Turning and Turning

Screw you Caterham!

Part of the rear suspension of my Caterham has gone rusty so I've removed it, wire brushed it and repainted it. To refit it I needed a new pair of nylon washers. They're an odd size 17.5mm ID. 1mm thick. The good news was that these washers were easily available directly from Caterham. The bad news was that, with shipping, these two flimsy washers would have cost £10.

As It happens I have a short length of nylon bar stock, so, out of spite, I decided to make the replacements myself. I drilled and bored out the centre, faced off the stock, and then parted off two very short lengths. The project was a great success, other than the huge amount of material wasted as swarf, the surface finish, the dimensional tolerances, and the massive burr I raised when the parting cut met the centre bore.

Richard "But at what cost" B  

Dinner Party

On New Year's Eve I cooked a 4 course meal for seven. Do you recognise this menu?

Mulligatawny Soup - served with sherry

Fish (Cod in parsley sauce) - served with white wine

Chicken (roast, with roast potatoes and vegetables) - served with champagne

Fruit (salad) - served with port.

It was a social experiment that had got out of hand. The previous new year one of the guests was a German and as a cultural exchange program she showed us a sketch which the Germans often watch around Christmas time. The sketch is in English, it's black and white, and involves an old lady and her butler having a four course dinner. It's called "Dinner for One". When I found out that she was coming again I decided to cook the Dinner for One menu and see how long it took for her to recognise it. She spotted what was going on between the first and second course.

Next year I'll cook something simple.

Mulligatawny soup has become my goddaughter's favourite, and even if I say so myself, the parsley sauce was excellent.

Richard "Admiral von Shneider" B

Ambiguous

 I love and hate the Engligh language. It can be very specific. We have, for example, a fully fledged verb for using subterfuge to direct someone to one particular Rick Astley video. At the same time it can be wildly ambiguous. I once boasted that I'd taken 200kg of woodchip to the tip. My mentor said "nobody can have that much wallpaper". I was talking about chipped twigs and branches that I had taken out of my hedge. In the days before Christmas my sister and I were shopping for Christmas supplies. I said that we needed crackers. "No need" she said "My husband will bring a big box of them". I was expecting the pyrotechnic cardboard party favours that you see on Christmas dinner tables. He brought a big box of biscuits for cheese.

Richard "Suzi Dent" B

Self Expression

 I must, at some deep cognitive level, be a product of my environment. I have no family history here, but I was born and raised in Devon and I've lived here for most of my life. The hedge that I'm looking after had been right here for about 400 years. As part of looking after the hedge I've bought myself a billhook. I chose the one that seemed most practical. It's not too big. It's only sharp on one side so that you could hit the back of it, and the handle can be shaped to only be held one way round. It also has a sort of exaggerated choil so that you could tie a lanyard around the blade.

I found out after I'd bought it that this is the "DEVON" pattern of billhook. At some stage, my thinking must have become Devonish enough that I can pick the billhook out of a lineup despite never having seen one before.

Richard "Nature or Nurture" B

Til Daddy Takes the T-Bird Away

 Type 1 fun is something that you do voluntarily and it's enjoyable in the moment. My best example would probably be playing on stage when you're not nervous, you're playing well, the rest of the band is playing well and the crowd is dancing. I have type 1 fun at track days after all the preparation is done and nerves have subsided. There is also plenty of type 1 fun available at rock climbing.

Type 2 fun is something that you did voluntarily, that you didn't enjoy it while it was happening, but that you're happy with after it's finished. I can think of some motorcycle and car journeys that were horrible in the moment, but I was delighted to have done them. I did a climb recently that was fun in the first half, but the rest was so difficult and frightening that it was deeply unpleasant. I actually got down from having done it and said "that stopped being fun half way up" however I was really pleased with myself for having done it.

And then there's the much more esoteric Type 3 fun, which is neither enjoyable in the moment nor in retrospect.

Richard "something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read" B

makefile.sh

Let me tell you about my deep, pure and abiding hatred for the Apache Maven build tool.

There is machine code, which tells a microprocessor exactly what to do in terms of bits and addresses.

There are procedural languages in which you tell the computer what to do. You have useful constructs like loops and logic, and named variables to store values.

There are functional languages. I'm oversimplifying it, but generally you tell the computer what value you want and it calculates it for you without any of the grubby details of explaining how it should calculate it. I class SQL as a functional language. In its purest form it has no looping structures and no variables. You tell it what you'd like to know and it decides how to get the relevant data from the disc and how to combine and process it for you. Many are the times that the query planner has come up with a deeply suboptimal order of operations and I've been powerless to persuade it to do it better. You get the right answer, but very slowly.

And then there's Apache Maven, which is supposed to make working on large software projects easier. You tell it where some things are and what you'd like to achieve. It then does what IT THINKS YOU SHOULD HAVE WANTED to do. I've spent far to long this week trying to control what an artifact was called, with persistence and the help of google, Stack Overflow, a very skilled senior engineer and an AI, we've come to the conclusion that no, you just can't do that.

Richard "And the Docs Are Terrible" B