Sunday 26 April Wife cut my hair. Probably not as good as the lady who visits us at home but my sideburns no longer resemble those of a 1970’s George Best. Fringe is sub-optimal but who cares. Not me. Another walk in Richmond Park. Entered at Kingston Gate, walked up to Isabella Plantation car park and back again. Don’t know how many steps or distance but it takes us about an hour. ...

Saturday 25 April Went for a walk in Richmond Park. Still swerving people, mainly on the roads approaching the park and at the entrance gates. Great to see families out on bikes, dog walkers, people jogging and folk enjoying the open spaces with no cars and no cyclists on the roads. Thankfully, didn’t see any cyclists flouting the massive ‘NO CYCLING’ signs on every gate as that was getting irritating and rather stressful. ...

Safe European Home - The Clash My Corona - The Knack Germ Free Adolescence - X-Ray Spex Don’t Stand So Close To Me - The Police Soul In Isolation - The Chameleons Ghost Town - The Specials Clampdown - The Clash You’re A Germ - Wolf Alice Eat Yourself Fitter - The Fall All By Myself - Eric Carmen Waiting For The Man (with a vaccine) - Velvet Underground Paranoid - Black Sabbath Panic - The Smiths I Predict A Riot - Kaiser Chiefs Anarchy In The UK - Sex Pistols It’s The End of The World (as we know it) - R.E.M.

Connor McDonald posts an excellent series of articles about tuning a database application. This analysis from a end user perspective reminded me of my own experiences when I was a technical consultant helping customers running a large CRM application, typically in call centres scattered across Europe. I was often summoned onsite and told to solve the problem that ‘The application is slow’. Usually, different people were eager to give me their view on the issue:- ...

We all love pub quizzes and like TV quiz shows. I think it’s partly because we are curious to see whether we can answer the questions and sometimes, to occasionally, laugh at some of the bizarre answers offered by contestants under time pressure. One of my favourites recently was a lady who was asked:- ‘Hydrocarbons are made up of carbon and which other element ?’ ‘Carbon dioxide’ I loved this answer because she replied, in part, with ‘Carbon’ which would have meant that hydrocarbons comprised of carbon, and well, more carbon. Then she added two atoms of oxygen for good measure. ...