Rick's b.log - entry 2024/10/20

The things you miss

No, it's garden centres. Mom and I would pick a day when we weren't working (so not always a Sunday) and we'd just do a tour of the garden centres around the Camberley/Farnham area. Mostly looking at the decor, how things were set up, and then we'd stop for a tea before going to the next one (oftentimes "along the A30"). If it was a weekday, we'd often finish by going shopping in Farnham, Fleet, or Woking. Quite often either an M&S or Waitrose, the obvious middle class choices right there. ☺

Here in France, maybe around the cities but certainly not in the countryside, they don't really have much of an idea of garden centres. I think the culture is too different, that gardens are supposed to be functional, not pretty. There used to be a Vilmorin in Châteaubriant that sold plants and garden tools, with a small section for "oddities" (scented candles and such), but that has been absorbed into the Jardiland chain that's almost a garden centre... but no tea room. I guess in a place where even small towns had multiple bars (less so these days with the economy), tea rooms (or even coffee ones) would be a peculiar concept.

That's not to say that tea rooms don't exist. There is the one I went to a lot while passing time after work during mom's incapacity until I got myself a car. Numerous types of specialty designer organic tea, but nothing that really hit the spot. I suppose part of this is that for some reason the French seem to think that black tea steeps at 60°C, but then their concept of black tea is notably different to mine. When I give Tetley to people, I tend to print off a photo or scan of the Tetley bag where it says to use boiling water. I can't imagine a humble teabag doing anything useful at sixty...

I also miss the ability to go someplace like Little Chef for an all day breakfast. However it seems that such a place no longer exists. Does the all day breakfast still exist, or has it been declared a major health hazard? (as if takeaway burgers are so very good for anybody...)

Smacking

Mom smacked me. I do not consider it abusive. Anybody who thinks otherwise, I can only hope that one day you get to experience an ADHD eight year old that has moments of refusing to accept the word "stop" or "no" or, for that matter, anything that passes as reality.

When talking and reasoning doesn't work, a sharp dose of pain tends to. Something mom was always careful to do would be to sit me down once I had calmed down to talk about what happened and why I was smacked.

As far as I can recall, mom only "lost it" (smacked me multiple times) once. That was when I was told not to climb on the roof of a garage and... yeah... you guessed it. This was a garage in a place we were staying overnight on our way to Cornwall. A place where a child doing exactly that a few years later was very badly hurt falling off of the exact same place I had been climbing. Would I prefer a few hard smacks, or to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair? Hmmm...

The thing is, basic parental discipline should not be considered abusive. Maybe your child is a little angel and always offers to help, sits quietly, and is never a problem. I say, with complete honesty, that I was a monumental shit as a child. Looking back now, I think part of it was an effect of my neurodiversity, and part of it was acting out because I had a teacher that refused to have anything to do with me and had me sit at the back facing the wall for the entire day.

Where to draw the line? It's an obvious question, but unfortunately it is harder to answer without an awful lot of context. Mom never came home drunk or wasted and used me as a punching bag. That, clearly, would be abuse. Likewise if you say "abuse is hurting the child for the sake of hurting the child", it's also highly subjective. The girl that died? Her father claims he was exercising his right to discipline, though it should be noted that he comes from a culture that doesn't have much use or respect for females other than as a baby incubator. Obviously every abusive parent will tell you they are only giving an appropriate level of discipline, as they beat the poor bugger unconscious.

Don't think I'm defending him, I'm absolutely not. But I will say that if my mother had not smacked me, I might well have made life altering mistakes as a child. It only takes a moment of crazy to fall off a roof, or run through a glass door...

But most of all, I don't think that this proposal will change much. It will penalise decent parents with very difficult children (as I was); while the sorts of people who abuse their children will just find alternative ways to dispense their sick twisted harms.
Back in my childhood, one of my neighbours never smacked their child, but when they were bad they would take their favourite toy and slowly break it in front of them and then make them tidy up the mess.
Another felt that a good method of punishing their child was to strip their bed and have them sleep on a bare mattress - which must have been pretty awful in the winter.

