A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
June 27
Watched Maria.
Was disappointed. I think the movie's summed up by the hack from
Le Figaro who shows up outside the theatre towards the end: he's
basically the entire atmosphere of the thing.
June 26
Couch-to-5k progresses.
June 25
Tonight's episode of The Sweeney featured entirely gratuitous
nudity, and the actress didn't even get a credit for her
troubles. "Think of the exposure", I'm sure they told
her. Exposure is right.
June 24
Well that was annoying: mac up and kernel-panicked.
Also annoying: a DVD with a handful of actual titles but 99 fake
ones on it.
June 23
On-call this week at t'office. Pager went off 15 minutes before
shift-end, which was not nice.
June 22
And another George Gently. Also still
excellent.
June 21
Watched A Complete Unknown again. Still
excellent.
June 20
Black Bag
is an excellent piece of work. It feels like John Le Carré -
it's about the gritty, almost boring side of the spy business,
rather than the action and derring-do of the likes of Bond and
Bourne. I'll put it this way: you could translate it directly to
stage and lose nothing. Beautifully played by all involved, and if
it's your thing, it has a pretty decent roll call as
well.
Annoyingly, the IMDb trivia for this movie is basically someone
pasting an interview / puff piece a paragraph at a time into the
interface and frankly I hate that crap.
June 19
More Sweeney. The episodes seem longer somehow - there's an
awful lot packed into the hour and it's not always clear, given
the precedent of the first episode, what the outcome will actually
be. I have to say the plot of this one kinda escalated into
incredulity rather quickly towards the end.
June 18
Second episode of the season containing a bit of implied eye
candy for The Boys. I guess this is what passed for
ratings-gathering in the 70s.
June 17
Season 3 of The Sweeney kicks off with an atypical story where
the boys - spoiler - lose out.
June 16
Churning away at the DVDs. I have not yet figured out how best
to deal with bonus content on DVDs that I will likely never watch
but I guess I've at least got to identify and name
it.
June 15
Doing a little investigative maintenance on a robot
vacuum. There's a video online for our species of robot where a
guy shows you how to remove the covers, and it reminds me of a
half-rememberd episode of Quincy, M.E. - which I used
watch with my dad - where Quincy is obliged to do a demo autoopsy
for a bunch of newbies but needs to be somewhere else, so he (more
or less literally) rips into it such that they all get queasy and
run off, freeing him up to do whatever he needs to do. Picture
that, but the corpse is a robot vacuum, and Quincy is the guy who
is pressed for time but you've asked him to show you how to open
the casing. ZZZZZZZIP!
June 14
A Complete Unknown
takes a couple of liberties particularly with the whole
"controversial" move to electric instruments, but it's still an
excellent movie. The leads, in particular, are astoundingly
good. Even if you're not a fan of Dylan's music I think this works
pretty well as a story.
June 13
We continue to watch Mr. Regan and Mr. Carter anyway. There's a
funny TV advert from the 90s - for a car I used own, the Nissan
Almera - featuring two guys done up to look convincingly like the
boys from The Sweeney.
My usual way of working with things like the DVD ripping script is
to have it do a bunch of work, fall on its face, and then I do a
bunch more work on it. The current incarnaton is remarkably good
at not falling on its face so I'm left with the slightly
tedious work of identifying which episode of a TV show it's
working on. I've been idly thinking about trying to get it to
figure that out itself but I don't have a clear idea how to do
that. One thing that occurred to me was dumping out subtitles and
getting some species of local LLM to compare the results with a
Wikipedia description of the episode list; simpler than that
(slightly, maybe) is to see if I can pull the episode title out of
the credits. The main difficulty with any of these approaches is
that it'll definitely be more work than the manual
slog.
June 12
Oh that's grating. If I go to Amazon.com I can find the Sweeney
with all episodes for all seasons. Somehow the version that's
available to me is shredded: season 2 consists of 5 of
the 12 or 13 episodes.
June 11
I am back on the couch-to-5k merry-go-round. Tonight was Week
1, Day 2.
(DVD ripping continues)
June 10
Well, that was slightly embarassing: email to this site has been
broken for a number of days due to a slightly full disk, caused by
a certain cloud provider's management software downloading all
possible versions of a component of itself into a non-standard
location instead of, you know, using package maangement tools and
repositories and what not. Anyway. Repaired. If you got some
species of 4XX error when trying to send me mail it will
eventually get to me.
June 9
Last episode of The Sweeney S1. Again, this being of its time, I
guess there was a presumption that there'd be a S2 without any
real need to do a cliffhanger; it's just a regular
episode.
DVD ripping continues. Currently ploughing through Doctor Who (the
Ecclestone year) and still finding bugs in my
code.
June 8
Offline network actually looks to have been some fight between
the mesh network and the macintoshes, since it affected my laptop
as well as the jumpbox, and simply bouncing the network connection
in some way fixed it.
Last of season 6 of George Gently. Another great story,
beautifully made. I did note that all the period cars are in
immacualte condition, even the delivery lorries, which you just
know would've been battered hulks in
reality.
June 7
Got a "internet is offline" alert overnight. Assumed it was down
to the irregularly-scheduled mesh network update (over which I
have limited control) and drove off to a location 200km away only
to discover it's more likely that the jump box that I use to get
into the home network, which is also the canary for "internet is
offline", has likely crashed and of course I can't do anything
about it until I drive back.
June 6
I could've sworn I'd seen Fracture
before but no. And it's pretty damned excellent, with the minor
plot hole around Why The Trick With The Gun Would Not Have Worked
In Practice (IMDb nitpickers identify one reason, but I'm pretty
sure there's an entirely other one as well). The other thing that
nagged at me throughout was whether Crawford targeted Beachum for
a reason or because he was a useful idiot; it seems like the
latter, but it definitely felt like the former while watching. Oh,
and Hopkins' accent was all over the place for some
reason. Still, pretty damned excellent.
June 5
Invoked backchannels. Undoing The Thing may be less
onerous than we thought.
June 4
Work stuff: we Did A Thing that shouldn't have been possible and
now we need to Undo The Thing. The annoying part is that it's
blocking some work that's been in flight for while. "For the want
of a nail" territory.
June 3
Discovered that the ... fiends at Prime Video have
stiffed us on individual episodes in The Sweeney, i.e. all
four seasons are present but some episodes within the seasons are
missing. Whyyyyyyyy.
June 2
DVD ripping resumes: I've now got a reasonable pile of crap to
convert TV episodes into a series of mpeg files. Of course I'm
still finding bugs.
June 1
Another excellent George Gently.
Found the SQLite problem I mentioned a couple of days back. It
wasn't quite what I thought but is now fixed.
Also Doctor Who season finale. It was a bit ... all over the
place, and the ending was unexpected, but ok, let's see what's
next - I presume in December.