Craig Sawyers

Not quite yesterday, but last week. What passed for grass in our garden was 50% weeds and infested with ant hills that defied all attempts, chemical, biological and thermal, to kill off. So after three weeks of preparation (painting 35 metres of fence twice, painting walls white, all after digging out 15 metres of Virginia Creeper and ivy) a team of five guys came for four days to fit artificial grass. Cheap it was not, but the effect is so much better that the mess it replaced.

Oh dear. The very real perils of land speed records. RIP Jessi.

It was known that firebreaks work since 1666 during the Great Fire of London. " [Samuel] Pepys spoke to the Admiral of the Navy and agreed they should blow up houses in the path of the fire. The hope was that by doing this they would create a space to stop the fire spreading from house to house. The Navy – which had been using gunpowder at the time – carried out the request and the fire was mostly under control by Wednesday, 5 September 1666"

RIP Peter. Another good guy gone.

Waterboarding the teddy. That is one kid I would not want to meet as an adult!

Point well taken!

Well our kids were born in 1986 and 1989, so definitely not boomers (I'm a boomer). Rob and Helen own their own house. And Liz and Oscar (the Australians) have saved a monster deposit by hard graft and will be buying in the next 6 months. Rob works as a project manager in major audio visual installations. His latest was the Samsung King's Cross https://www.samsung.com/uk/explore/kings-cross/ AV systems, the most complex bit being this, 4 metre wide curved screen LED display with 0.8mm pixel pitch. The LED modules weigh a ton in total, and each networked module has got 6-axis microadjustment to ensure minimal error in module position. Helen works in advanced image analysis for defence. Liz now works mainly in costume and theatre installation design with some acting Oscar runs a 15-man arborist company clearing power lines from tree problems (gum trees grow real fast) So any idea that non-boomers have got a bum deal is certainly not the case with our offspring.

WTF? Why would anyone do that? Does not compute, fzzz grkk....

Serial data with an embedded clock (for example the NRZ used for SPDIF) is subject to a well known set of random and deterministic jitter mechanisms. Agilent make high end car priced gear to measure and characterise these in high speed data links - but lowly SPDIF is just as prone to these at a pedestrian data rate. And although it is true that Red Book CD's use a robust error correction code (Cross-Interleaved Reed Solomon) a SPDIF link uses a simple checksum.

Just heard that on the BBC late afternoon current affairs programme on the radio. RIP Toni.

I went to see him with his string quartet at the Holywell Music Room in Oxford https://www.music.ox.ac.uk/about/facilities/holywell-music-room/ about 20 years ago, It was a very good concert as I remember it. This is one of his pieces Just worked out that he was in his early 30's when he composed the iconic Morse theme. It was a real shock that he has died, and so early. RIP Barrington.

Different package, but Linear Systems do the LSK389 (in TO18 style can and also surface mount) in three Idss bands.

Where did you buy the long-obsolete dual FET's? Or did you have a hoard of them

Various of our cats over the years have had that sort of problem. Scary how quickly a cat loses condition when they start the puking thing. Since ours are outdoor cats, it is usually they have eaten something nasty.

Bitter Wheat starring John Malkovich was awesome. It was basically a parody of Harvey Weinstein. The name of Malkovich's character was Barney Stein, a fat movie mogul who comes to grief amid a sexual abuse scandal. If you get a chance to see Malkovich on stage, jump at it. He is a truly great stage actor. How on earth David Mammut got away with a script that even had a similar name in it is amazing.

Occasionally National Theatre tickets sell out for a production before we get the chance to buy tickets. So we do exactly the same and go to a movie theatre and watch a live production. I did not know that they also did that in the US. Last thing we saw at the National was last year - a superb production of MacBeth with Rory Kinnear and Ann-Marie Duff. Next London production we're going to see is on Saturday - a new David Mamut play called Bitter Wheat, with John Malkovich. The reviews have panned it, which means it is probably very good! We're very lucky where we live - we are within 90 minutes drive of Stratford on Avon (RSC), Chichester and 45 minutes by train to London. Spoiled for choice.

I thought I remembered that the Duomo had some significant claims to fame. It was under continuous construction from 1387 to 1965 - a period of 578 years with a total of 65 architects in sequence. It is truly huge, with a capacity of 40,000.

Oh wow. For some reason Blade Runner (so much better than Philip K Dick's book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep on which it was based) seems so damned recent - but it was 1982, when Hauer was 38 and Harrison Ford was 40. Such an iconic movie. I shall watch The Director's Cut tomorrow to honour Hauer's passing. Damn. 75 is too damned early to go. RIP Rutger. Odd fact - the director was Ridley Scott, who was born and brought up not far from where I was born and brought up in the North East of England. The heavy industrial landscape with flames belching from chemical and steel works lighting the night sky when he was a child found their way into the opening sequence of Blade Runner.

Hey Antonio - have a truly spectacular day!

Definitely to both - thanks! Have a great time out there. How hot is it where you are? It is bat shit crazy hot in the UK - 38C today (100F), and since it is usually cold and wet here we don't have aircon. So everyone is hot and cranky.

That is me totally physically trashed. In a moment of madness I decided to do a run I last did about 15 years ago - 15 miles of cross country with three chunky hills in it. I really haven't done anything like that for three years (when I did the Yorkshire 3 peaks) so I was working on base fitness from the gym, and physical memory of doing that sort of thing. I did 3h45m - and back in the day, when I was doing a lot more running and quite a bit younger I got it down to 2h30m. Anyway I'm not unhappy at age 63 that I can still cut the mustard to some extent. It was made a bit more tricky that it started at 75F and finished at 83F. And made even more tricky that copious and corrosive sweat gave me an heroic dose of runner's crotch. When Carole saw it she said "how on earth did you continue with that". Well basically I had to - I had to get back to the car! But last night I was walking around as if I'd just got off a horse. A lot better today, but I'm pretty physically tired. Definitely not looking for sympathy (as if! This is head-case!)! It's after all my own fault

Graham Nash in concert tonight in Oxford. Bloody awesome. His voice is still unchanged even though he is now 77! He even did some numbers that he wrote when he was with the Hollies in the early 60's. https://www.atgtickets.com/shows/an-intimate-evening-of-songs-and-stories-with-graham-nash/new-theatre-oxford/ Oddly enough we're going to precisely those places in a month. Our daughter and her husband are in Milan from Australia for a wedding, and we're meeting up with them for a few days, driving with them to Lake Garda.

That is making me feel very hungry!

Alternatively, extreme ironing

Wow. RIP Rip.