Rick's b.log - entry 2025/01/05

Questionable morals

In a nutshell, a boy who thinks his dad is lame, lax, and more interested in work than him... finds out that his did is actually a superhero.

Now, one of the big points between father and son is the son asking "why couldn't you trust me?". Like the boy is so upset that rather than being honest and saying "I'm a superhero", decided to not tell his son and just make it seem like work was more important than family. We're supposed to think that the boy has a point.

Which he may well have done, had he not lied about calling his mom to stay in his fathers house, invited a friend over (who brought other friends), discovered the secret lair, messed around with all the stuff they could barely control, went joyriding in dad's souped up vehicle, which gave away the location to some bad guys who wanted the alien thingummyjig all for themselves, who were able to walk right in due to nobody thinking to make any attempt to hide the secret way down to the lair, and after some comical fighting the boy who swiped the alien thingy and didn't really know or understand what it was tried to fake them out but would have eventually had to give it to the men if it wasn't for dad realising what was going on and coming to save the day, et cetera et cetera. Only the chase is still on as one of the other kids is very easily coerced into saying where they hid the thingy.
And since this is a kid's movie, some children armed with weird tech manage to (mostly) fend off a bunch of armed men. Had this been reality rather than a movie, given the supposed power of the alien whotsit, there's a pretty good chance that the armed men would simply grab the cute girl, put a bullet into her head, and the other children would instantly give up and hand over the goods.

And the boy has the audacity to wonder why his father didn't trust him...

If you don't know what the weird glowy thing is...
...leave it the hell alone!
(screen capture; film released by Paramount, 2022)

Another kid's film with questionable morals is one I watched a long time ago - so I don't remember the title. A bunch of kids on go-karts rob a bank. I think it might have been a Danish film, I sort of remember subtitles.
Anyway, it's okay for children to pull off a robbery if it's for the right reasons (paying for medical treatment for a sick relative (father?)). Uh-hu...
Oh, and this was pretty much only possible because the mother of one of the children was very conveniently the person who designed the bank security, which meant they basically had access to everything they needed to work out how to get in.
Reality would have the mother jailed for gross negligence, the kids that made it out alive get to look forward to a future in juvie, and the sick person dies.
Film? Happy ending, it all works out in the end (ergo: stealing is good).
<shrug>

I sort of remember an American remake...and that I preferred the original.

Later: I wrote this part yesterday and during the night it came to me: Klatretøsen which was remade as Catch That Kid.

Give her the money...or else.
(screen capture; film released by Nimbus Film, 2002)

Let's gloss entirely over the morals of a mid-90's Disney movie called "Blank Check", which features - amongst other dodgy things - a thirty-something woman (an undercover agent) who technically dates and eventually kisses (in a romantic way) a prepubescent boy just after saying to give her a call in about seven years (when he is "legal"). It think it's supposed to be cute, but ewww!

Fish and chips

It was something like three euros fifty for a pack of fish fingers. Then I noticed a pack of 4 British style battered fish for something like three euros, with the second one being half price. So for about a euro more I got eight pieces of fish, over twice the weight of the fish fingers.

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day;
teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime;
give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish.

This is Colin d'Alaska in French. This is one of the cheaper Cod-like fishes that rose to prominence after the problems of overfishing cod stocks. It is currently known in English as Alaska Pollock, but there is some disagreement over what family the fish belongs to, thinking it may be more closely related to cod than pollock.
There is a danger here, of course, because we know sales people are very good at twisting things. I'll give you an example from the freezer cabinet in the supermarket - Saumon du Pacifique is a wild fish hoiked out of the ocean, while Saumon de l'Atlantique is pretty much a farmed fish that's not only not wild but has never seen an ocean in its life. The texture and taste is notably different. But hey, the wild ones are named after the ocean they come from so why not call the farmed ones after the ocean they are closest to in order to deceive consumers and make them think it's caught from the big wet?
So you can just assume that if it gets considered a sort of cod, it'll be labelled and sold as such despite the fact that it's a different fish and typically costs half the price of actual cod. There isn't much difference in the end result - it's a white fish without much in the way of taste - but you can also just assume that this would be put into products, get called cod, and be sold for cod prices. Think of the profit!
So, thanks, but call this pollock and be done with it.

