10pm Thursday – congregate in the street to look at a ‘Flour Moon’. This is handy as flour is in short supply. 10am Friday – congregate in the street to watch a fly-past. Didn’t see anything so returned inside. 11am Friday – given special dispensation not to congregate in the street to observe a two minute silence. 3pm Friday – congregate in the street for a toast. Have a chat with the neighbours (again)....
After detailed analysis by medical professionals, data scientists and epidemiologists, we are delighted to announce that blog traffic to ‘Blog In Isolation’ finally looks to have peaked on Wednesday April 29 with 15 million unique visitors. Yesterday’s number, by comparison, was just 4 million. However, bear in mind this doesn’t include people who with pre-existing health conditions who have experienced pain and discomfort using an RSS Reader. Hopefully, if this promising trend is sustained, the blog can be re-opened up to Facebook and WhatsApp audiences on Sunday 10 May....
Instead of moaning about trivial marital disputes over cheque books, it’s time to celebrate some good news ! David celebrates a new arrival. As in a new baby not an Amazon delivery. Richard celebrates a significant anniversary during these unprecedented times with freshly brewed coffee, craft beers and cake. I have known David and Richard for many years, back from identi.ca days. They remain two of very few people (from social media circles) I have actually met in real-life....
After six weeks of lockdown, I finally lost it and had a blazing row with the missus over a trivial issue. ‘Have you got a cheque book handy ?’ ‘No.’ ‘What - you don’t have a cheque book ?’ ‘I have a cheque book somewhere but I haven’t used it in years so it isn’t handy, no’ ‘Hmm OK. Well, I can’t find mine and I need to write a cheque for the man from the allotment’....
I work in IT and am vaguely technical. I use Linux and vaguely know how to program in C, Python, PL/SQL and install, configure and tune a variety of databases. However, apart from the odd gratuitous post detailing my Linux desktop setup, I generally don’t post technical content and never have done. I am slightly conflicted and feel guilty about this as I feel that I have learned so much from other people’s blog posts and, increasingly, videos that I should really try to reciprocate and offer something back to the community....
‘Nice weekend, Barry ?’ ‘Yeah, very busy though, Dave. Very busy’ ‘What did you get up to ?’ ‘Saturday morning, Sandra and me went down Tesco. Bloody great queue as normal. Full of idiots with nothing better to do. It was 25 minutes before we even got into the store’. ‘What did you go for ?’ ‘Nothing much. Just laughing at people asking staff for that fancy wholemeal, gluten-free flour when there’s bread on the shelves....
Saturday 2 May Six days thou shalt do thy work, and on the seventh day thou shalt rest: that thine ox and thine ass may rest, and the son of thy handmaid, and the stranger, may be refreshed.
Friday 1 May Inspired by Luke’s post about his love of books, here’s the current collection of books on my bedroom dresser. I also like books but my reading is mainly limited to the time in bed before going to sleep. This is a rather atypical list as I normally read lightweight, disposable thrillers (Michael Connelly, Clare Mackintosh etc). Humble Pi - Matt Parker An interesting book about how maths causes glitches in real-life scenarios such as the wobbly Westminster bridge in London....
Thursday 30 April Please don’t think I have a lovely working environment where I work remotely and I have an immaculate, tidy, uncluttered desk with an immaculate, tidy, uncluttered desktop. I have several irritations that are all very minor (given the current climate) but are irritating nevertheless. Periodically, I am tempted to re-install Arch cleanly from scratch to see whether that would resolve some of these issues but that would take me a while (an Arch install is fairly straightforward but I do need to encrypt the disk) and this might potentially leave me back in exactly the same situation....
Wednesday 29 April I use a Lenovo Thinkcentre M900 desktop computer that runs Arch Linux for work. This PC is a few years old now and has i7-6700@3.40GHz CPU (4 cores) and 16GB of memory which is adequate for my purposes. I used to distro hop (Fedora, Linux Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, Solus) quite regularly but haven’t done so for a while as Arch meets all my needs (rolling distribution) with almost modern, up-to-date versions of every software package I would ever need....