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August 17

BBC World News: all the news that's oh whatever:

2018-08-17 05:05:02	Boob pools, climbing walls and raining dollar bills
2018-08-17 13:05:02	Nipple baths, climbing walls and raining dollar bills

Bosch Season 4: Complete. Wrapped up nicely in a way that allows this to wind up the show or lead into a new season.

August 15

We're most of the way through Bosch Season 4 at this point, not least because it's damned hard to stop at watching when the credits roll. I could easily binge-watch an entire season of this.

Monday: wrote 75% of a web automation tool (posting a form that's split over multiple pages and is tedious to deal with). Tuesday: did some trivial amount of reworking on it and the 75% that was working... no longer works. Doesn't even work past the first page. I have no idea, and of course I didn't keep a work-in-progress copy (although it's just occurred to me that either Time Machine or Arq will have done that for me, so there's hope)

August 11

I continue to be amazed at the awfulness of the made-over Vodafone site. This morning I discovered that they have a section on the data they hold on me; when I clicked the button to request said data, it said "Error making request" and that's it. Then I went over to their store-finder page, and it's a list of pop-open sections, unsorted, with Dublin listed by postcode and a "search filter" which just limits the number of pop-open sections shown to you (and, incidentally, closes any you had open) with matches anchored at the start of the search word so "Dublin" doesn't match "Co Dublin" (which should be "Co. Dublin", strictly speaking). And it lists at least one store in a shopping centre that's currently closed.

And they're still not doing online upgrades.

We launched into Bosch Season 4 recently and it's pretty compelling. The Mrs. Bosch event was surprisingly swiftly dispatched, but at least it wasn't as nonsensical as the book version.

August 05

Fiddling around with linear gradients to do a progress bar in HTML (something like background: linear-gradient(to right, green x%, red 100-x%), and getting decidedly odd results (Safari on MacOS): identical code with slight variations in the percentage gives me either a crisp progress bar look, or a smooth green/red gradient. Swapping from percentages to px doesn't seem to help, either - it's like some values Just Don't Work.

(I realise I'm totally abusing the intent of the linear gradient here, but hey)

Ok, so some experimentation shows that for values < 50%, I get the gradient rather than the clean cut... leading to a fix: if the left-hand percentage is below 50, swap the gradient around so it fills to the left instead of the right, and swap the colours so the first one is now the value > 50%. Crazy, but it works.

Well, that was disappointing. Having gotten to the end of X-Files "Classic" - the last episode of Season 9 - we figured we'd watch the second movie (X-Files: I Want To Believe) and see if it tied up any loose ends (supersoldiers, alien invasion, etc.) But no, it's basically a feature-length monster of the week episode. Gah.

August 01

We just watched The X-Files Season 9: Jump the Shark which is quite possibly the worst episode ever. I'm not even sure if it was meant to be a joke, but if it was, it failed..

July 29

Took a spin down to Wexford for the weekend. Wells House and Gardens, Whitford House Hotel, Johnstown Castle and a little bit of randomly driving around to see where we wound up (a few places where the GPS was metaphorically scratching its head...) I'd recommend all of the above.

July 22

We just started watching Rebus only to discover that Virgin have dropped Alibi, so (a) one of the episodes was cut off half-way through, and (b) there will not be more episodes. GAH.

July 21

Black Panther was pretty good, but I did feel like the climactic fight between the protagonists was a bit underwhelming.

July 17

Took me almost a month because I was checking for records I wanted to keep, but my MapMyRun account is now empty and deleted. Of course, I got spam from them the day I was finishing this cleanup.

July 16

Another hiatus. Sunshine: been and gone, more or less. Illness: also been and gone, more or less. Nothing of note watched, as far as I can recall - oh, wait, we watched Men in Black III which our DVR had, for some reason, recorded in two chunks with a few minutes missing between them. I'd seen this before, Mrs. hadn't. It's a fun movie, doesn't do a huge amount that the previous ones didn't already cover to some extent, but still enjoyable for all that.

Currently trying to coerce Django and OpenHAB to play nice with each other - specifically, getting Django to deal with OpenHAB's frankly terrible persistence model. This requires either defining all your persistence classes up front, which means they're out of date if you ever change any of your OpenHAB setup, or defining them on the fly, which requires doing things that I'm pretty sure Django isn't meant to do and I so far haven't managed to do successfully. Once you've gotten past that, looking things up may involve use of eval() which is just... ick.