I made this meal (two pieces and chips) on Friday night, and I made a discovery. I had wondered for a while why my air fryer chips are so different to chips from McDonald's (or other overpriced burger flingers). I decided, yesterday, to do my fish and chips like it used to come from the chippie back when I was young. So I doused the fish in Sarsons and threw a little too much salt onto the chips. That was it - they resembled chips from the burger flinger. Salt was the key.

Brrr!

Taken at half nine in the morning.

It was -2 on the night of Friday/Saturday. It was supposed to start raining, be really rainy, and go up to around 12°C on Saturday. It didn't. It was just above zero for most of the day, creeping up to a couple of degrees in the late evening; though a stiff easterly made it feel perishing.

When I checked on the weather at ten o'clock before turning in for the night, I got a shock. The temperature had shot up.

C = Connection type, F=Radio; T = Trend (air pressure); F = Forecase, R = Rain expected; H = Air humidity.

It stayed around 11°C through the windy rainy night, and is 11½°C right now, so I have the windows open to warm it up a little in here...again.

Funny how when it's supposed to warm up it always takes longer than predicted, but when it's supposed to cool down it happens faster than it is supposed to.

Speaking of weather, I normally keep my location settings/GPS off on my phone. I know where I am as I don't go out much, or far, and turning these things off can save a miniscule bit of battery life.
Unfortunately Google, in their infinite wisdom, seem obsessed with trying to provide me with "location accurate" weather reports. I know quite well that Google have accurately located me from my Livebox's SSID as Chrome annoyingly keeps you signed into Google, so searching things will say at the bottom of the page that the search was related to my current location "Xxxxx (Home)".
Unfortunately, the current weather seems to mostly guess based upon things like where they think the IP address is located and/or the phase of the moon divided by how many cookies I have recently eaten. As far as I am aware, they have never, not once, shown my actual correct location. Often it's the next town over, sometimes it's one of the towns on the commute to work. Friday night it was...

This is where?

I know Treffendel is a place in Brittany. It just has a Celtic sounding name, like Trevenen and Tretheway are going to be places in Cornwall rather than Surrey, or anything beginning with two L's is undoubtably Welsh.
However, I had to look at Maps to find out where it actually is. It's near the forest of Paimpont (also known as Brocéliande) which is one of the various places steeped in Arthurian legend.
It is also about 60km (40 miles) away, which given our oceanic weather, may as well be an entirely different climatic zone...and no, that's not hyperbole, about there is where you start seeing the trees change. There are fewer oaks and beeches and the like and more angry looking pines (some contorted into celestial agony) and a lot more gorse along the sides of the roads, compared to the brambles and ferns around here.

The danger of air fryers

Let's take a look inside to see what's going on.

It's pretty simple really.

I think I've mentioned this in the past, but it's not a fryer. It is a very small forced-air (convection) oven. The reason why it is capable of doing what it does is because of its diminuitive size. You're able to concentrate a lot of heat into a very small area and use a fan to really push it around.

The element, which isn't that different to the sort that you would find on an electric stove, isn't overly powerful, maybe 1000-1200W (depending on the oven). This is coupled with a dual-bladed fan. The reason for the dual blades is because there is one set of blades in the cooking area to push the hot air around the food - that's why the basket has holes and it cooks much better if you don't block them. Because of the proximity of the heat and the forced air, both of which are much more powerful than regular fan ovens, it has an effect similar to oil frying which is why they are called air fryers.
The other fan is on top and this typically sucks cool air in from the top and pushes it down the sides and out the bottom. The reason for this is that air fryers reach around 200°C and while the cooking area is made of metal, everything else is usually made of plastic. Plastic that would easily melt if it wasn't kept cool.

The rest doesn't matter. Whether it uses mechanical knobs like mine, or buttons with a glowing display, it basically boils down to something to turn the heater on and off to regulate the temperature for a predetermined length of time.

Now, do you see the bright patch in the lower middle of the photo? This is an exhaust vent. Quite a lot of hot air is blown out of that vent. This is partly in order to regulate the heat, and partly in order to expel moisture. Cooking creates moisture, you've probably noticed this when heating something in a microwave. If you hold your hand over a toaster as it is working (carefully!), you'll feel your hand warming up (obviously), but also it'll start to feel damp. It isn't any different with an air fryer.