Like I said, there are many ways to hurt children. The teacher who called me annoying and stupid and excluded me from lessons as much as she could probably did more damage than every single time mom smacked me. I disliked going to school as much as she disliked me being there. If I absconded at break time (which I was not allowed to participate in) and went to the little library, she wouldn't come find me. Of course, my "annoying" was simply wanting much more in depth information on whatever the discussion was; so we had the interesting juxtaposition of a teacher saying how awful I was and me sitting quietly in the library reading everything.

Pop music

At work we have a five minute warm up before beginning. Turn your neck from side to side, wave your arms around, do a hula hoop, and so on. Since I do mine with the stock girls at 9am, we do it in the stock area and not the production area, so the person overseeing the exercises plays music on their phone. I think they must look up "music to exercise to" on a streaming service as it is quite often rather unpleasant techno-beat remixes of popular old songs performed badly. A deplorable version of Faded (Alan Walker/Iselin Solheim), and what they (whoever they are) did to Eye Of The Tiger (Survivor) is best left unsaid lest you risk encountering creative uses of the sorts of words best not said in polite company.

I did suggest Cliffs of Gallipoli (Sabaton) and The Girl Who Loved The Monster (Rob Zombie) because both have a good beat that's about the right sort of tempo, but neither played as yet. I hope she at least looked up the songs. ☺

The problem for me is that it's hard to give suggestions for the sorts of things that I listen to normally as either the beat is too slow if it's goth stuff or too fast if it's metal stuff; and if it's symphonic metal then... oh my, key changes, tempo changes, and stylistic changes abound - Haunted (Shadow Gallery) is a good example. Hell, Ghost Love Score (Nightwish) even has an intermission in the middle! And both go on for far longer than the exercise time.

Common sense?

For example:

• Don't put air fryers up against a wall or under cupboards.
  Did nobody notice that they blow very hot air out the back?
• Don't put air fryers on tea towels.
  Is this made up? Who the hell does this?
  In case you were wondering, there are two fans inside the air fryer. The big obvious one that moves the heat around inside the cooking area, and a smaller one that sucks air from the top and blows it out the bottom to keep the motor and plastic casing cool compared to the cooking compartment that's around 200°C.
• If a can is dented along the seam or the top seal, discard it.
  Small dents are often okay, but a dent along a structural part of the can should cause the can to be discarded. It can be useful to listen for a "psst!" as you open it, but if in doubt, bin the thing.
• If a can is swollen, discard it.
  There are two possibilities here. The first is that acids in the food has reacted with the metal of the can to produce hydrogen. This tends to affect tomatoes and citrus fruit if the can lining is damaged or incomplete.
  The more likely possibility is that either the food or the can wasn't suitably sterile so bacteria has thrived in the can. Clostridium botulinum is a very common bacteria that thrives in oxygen-free environments (like the inside of a can). It can cause an illness called Botulism that can be fatal. It blocks nerve functions which causes havoc in the body, including such affects as suffocation by essentially paralysing lung functioning due to no nerve impulses.
• If you're pouring water from a kettle, don't try pouring it backwards or you'll get scalding hot water on yourself.
  I despair for my species...

I thought the only people that inept were the comically stupid people that show up in television sales adverts, like "before the supervac 2000" and cue a man trying to clean his living room in the most idiotic way imaginable, then "with the supervac 2000" and cue a woman effortlessly swishing around this tool that can be yours for only £xx.99 if you order today! With free home delivery (British mainland only).

Tories being Tories

We open with a bloke relaxing in his nice middle class home talking about how much the winter fuel payment means to him while wearing a gold Rolex.

The Tories think this is a representative pensioner.

We then cut to some very prominent shots of a Tassimo. Not just the expensive coffee pods, but a branded glass too. Whoo!

Coffee, not heating. Priorities.

She's doing the Sunday Torygraph puzzle (though, note, none of it is filled in). That paper retails for £3.50. If she's a true Tory, she may well have the seven day Torygraph that comes in at a tidy £286 per quarter (current price). If it's only the Saturday and Sunday ones, it's €130 per quarter.

Seventeen across is "Cockwomble".

Look! She has a dish washer beside her washing machine. If she can afford to run that, instead of - you know - a sponge and a squirt of Fairy - then clearly she's not the sort of person who needs a winter fuel payment.

Such a nice tidy home.

