I was hoping to get a weather forecast on the TV this morning but it's wall to wall royals and fawning lackies.
22 bleeding pages in my red top and a pull out souveneer that went straight in the bin.
Posts by Heero Yuy
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You can't ban people from gambling as it's in the human nature. However those FOBT's are an invention of the Devil. No one can afford to loose £300 a minute and it's often those who can least afford it that are sucked in.
R4 "You and Yours" have featured this several times and the story's are terrible. Of people that lose everything, their job, family, house and are in debt that they can never pay off.
So I'm in favour of the much lower limit on these machines so at least the gamblers losses are limited.
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Don't get a paper tomorrow, Heero.
I'll only get it to have the puzzles pages. No doubt the rest will go straight into the recycling bin.
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Well it was still very chilly here only peaking at 16C. Still got some laundry out so we'll have socks for next week.
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No! We watched food programmes so as to avoid that and football.
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I mentioned Mr and Mrs Blackbird before but Mrs seems to be going in and out of the ivy covering the fence between me and my (nice) neighbours. I'm guessing they have a nest there.
I'll have to keep a close eye on the cats.
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Mind you all this brouhaha is conditional on all 27 EU members voting for the deal and that's certainly not guaranteed. Planning has to be made for a hard exit in March 2019 and that means a hard border with NI.
If May proposes this fudge I consider that those who voted to leave will have been betrayed. We could be entering the next election, still not really having left the EU and if Corbyn's lot got in we'd be catapulted straight back into the EU for keeps.
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Another sunny day in London today
Sunny down here too but started out a bit chilly (+6.5C) Light puffs of fair weather cloud. I hope that lazy NE wind has gone away. It was a bit nagging yesterday even sitting in the sun.
Weekend is forecast fine so we might be able to crank up the BBQ again on Sunday. Plenty of supplies in the freezer.
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Now it has been reported the Secretary is facing more pressure to act over a further four more rail operators, according to The Times.
Operators in the firing line include Northern Rail, South Western, Transpennine Express and Greater Anglia, it has been claimed.
Lilian Greenwood, chairwoman of the transport select committee, warned that other rail companies were “struggling to meet their obligations”.
I've linked the story to The Times' sister paper as The Times is paywall protected.
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Some of the franchisees based their business models on an unrealistic increase of passenger numbers. When those numbers failed to materialise the franchise became uneconomic.
Maybe a bit of realism, particularly on the part of government that is dishing out the franchises, is what is needed.
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Debugging some "C" code that corrects for DC errors in an AC circuit and I've made an elementary maths error: The square of the sum is NOT the same as the sum of the squares.
I was adding all the measurements together, squaring and subtracting that from the total of squared values. The right way was to add up the measurements, divide by the number of measurements, square this and then multiply by the number of measurements and then subtract that from the total of squared values. The two things sound the same but have radically different results.
Stuff like this makes my head hurt.
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Display More
A huge new data breach has allowed a rogue app to snatch the intimate details of THREE MILLION more users
This latest gaffe saw the intimate details of 3 million users snatched by a rogue app with links to the software at the heart of the bigger privacy scandal that recently rocked the firm.
The "myPersonality" quiz is the app in question this time round: a questionnaire that asked people about highly personal matters, including the results of psychological tests, reports New Scientist.
All this sensitive info was then uploaded to a website with "poor security precautions" and shared with almost 150 institutions and companies, including
researchers at universities and at firms like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
As a famous man once said: "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear"
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Have the Americans said we could have access to GPS,
Unless the USA was to change the way the signals are encoded and then keep that a secret everybody can access the signals in the same way a radio tunes stations. GPS is a one way system much like recieving Sky TV.
Since pretty well the entire world uses the USA GPS system since the encoding was made public knowledge, changing that encoding is nigh impossible without world chaos.
The galileo system uses much encoding and technical information from the UK. If we were excluded from the project all we need to do is to make the information public domain to really screw the project. They would either have to live with the fact that anybody could use the system without paying for it or re-engineer the whole thing from the bottom up.
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Galileo was really only an EU vanity project. The idea that we would be denied access to the American GPS system is really unthinkable?
Save the money and stuff the EU.
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Lovely down here too. Been removing ivy that's gone mad in the back garden.
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do you still get starlings in your area Heero?