So there's potentially hot air coming out of the bottom (around the edges) and there's hot air coming out of the back. They need to be given space, even if this mucks up the carefully balanced æsthetic of your kitchen.

Nuggets

These nuggets were, in point of fact, actually pretty grim. I ate them, but only after drowning them in chili sauce and/or ketchup to try to give my mouth some shock value to detract from the texture that seemed to me what it would be like to make a burger out of flour glue and the dust you get in a vacuum cleaner bag (once you filter out the hair and dead spiders).

At the end of the year I had thirty euros of meal vouchers. That expired at the end of the day. What to do?

McNuggets lurking in the freezer.

Yup. I went to the burger flinger and got myself a meal of twenty McNuggets, which came with a plentiful amount of cold chips, and a half litre of a brown sugary liquid that only passes for coke in the minds of people too young to remember what coke used to taste like. I'm mildly annoyed that you cannot get coffee or suchlike as an alternative. Every single drink that comes with a meal is cold. I got my coke-like-liquid without ice, because who the hell wants ice in a drink in the middle of winter?
Note - they don't do milkshakes in France. They were introduced a while back as a sort of desert (never as a with-meal drink), but I guess runny ice cream was just a step too far for most people. Small strawberry (with flavouring) or vanilla (without flavouring) milkshakes are listed on the menu, but this implies that the machine is working...

I then got myself another box of twenty, which to my mild pleasure contained twenty one nuggets, and when I got home I let both boxes cool before putting them into an airtight freezer bag and then into the freezer. Now when I feel like nuggets, I can have actual nuggets and not... icky things that might only exist because there is no law against it.

Now when I feel like a quick snack, I can simply throw some things into the air fryer and ten(ish) minutes later...

For when all that is needed is a quick snack.

English sucks

When someone starts to program a computer for the first time, they sit in front of the machine and they enter text. In all but some deeply arcane languages, they type words - ones resembling English, because between its alphabet and its grammar, English is one of the easiest human languages, both to read and write as well as to understand.

Oh boy. Red flag, bull.

I specifically avoided using the English flag
so people don't think this is something to do with Brexit.

This is what I wrote...

English is one of the easiest human languages

Oh really?!?

[rolls up sleeves]

I live and work in France and a topic of discussion from time to time is about how awful English can be. I find it easy as I grew up speaking it (and by consequence I really can't get my head around all this gender crap, it's a book, it's a thing, it's not masculine or feminine, it's flattened bits of squashed tree flesh with ink splatter in various patterns that magically impart information).

English grammar is a mess riddled with exceptions to the rule.

English is a stress-timed language (that's how Shakespearean stuff works) which can be not only very confusing for somebody from a syllable-timed language, but there are plenty of arcane rules about where to put the stress. Contract is not the same word as Contract, for example.

To ram this home, say this sentence seven times, and each time put the emphasis on the next word along: I never said she stole my money. You've just said seven different things.

Pronunciation is a mess. It's not just that there are words that look identical that are completely different (like "wind" (that which blows) and "wind" (what you'd do to fishing line)), even certain letter sequences are batshit crazy, like "ough" (rough, thought, through, though, etc etc). On the flip side, "wine" and "whine" sound identical but are two completely different, unrelated, words.

And good luck explaining to a foreigner words like "choir". Really, English is a language crying out for a whole pile of accents so people can look at a word and know how to say it.

Speaking of nonsense words: Queue. That is all.

But this wouldn't help as, thanks to the widespread use of English and people's regional variations, there are hundreds of similar but notably different ways to say the same things. Hell, in England there can be a dozen entirely different accents in a hundred mile radius.

Oh, and this means that the same words can be pronounced in entirely unexpected and interesting ways because of these differences. My mother, born and raised in Maryland, found out the hard way that "Woking" and "Basingstoke" are not said like she expected (for non-Brits: woe-king and bay-zing-stow-k).

We shall politely gloss over the extra Us in English words like "colour", and the use of "s" for a "z" sound, like "realise", and the missing words in American English, such that "write me" is a complete sentence. But we shall take a moment to consider the startling array of sounds that an English speaker needs to master in other to speak good English. Nobody at work, and there's like a hundred and fifty people, are capable of saying my name correctly. It's just a bunch of sounds that literally don't exist in French. Related to this, a cow-orker was annoyed and decided to swear in English...but the best she could do was "oh sheet". Or should that be "oh sheat"?

