thinking about it before I get to sleep, and then dreaming about it. Often it takes me some time the next day to work out what I actually thought about and decided to try, and what (e.g. actually trying something and deciding it did or did not work) only happened in my dreams.

 

I suspect I'll have some more of that tonight after wasting several hours trying to get predefined hyphenation etc packages in TeXLive working for listing Article 1 of the UDHR in some fonts (hint: the documentation lies, many languages are documented to have localization patterns but they no longer exist, or else they report that they require adaptations for unicode (I'm using text already in unicode) and then fail to compile). That is not a rant, documentation never matches the code!

 

I expect I'll come up with something eventually, but probably keep dreaming about it for a few weeks.

Whether I ever get to a point where a Japanese reader would feel comfortable  with my layout of the Japanese UDHR text is a different matter (they have complicated rules about e.g. which characters can be at the end of a line when breaking it - no spaces between words!).😉

 

Still, at least it is keeping me away from worrying about how to fit my desired  amounts of parallel-metal into a 3D space several orders of magnitude too small. ISTR that when I came back to the forbidden subject I spent many nights dreaming about ideas related to that.

 

If anyone is still reading and wondering why I care about Article 1 of the UDHR - it's traditional for showing how languages look (see e.g. https://omniglot.com/) and I'm trying to document which languages some freely-available fonts support, as well as showing that so that people can decide if they like the font or if they think it looks ugly.

[jjb1970]

The mosquito risk here is dengue. They do a lot of public information and have wardens who go around doing home inspections and looking for people not following instructions to mitigate dengue risk. The fist time it happened to us my wife answered the door and didn't know what was going on when someone asked to do a home inspection.  Apparently the woman had a very official looking identity card and being Singapore she decided to go along and then friends told us not to worry about it, they do that.

 

On Chinese food, Chinese food is like most food in that when it travels it tends to adapt to local taste and preferences. In most countries you can find food which is authentically  xyz but most tends to evolve into something new like anglo-indian food. 

 

 

[jjb1970]

Congratulations to Mrs NHN!

[BR60103]

10 hours ago, jamie92208 said:

Woodlesford just south of Leeds has or certainly had mosquitoes. In the 50's some scientists from Leeds University released some on the wetlands between the  river and canal. No need to worry they told the locals they'll be killed by the cold in the winter.  They were still around when I lived there in the 70's.

 

Jamie

We have mosquitoes in Ontario and Winter.

But more feared are the Black Flies.    Black Fly Song

 

[BR60103]

We started the day with a big truck parked across the driveway in front of the bins.  This was a tree removal service.  Yesterday they were a few houses down the street taking out a tree in friends'  back yard.  Landscaping is handled by the management company. Today they were taking down a tree behind our hose but in the behind neighbour's area. This was a nice maple that shaded the back of our house during the day.  We may now be able to see the moon.  We reached an accommodation with them that we could drive out the car and the bin men could get at the bins.

(Land is an awkward arrangement. Owned by the university but managed by a home building company. We own the house but there is a clause in the agreement where they can tell us, "Pick up thy house and walk.")

 

[Ozexpatriate]

2 hours ago, BR60103 said:

We have mosquitoes in Ontario and Winter.

But more feared are the Black Flies.    Black Fly Song

I'm pretty sure I saw that doing the rounds at animation festivals - it's from 1991.

 

It instantly reminded me of a classic of the old animation festival circuit (also from the NFBC) - The Cat Came Back of 1988.

 

I checked the animation credits and didn't notice any similar names but they are very similar in structure - animating a 'traditional' tune in a humourous way.

[polybear]

8 hours ago, grandadbob said:

Evenin 'each,

@New Haven Neil Neil, great to hear some excellent news from Fraggle Rock.

 

And a bit of goodish news here as the replacement Sim card turned up at last.  I also received the promised phone call from "Kate" who is now dealing with our mobile phone plan changeover.  This should happen tomorrow morning with a bit of luck etc.  🤞

What didn't happen was the promised phone call from "Joe" regarding the new date for the broadband and land line change over.  Pah! is  probably not strong enough but as I keep getting reprimanded by Management for turning the air blue I shall leave it at that.....for now.

 

 

 

what company is this - so we can all avoid it......

 

7 hours ago, TheQ said:

 

I've never had a breakage on a delivery from Herpes /Evri, my complaint with them is I get emails saying parcel dispatched, but Herpes take forever to pick it up from the dispatch shop.. I know from stuff I've sent back that I've put it in the local dispatch shop ( a filling station) it took over a week for them to collect it..

 

my guess is they want enough to collect to make it worth their whole as it's a rural area

 

2 hours ago, BR60103 said:

 

 

2 hours ago, BR60103 said:

(Land is an awkward arrangement. Owned by the university but managed by a home building company. We own the house but there is a clause in the agreement where they can tell us, "Pick up thy house and walk"

 

Not impossible I know, but kinda tricky.

 

iON.....

 

Excellent news from Fraggle Rock!!

 

[iL Dottore]

6 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

 

I was watching a UK youtuber earlier doing a food review of a Chinese restaurant in Mansfield(?)

 

Gotta say, I've never  had a Chinese restaurant meal here come with chips!

 

 

 

 

 

Give me venomous frogs any day 😀

That looks truly revolting.

 

Why so many Brits insist on having chips with everything is beyond me.

 

Perhaps it’s the legacy of both the Industrial Revolution (chips are cheap and filling, if not particularly nutritious) and Boarding School (skool dinners).

 

And the British wonder why so many countries look at British Food and larf!