There are a few. Mostly hear them first as they have a strange sort of whirring call that they make. Got a pair of blackbirds with a nest somewhere close. They get very upset if there's a cat lurking so if I hear their alarm call I go and chase the cat away.
There are a few other small brown birds and some that I think are coal tits with a black and white head and greyish feathers.
On the local industrial estate is a small colony of green parakeets.
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but did you enjoy it Heero?
Yes, really interesting to actually go to the places like the Church of the Nativity, the wailing wall, church of the Holy Sepulchre. One thing that did sort of shock me was to see real beggars in the city streets dressed in rags unlike our own professional "beggars"
This was part of a 3 day trip that we did from Cyprus that also included a visit to the Pyramids, Sphinx and the Egyptian museum in Cairo, about 15 years ago when things were quite settled, unlike now.
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Member of the crow family, fly around in large groups known as "clatterings". I don't remember them from when I was younger but there seems to be plenty now especially near farmland.
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I believe we may now see moves for the Israelis to gain full control of the city.
The problem there is that there are sites that are holy to Islam that are currently under Jordanian protection. (via Ministry of Awqaf in Amman) There is also the Church of the Nativity that is in the Palestinian quarter. It's a very tangled web.
I had the opportunity a few years ago of visiting Jerusalem during a quiet period but there were still plenty of armed guards especially at the various holy sites. We weren't able to visit the Dome of the Rock but were able to view it from the Mount of Olives as pictured in the wiki link. I have my own stitched together panorama.
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We have magpies too and as for jackdaws, they're everywhere. Being coastal we also have loads of noisy herring gulls that seem to spend most of their time tearing open rubbish sacks.
The RSPB page for Swifts is here.
We do have plenty of trees both in the gardens and also down the streets: Mature sycamores, planes and a number of cherry and ornamental plums too.
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I just know that I'll need to throw away >80% of my red top for the duration.
It was the same for the previous wedding. At least when it's a souveneer you can just dump the centre pages.
At least with cable TV we can escape coverage.
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Swifts only land to nest, otherwise they just stay on the wing. They're like a large swallow, same shaped wings and tail. They fly very fast, usually in groups and make a high pitched screaming sound.
Always makes me smile when I suddenly hear them flying round in the square.
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Yay! Our swifts are back. Now I know summer is just round the corner.
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As you may have guessed from previous comments about the royals, I doubt I'll be watching the ceremony
No, we won't be either, however I do hope they have a nice day for it as I would for anybody's wedding.
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Almost 50 Palestinians dead, but I was expecting it to be much worse.
The Israelies will never let them come back en-masse to their old lands, they'll just have to face that. Unfortunately the leaders whip up the youngsters into such a lather that they don't care if they get themselves killed trying to storm the border.
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How big is the potted one, Heero? If its too small, it might be wise keeping it in the pot for another year or so.
It's been in that pot for at least 10-15 years and this is it's third stem. Even if it stays in a pot it really needs repotting into a bigger container with fresh compost.
I think I mentioned about the lillies in another large tub got frosted but they're all sprouting well now so it looks like they survived as well.
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Surely we'll get summer at some point??
Tomorrow will be warmer, then it cools a little but it's supposed to really warm up in time for the wedding.
Enjoy your pint later, Heero.
Cheers.
I've got to pop into Broadwater to get some stamps at the Post Office and post a birthday card to a mate of mine. Then I can go and get that pint. -
I've been looking closely at the largest banana plam and have removed the last bit of mushy-ness from the middle. Now all the material is green (ish).
There's no real stem to these palms, they're more like a leek in structure and AFAIK each new leaf starts at ground level inside the stem and finally bursts out of the top so hopefully once it makes a move the next leaf should push it's way through.
I lost the smallest "pup" but the next one I had removed all the mush and it's now green and producing a new leaf at the centre. It was about 3' tall, it's now only 8-9" but it confirms that each leaf starts at the root.
The one that I bought back from my mothers conservatory, it's in a large pot, is also producing a new leaf and I'll be planting it out when the weather is more reliably warm. It'll need a good season's growing to be able to survive the winter.
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Just got back from a nice pub lunch. My local does a steak dinner for £5 on Mondays and very good it is too.
Just the day for a pub lunch.
I'm going up to Sainsbury's later and will drop in to the Toby for a pint in the beer garden
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Oh what a surprise the UK didn't win again, I am actually proud of the fact I was able to totally miss the crap.
We were watching Star Wars IV.