Word order is always a fun one. While there are many variations in the world's languages about which way to put the subject, the object, and the verb; English has rules and is quite happy to break them because screw you.

English also has a long long long history of pillaging words and grammatical prefixes from wherever and whenever. This gives us complete bullshit like flammable and inflammable mean the same thing, but visible and invisible are complete opposites.

Lots of homophones to make things harder to understand. You might see the word "date". You'll need context to know whether it's a day, a romantic outing, some sort of fruit, or a vague concept of time (like carbon dated), or just referring to something old fashioned.

Sometimes one needs to use "that that" in a sentence and even though it is correct it just looks peculiar.

Adjectives... Oh my. In order to speak "correct" English, there's a big list of what adjective goes where in relation to the rest. It's why we might talk about the small round plastic mirror, but not the round plastic small mirror.

Mouse pluralises to mice, but "house" pluralises to "houses". It's regional (and possibly old fashioned) that roof pluralises to rooves instead of roofs.

If you feel proper chuffed that you make it this far, it doesn't matter whether you're pleased or annoyed. Chuffed is a contronym, so it'll happily mean whichever you want.

Oh, and one final thing about English. Always remember, it's i before e except after c... right? right?

.

I'm not familiar enough with languages to know what would be an easy language to learn, but it's not English. The only benefit that English has is that so many people speak so many variations (some more broken than others) that English speaking people generally understand even somewhat messed up English.

As opposed to French where I (living and working in Brittany) had the bizarre experience of watching my cow-orkers completely fail to understand a girl from Toulouse. Yes, her French sounded different enough that I noticed it was different, but it wasn't that different. So there's me, qui parle comme une vache espagnol, translating between the two. A bloody Brit interpreting a Frenchie for another Frenchie. What. The. Actual.....

I'll leave you with this: "tittynope" is a word. You're welcome.

And, just to clarify: while most people use chuffed to mean pleased (because that's how it is in British English), it can also mean annoyed (mostly in American English, some sources say British Informal but I've never heard the negative connotation used in England).
This confusion helps to demonstrate a little bit more why English, as a language, is a pain in the arse.

Horrible coding

public static bool CompareBooleans(bool orig, bool val)
{
   return AreBooleansEqual(orig, val);
}

internal static bool AreBooleansEqual(bool orig, bool val)
{
   if(orig == val)
      return false;
   return true;
}

It seems to me that this is what happens when a company monitors employee activity by such shonky methods as keystrokes or amount of time parked on arse in front of keyboard.
Quite a lot of proper coding is thinking through the problem, working out how to step through the problem. That may involve doodling, brainstorming with a whiteboard, talking to a pet rock, and whatever else helps them to organise their thoughts.
As for the fact that they wrote all of that to compare two booleans and still got it wrong - is this because they are a crap programmer that somehow managed to pass a course in mediocrity, or is it because they feel underpaid and not respected and so just don't care any more?

Truth is, in the latter case, either could be true. Certain places in the world act as farms for badly trained programmers to make a company rich - take a look at some of the code released as a part of the Horizon Enquiry (the British Post Office fiasco).
But, on the other hand, companies are often quite good about talking about trust and reliability and how we're all a happy family while management actively suppress employee wages and refuse replacing broken or outdated equipment, mess around with time off, and shuffle employee working hours "for the good of the company" because they see employees as numbered assets on a spreadsheet rather than actual people. So is this simply incompetence, or is it malicious compliance? At least they put the curly braces in the right places.

Me? Well, I'm quite sure I have written some lousy code - especially if it was something to do with maths given my maths often sucks at the whole mathing part, but in this case I think I'd simply die of shame if I wrote such code.

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David Pilling, 5th January 2025, 19:27

Programming and languages I would say are a result of first mover advantage. OTOH English as used in programming languages is simple. People only going to use programming languages to make confusion - are programming languages more complicated that English - find us examples of badly named variables etc.    If you Google:    "CompareBooleans(bool orig, bool val)"    with quotes for an exact match, it pulls up lots of hits. Seems to have been around for a long time - 2019. Reddit mostly.

jgh in Japan, 6th January 2025, 09:29

"give her a call in about seven years"    So he's NINE?!?!? EUUUGGGGHhhhh!!!!! Peeeedo!oooo!!!