I fear that a lot of this is a jealousy of missing out over something that other people might get that they feel they should be entitled to. Unfortunately the Tories cannot show the sorts of pensioners that use food banks and live in much more cramped and poorly insulated accommodation because, well, because those people - who need the fuel payment - will qualify for it.

That being said, when Labour is having to tighten the belt because of the massive fiscal hole left by the previous government, to depict these people as pensioners in need of fuel payment assistance is shockingly out of touch. About as out of touch as Tories normally are, in that they probably think this is a hard-put-upon pensioner. Millions of people in actual poverty would disagree.

And, one final photo.

Eww!

I don't know what's worse here. The awful butcher job of installing that temperature sensor, or the icky fingernails.

Tea v0.16

• The schedule window now properly clips the description text to fit in the window.
  
• Also fixed the "Your schedule (1 programmes)" to add/omit the 's' at the end depending on the count... because that sort of thing annoys me and it's depressing that it took so damn long for me to get around to doing this, and even more depressing that I wrote such lame-arse code in the first place. It's not as if it was in any way complicated to do properly.
• Better handling of the caret into the early hours (technically "tomorrow" but counted as "today").
• When changing the "When" day to today, the window will be shifted to centre on the caret.
• Expanded schedule to support full length descriptions, and updated the schedule iCalendar output to support the longer descriptions as well.
  
• Sanitised channel name matching - will now report if a channel ID is unknown rather than defaulting to whatever channel is first (which is usually BBC One). If you should see this in your schedule, it means that your region is set differently to how it was when the programme was added to the schedule - so check that the postcode is correct.
• Added Search facility. It's fairly basic at this point, just saying when/where anything matched is on. No, you can't go clicky-clicky on anything. Maybe in the future...
• There is a Search option in the iconbar menu, and one at the bottom of the When menu.
  
  (the menu is supposed to be surrounded by transparency, but the image processing PHP doesn't support that; I never got around to working out how to add it, sorry...)
  When you get results back, they will be shown in date order (soonest at the top).
  
• Some programme descriptions contain info like "seriesNo":2,"episodeNo":5; if this is present then it will be suffixed to the end of the description in the form " (ep2.5)". You can see this in the Google Calendar example image for Ludwig, just above, showing that it is episode 1.5.

Now, before the download I need to talk to you about the search facility. To say that it is basic would be an understatement.

You can only enter numbers and letters. No spaces, no punctuation. It will find results for "mirror" but nothing for "mirror-belle" (it's something on CBBC).

It seems to be stuck on the default London region. It doesn't recognise "South Today" (searching for "south") or "ITV Medidian News" (searching for "meridian"), but if you search for "london" then it'll happily tell you about the "ITV London News".
Because of this, I have added some traps to display a sensible channel name if your TV region is not London, as it gives the ID of the London version of BBC ONE / ITV1 which won't match yours. Please let me know if you encounter any mentions of unknown channel so I can expand the list if necessary.

Some searches, such as "news", can return stupidly large amounts of data. The buffer is 64K and anything over that ("news" is about 758½K!) won't work. You should try to refine your search.

There's quite a lot of processing that goes on when unpacking search results as the server, for some reason, is quite happy to tell you about stuff that's a week old.
Take a look at this, a screenshot that I just made.

• Tuesday 22nd October, two days from now.
• Monday 14th October, nearly a week ago (because Available On Demand).
• Yesterday (because Available On Demand).
• Tomorrow
• Next Saturday, nearly a week from now.

So that's what I'm working with. That you can't click on a programme to call it up in the main grid and/or schedule it is... my fault. Maybe those things will be added.
That the search generally sucks in all manner of other ways, not my fault. ☺

It's better than nothing, right? Right?

Here it is then. It's also on Store.