[jamie92208]

12 hours ago, Coombe Barton said:

... This is the argument in a nutshell “They’re taking our jobs. No they aren’t.” ...

https://johncolby.wordpress.com/2024/05/14/scaremongering-marking/

 

 

Perhaps you should emulate my French teacher who wrote on a report when I was 14, "He was physically present" or from your comments perhaps it should be " he wasn't even physically present". 

 

Jamie 

[iL Dottore]

Pleased to hear the good news re Mrs @New Haven Neil.

 

When you ask people what are the most dangerous creatures in the world, most people will refer to spiders, snakes and the big predators (bears, tigers, lions etc.). But as millions of people over the centuries have been killed by mosquito-borne illnesses (more than by all the snakes, spiders and predators combined), the mosquito is by far the deadliest beast. Given the choice between being in a room with a brown snake or a mosquito carrying West Nile Fever, Yellow Fever, Malaria or Dengue fever, I’ll take my chances with the snake (I wonder if @polybear, after reading the above, will develop a mosquito phobia to go with his spider and snake phobias?)

 

I’m a bit concerned that @zarniwhoop has been dreaming about me (Me!?! Why me?) - it sounds like a low budget horror flick: character Z dreams of “IT” (in this case me), “IT” appears in the real world and subjects Z to unspeakable horrors (such as making Z scrape baked beans into the bin, forcing Z to eat a pizza with a salad - NO fries and making Z pay more than 60p for a cake). Truly stuff of nightmares.

[jamie92208]

Good moaning from the Charente where it isn't actually raining at present.  Beth to take to physio this morning and then more work in the shed this afternoon.  

 

Grear news from Fraggle Rock. 

 

Jamie

Edited May 15 by jamie92208

[polybear]

1 hour ago, iL Dottore said:

Pleased to hear the good news re Mrs @New Haven Neil.

 

When you ask people what are the most dangerous creatures in the world, most people will refer to spiders, snakes and the big predators (bears, tigers, lions etc.). But as millions of people over the centuries have been killed by mosquito-borne illnesses (more than by all the snakes, spiders and predators combined), the mosquito is by far the deadliest beast. Given the choice between being in a room with a brown snake or a mosquito carrying West Nile Fever, Yellow Fever, Malaria or Dengue fever, I’ll take my chances with the snake (I wonder if @polybear, after reading the above, will develop a mosquito phobia to go with his spider and snake phobias?)

 

I’m a bit concerned that @zarniwhoop has been dreaming about me (Me!?! Why me?) - it sounds like a low budget horror flick: character Z dreams of “IT” (in this case me), “IT” appears in the real world and subjects Z to unspeakable horrors (such as making Z scrape baked beans into the bin, forcing Z to eat a pizza with a salad - NO fries and making Z pay more than 60p for a cake). Truly stuff of nightmares.

I’ll go for the Mozzie - much easier and less scary to kill

[Barry O]

Ey up!

 

Off to an AGM of our retirement group from a previous employment today. We are staying at what was the Midland Hotel in Skipton tonight. Other than the AGM we are on a canal cruise with Fish and Chips for tea..  then.. lots of talking and.. drinking.

 

@iL Dottorenot everyone eats chips with everything in the UK. I have eaten chips once in the last ten days..indeed that was the only potato I have eaten in the last 10 days.

 

However, if you want to feel full.. chips as an addition to a meal does help. Other countries fill up on rice, or pasta or bread.

 

Mansfield is jot associated with healthy eating...

 

Have as good a day as you can.

 

Baz

[New Haven Neil]

Morning, from a much relieved rock.  15c, dry, overcast.

 

Thank you all for the supportive messages, we are almost deflated this morning with post-stress relief.

 

Not sure of the orders of the day as yet, we had intended to go out on the bikes, but not sure the weather is going to hold.

[grandadbob]

Good morning all,

Some blue sky and sunshine appearing through the clouds.  Sunny spells forecast along with a few showers this afternoon.  13°C rising to 21°C.

2 hours ago, polybear said:

what company is this - so we can all avoid it......

 

AIUI EE is becoming the primary consumer brand of BT and existing BT customers (like me) are being offered EE packages if they change/renew  their contract which I was doing...and I'm not paying quite as much.  Never had any problems with the BT service in the past apart from the landline going down for three days a couple of weeks ago. I did consider moving to Virgin as quite a few friends and neighbours use them but have been put off by the number of times I see Virgin making visits to neighbours to fix something.  Two in particular always seem to be having problems.

Well the good news is that our mobile phone numbers have now been successfully moved to from BT to EE and are working.  Now just got to see when the broadband change will happen.

"Timetogettamoveandhavesomebreakfast" according to The Boss.

Have a good one,

Bob.

[PhilJ W]

1 hour ago, polybear said:

I’ll go for the Mozzie - much easier and less scary to kill

But for every snake you will have to kill a million mozzies.

[polybear]

1 minute ago, PhilJ W said:

But for every snake you will have to kill a million mozzies.

True - but iD did say this was a room with a Mozzie in….

[BSW01]

Good morning everyone 

 

Thankfully the rain has stopped and the wind has gone, it would be a perfect day to was the windows at the front of the house. The day is looking slightly overcast, but the sun is trying to shine, although there is rain predicted for this afternoon. However, the windows can wait for another day, as we are going out this morning to RHS Bridgewater for a walk round the gardens and woodland, we might (well me anyway) even stop for a drink and a slice afterwards. No doubt we’ll come home with a few more plants, but what the heck! 
 

Back later. 
 

Brian