I’ve got so far behind with these posts that I can’t remember much at all about this book. I do know that a girl is murdered at the halowe’en party by being drowned in the apple-bobbing tub while lots of other people are in the next room, but that’s about it.
What I can tell you is that I enjoyed it as I was reading it, without ever for a moment thinking it was actually good. Continue reading
Posted in Books, Reviews, What I've been reading lately
I’ve been laid low with Covid for the last few days. (I hate it. The isolation from my family is the worst part at this point. But at least the isolation seems to be working.) It’s left me mentally wiped out and unable to do more than the very slightest bits of work, so I’ve spent most of the time reading and watching TV and films. Today I watched the 2006 film version of P. D. James’s novel Children of Men.
Not so long ago, we all got comfortable with the idea that great chunks of the programs we were writing should be implemented by libraries pulled in from third parties — using CPAN, Maven, NPM or what have you. It was the reuse we’d always dreamed of. Happy times, right?
Not so much, I now think.
Posted in Bad habits, Culture, Despair, Programming
Here is a YouTube playlist of my now-traditional top-ten list of the albums I’ve listened to the most in the previous calendar year. (See this list of previous entries.)
I listen much more to whole albums than to individual tracks, so each year I pick the ten albums that I listened to the most (not counting compilations), as recorded on the laptop where I listen to most of my music. (So these counts don’t include listening in the car or the kitchen, or on my phone.) I limit the selection to no more than one album per artist, and skip albums that have featured in previous years. Then from each of those ten objectively selected albums, I subjectively pick one song that I feel is representative, or that I just love. Continue reading
Suppose every day I punched you in the head for fun.
Portrait of a man who getting a punch from someone
Then you offered to pay me to not punch you in the head.
Posted in Guest post, Modelling, The Real World, Very basic economics
I recently finished a big jar of pickled jalapeño slices (I use a lot of them on pizza) and didn’t want to waste all that delicious jalapeño-inflused pickle juice. So I finely sliced some white cabbage, grated a carrot, chopped a small green pepper (mostly for the colour), dumped them all in the jar, and mixed them up. I left the jar in the fridge for a couple of days.
Well, it’s absolutely delicious. Cruchy, tasty, a little spicy. It would make a superb accompaniment for unctious meat dishes like pulled pork, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to finish it before the next time I cook something like that.
Highly recommended (and dirt cheap!)
Posted in Food and drink, Recipe
“And ‘Nothing’ is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them […] in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish.”
— The Screwtape Letters (1942).
Posted in C. S. Lewis
Back in May 2022 — let the record show, 20 months ago — I analysed the cost of the ingredients of an excellent home-made pizza. Based on the costs of bread flour, salt, yeast, tinned tomatoes and extra mature cheddar, I found that the per-pizza cost of ingredients was an satisfyingly low 53p (plus another 15p for the electricity to bake them, amortised over four pizzas for a total of 68p per pizza). Yum.
Here’s one I prepared earlier. This, unlike the cheaper version in the text, includes sliced chorizo and pickled jalapeños.
Posted in Food and drink, Very basic economics
When I first heard about Semantic Versioning, or SemVer, I thought it was one of those ideas that’s so obviously right that we were all going to benefit from someone having just codified it and written it down.
Posted in Bad habits, Programming
Yesterday’s evening meal: a modified version of the Greek Salad pizza from the day before.
As I suggested I might, this time I mashed the feta with some olive oil into a paste, and spread that over the otherwise identical pizza (green olives, shredded red onion and sun-dried tomatoes). The hope was that, when combined with oil, the feta would melt rather than just charring.
Posted in Food and drink
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The Reinvigorated Programmer