microblog
Back to the Minnow theme. One of these days I’ll stop experimenting and settle on a theme.
Oh, and I suppose I should say something about “may the fourth of May be with you,” right?
I sometimes forget how easy it is to post to my blog. Then I go into Micro.blog…
When you’ve got a child who’s on the electoral register, but they’re not yet old enough to vote; and they have the same initials as you? That can cause problems.
Good day today: spent most of it struggling to get Java — running in Tomcat on the Mac — to call functions in R. Successfully in the end, thanks to Stack Overflow and others. Tonight: Infinity War!
What?!? Commando comics are still a thing? I used to love them when I was a kid. And look at those issue numbers: up in the five thousands!
Today was the first day wearing shorts this year. And also the first time ever wearing shorts to work. Another reason to love this new job.
Merlin Mann just said what I thought was “Trump loyal” on the Reconcilable Differences podcast. Intriguing.
Then I realised he said “trompe l’oeil”. Which made more sense in context, but was less interesting.
Why do Americans (or at least American podcasters) say “soddering” for “soldering”? Is it just a weird pronunciation (and if so, why?) or is it a slightly different spelling, like aluminium?
Ev Williams on the future of reading and writing on the net:
Now we can’t stand to sit through ads…
Where I come from we never could; because we grew up on the BBC. Whose funding, when you think about it in modern terms, is essentially a subscription model, though paying the subscription — the TV Licence fee — is mandatory if you have a TV.
In the early days that made sense, because the BBC was all there was on the TV. Now it seems harder to justify, but I’ve yet to see a solution that would be both as successful and as egalitarian. Because the licence is very, very cheap compared to the alternatives.
Stiff Little Fingers were the first band I every saw, back in 1980, at the Glasgow Apollo. Tonight I’m off to see them again (for maybe the sixth, seventh, eighth time), at the Forum in Kentish Town.
There’s a Blues Brothers quote that seems appropriate here. And it’s not the one about sunglasses.
BREAKING: American Nazi wins Republican primary in Illinois’ Third Congressional District.
And I see that downstream people have posted the requisite clip.
Professor Hawking told us to loook up at the stars… he probably didn’t live in London.
Aw, Stephen Hawking, man. It’s not exactly sad, because he had a good life, especially compared to the two-year prognosis he was given. But still.
His name will forever be written in evaporating black holes.
OK, so I’m watching Stranger Things, and in season 2, episode 8, it gets really weird. You need to know BASIC to reboot the security system?
But then I remembered: it’s set in the eighties. So it almost makes sense.
Looks Like I Chose the Wrong Week to Start Working in Academia
What with the strike on, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of crossing a picket line, but there wasn’t really one. Nobody in the group I’m in was striking, as far as I could tell, and I’m not in the union (yet). And you know, the contract had a start date of last Monday. So one week into my new job, and I’m enjoying it tremendously.
I’ve been bashing bugs in a large and complex codebase. It was very satisfying to take the failing tests from 600 down to 490 with a single commit. That’s 600 failing tests out of 800. And looking at what’s there, it’s hard to see how some of them could ever have passed. I sort of get the impression that a whole lot might have been written but never run.
That big win involved nothing more than changing a class from being all static methods to being one that you can instantiate, and then passing in a test version of a ResourceBundle, instead of trying to read a properties file which wasn’t there in my setup.
More importantly, the people are nice. The commute is shorter than to Croydon, by a good half hour. But it’s a lot more crowded on the Circle Line than I remember from two years ago when I was at Misys.
I should just mention that Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is brilliant. Best film I’ve seen this year. And I’ve seen Black Panther. (Which, don’t get me wrong, is also great.)
It’s amusing to see that this article, called ‘Why Decentralization Matters,’ is on Medium.
Where’s Alanis Morissette? (Sorry, ‘Ironic’ cliché.)
Oh, well done, Orbit. I salute not just the publication, but the use of weapons language:
We’re thrilled that the Estate has given us permission to publish the collection, and that owing to special circumstances Ken MacLeod has agreed to join the team working on it.