Your comments:

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jgh, 21st October 2024, 09:19

My Dad would have been 79 a couple of days ago, and you've reminded me that's one of the things I miss now he's gone. Going to a local garden centre cafe, wandering around, buying (or just looking at) garden supplies and stuff.

jgh, 21st October 2024, 09:29

RE: The pensioners.  Look in the background: oo, nice double-glazed windows, that house should be nice'n'cosy without much heating spending.  Also: ooo, large open plan rooms with knocked-through walls. If you're concerned about heating, PUT SOME DAMN DOORS IN AND CLOSE THEM!

jgh, 21st October 2024, 09:32

Tea: Any chance of an option to tell it to check if a program title ends in "..." to then check if the description starts with "..." and if so scan forward for a full stop, chop it off, and append it to the title. So:  The Girl, The Ghost...  ...and the Graveyard. blah blah  becomes  The Girl, The Ghost and the Graveyard.  blah blah

Rick, 21st October 2024, 20:02

Okay jgh, try this prerelease I put together for you: tea_0-17pre.zip    Note that it has had *very* little testing other than "it appears to work" (but I've not looked at potential side effects).    I saw your message while on break, and thought about it while at work as it doesn't take much in the way of brain power to move baking trays from here to there...  ...and came home and cobbled something together.    I am coming down with a cold. People coughing without covering their mouths, like nobody has learned a goddamned thing from the pandemic. Grrr. So I hope this works for you. I'm now going to grab a premade rice pudding and go to bed with some Netflix or something as I have even less concentration than normal (heading towards negative values).

A tree-dwelling mammal, 21st October 2024, 22:42

I must point out one thing. Washing dishes in a dishwasher uses less water than doing them by hand (if you do them properly), and therefore less energy to heat the water. It also uses hotter water than hand-washing (do you want to try sticking your hand in water at 65C? Nope, me neither).    I wouldn't be without mine, even though I (currently) live on my own. Just have to make sure you have enough plates, cups etc to run a full load. It also has a "quick rinse" program that cleans all the crud off the plates etc so it doesn't harden, if you aren't going to run a full cycle for a day or two.    It also keeps my kitchen tidier. Dirty dishes go straight in the dishwasher rather than piling up on the side until it gets to the point where I end up having to clean them out of necessity.    Finally, I live in a really hard water area. All dishwashers have a water softener (hence why you keep having to chuck salt into it). Softened water gets dishes (and glasses in particular) much cleaner without streaking.    As you may have guessed, I don't consider a dishwasher to be a "luxury" item. It's as essential as a washing machine, tumble dryer, fridge, freezer etc. And an oven. And a microwave.    Speaking of tumble dryers, I had to replace mine recently - my 2006-vintage condenser dryer finally let go after hanging on by a thread for the last 18 months or so. I've just replaced it with a heat pump model. Much better. I'll probably do a blog post about it when I get some free time (anyone who follows my blog will notice that I don't post nearly as often as Rick - about once a month usually!)

Rick, 22nd October 2024, 14:38

The dishwasher provided at home goes by the name of Rick. ;)  I've never used a mechanical one, and honestly don't see the need or the point.  I boil a kettle of water and pour that over a stack of dishes with washing liquid added. When it's cool enough to handle, I finish the job, rinse, and put on the rack to dry.

A tree-dwelling mammal, 22nd October 2024, 21:30

Interesting. Not heard of that brand. Mine's called "Hotpoint". :)    Another thing. The detergent in dishwasher tablets is a lot stronger than washing up liquid. Even the supposedly 'ferocious' stuff like Fairy Platinum. Plus I have sensitive skin, especially on my hands. Regular immersion in detergent doesn't do it any good.    Finally (and this may be an undiagnosed ADHD trait) when I first moved here and didn't have a dishwasher (technically I did, but had nowhere to plumb it in as the extension wasn't built and the washing machine was in that spot - which kind of took priority) I used to end up with dirty dishes piling up and never getting around to doing the washing up, at least until I hit breaking point and couldn't find a clean mug for my coffee.    In case you hadn't guessed, I also hate doing dishes. A dishwasher is definitely an essential appliance.    I hope you let the kettle full of water go off the boil before you pour it over the dishes. If you don't, it will make the dishes taste really bitter... err... I mean... it could crack the dishes (unless they're Pyrex). As I once found out when I poured boiling water into a glass jug, thinking it was Pyrex. One loud "crack" later and it turned out that actually, no, it wasn't Pyrex, it was just regular glass. Oops.

jgh, 22nd October 2024, 21:38

Tree: my solution to that problem is to only own three mugs, three plates, three bowls, three forks, etc...

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