Gavin Wraith, 6th January 2025, 12:57

English is difficult, no doubt about it. Danish is easier, once you have the rules of pronunciation. Dialects of English seem to be mostly vowel-shift. I have no idea how to produce the Derry accent. But try  this:  https://youtu.be/Acl6a8LX0O4  for difficulty of pronunciation - a recording in Ubykh.

Rick, 6th January 2025, 15:43

JGH - I think he was 12. +7 would be 19, which may be the legal age in the state in which the film was made?  Either way, problematic...

Rob, 6th January 2025, 19:03

I was on the tube many many years ago, and was asked directions by a couple of Americans who were struggling to even say where they wanted to wanted to go. It turned out to be Leicester Square. Thank goodness there's no station named Cholmondeley..

Rob, 6th January 2025, 19:10

After teaching myself ZX BASIC, Z80 machine code, BBC BASIC and 6502, I successfully got myself a programming job. Writing a varient of COBOL... If you want a programming language that's mostly writing things out longhand in English, this is a good candidate.  MULTIPLY PRICE BY QTY GIVING LINETOTAL.  MULTIPLY LINETOTAL BY VATRATE GIVING LINEVAT.   ADD LINETOTAL TO ORDERTOTAL.  ADD LINEVAT TO VATTOTAL.  etc.. making sure all variables were unique in the first six characters too..

Rick, 6th January 2025, 19:24

You speak COBAL?    Why aren't you raking in £$€¥ keeping those creaking ancient banking systems alive? 😉    [and, on the subject of English, note how "creaking ancient" sounds odd, it should be "ancient creaking" shouldn't it?]

Rob, 6th January 2025, 19:26

I was looking at some old (1990s) C code a while back and it started off:    #ifndef is  #define is ==  #define isnt !=  #define and &&  #define or ||  #define not !  #define until(x) while(!(x))  #define unless(x) if(!(x))  #define null 0   #define since(x)  #endif    This was so the rest of the code could use completely non-standard constructs in almost every test and conditional thereafter. If I'd actually been proficient in C then I dare say this would have blown my mind..

Rob, 6th January 2025, 19:37

I've got a gig on Fiverr, but only ever receive spam. You probably have to be "known" to get the job offers, and I've not been employed as a programmer for over 20 years.. I keep my hand in as a hobby, but not with COBOL!

jgh in Japan, 7th January 2025, 02:44

Filmed in Georgia (the state, not the country). Age of consent = 16.

jgh in Japan, 7th January 2025, 02:46

I too "know" COBOL, but have never been paid to use it despite screams of pain from employers at the shortages. A few years ago I downloaded an updated compiler for Windows and did a bit of "play" programming and rebuilt some code from uni.

Rick, 7th January 2025, 08:50

@JGH: 🤷

A tree-dwelling mammal, 8th January 2025, 01:13

COBOL? Pah. Back in my day you had to flip toggle switches on the front panel, and that was just to input the bootloader. Then feed a stack of punched cards into the card reader to load the second-stage bootloader. Then... *ahem*    Actually, my first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. A little more advanced than flipping switches to input the bootloader, but not by much. As anyone who remembers the VIC (or the C64) knows, there was zero support in the OS (or in BASIC) for sound, colour (apart from character colour), hi-res / user-defined graphics etc etc.    Want to redefine a character? No equivalent of VDU 23 on CBM. You had to poke directly into RAM then poke the register on the video chip to move the start of character memory.    Want to make sounds? Start poking the sound chip.    Want to change the screen background or border colour? Poke a register on the video chip.    The only thing you could do through the OS (and hence through BASIC) was change the text foreground colour - Commodore had at least been nice enough to wedge some colour control codes into the operating system. Otherwise you'd have to poke a location in BASIC's workspace (you do anyway if you want to use multicolour mode).    And Commodore's BASIC 2 was awful. No structures, no REPEAT or WHILE loops, just GOTO and GOSUB everywhere. Honestly, moving to the BBC Micro was a breath of fresh air when I realised just how awesome DEF PROC and DEF FN were.

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