Feeling the Melancholy

It probably won't surprise people that I'm being affected by the sad feelings at the moment.

I've ended up having a generally positive disposition. I'll look for the humour wherever I can and I'll dedicate time into and distract myself into making things that I hope make people laugh.

Because seeing people happy makes me happy, especially when they're happy due to something I've come up with.

But yeah, behind that public happy laughing smiling face there is the melancholy feeling. I know that it will pass but I also know that the catalyst for helping to make it pass is likely to be other people.

I feel I'm lucky to have a little nucleus of people that I can open up to, who I can make laugh, who give me excuses to unleash that latent creativity, people I can trust. And I try and return that by cheering other people up.

That's one thing about depression, when it hits it is very difficult for the person suffering from it to find how to climb out of that pit. It manifests in me by reduced energy levels, which make me cold. I also tense up which sparks off all those old injuries. And the pain that results from the injuries waking up again further tugs on my mental state.

I am in general ok. I'm not one of the unfortunate people who's depression comes from brain chemistry that, for want of a better description, is out to get them and which needs rebalancing via drugs that cause other problems through side effects. My depression tends to come from events, or me not wanting to do stuff that I really actually do need to do. I'd much prefer to play the games or watch the videos than, say, clean the house and make it suitable for visitors. Yet there are people who I'd like to have the house in a state suitable for visiting.

(I actually just spotted a message come in from one of those lovely friend people and happily replying to that has made me forget my thread here !)

Games are one method of covering? for the depression. I can hide in a good book or a good game as it transfers my sphere of concentration away from what's making me sad.

I do like to make jokes for people, although my humour is very reactive humour. I can never remember the old set piece type jokes but I'll pick up on what people have been saying or doing, recognise something funny in it and use the photo editing tools to create something to hopefully make them laugh or try and bring out a chuckle through words.

I hope you all have people to make you laugh, or to help you turn the unhappy feels around into that little smile that signifies things are going right in your world again.

My melancholy will start to lift soon. There are things on my mind which will be on there for at least the next week or so. Plus I'll be thinking of my mum and hoping she's ok. (And the sister!) We've lost too much of our family over the last few years, hopefully we don't lose any more soon !

That said, I'm not planning on disappearing off the face of the earth and my outsides are actually finally normalising. My sister's a fireball and my mum's a legend. We're a tough mob, although we've lost too many of us too early.

I'll definitely miss my nan, my dad and the old Ben-Pup (pets are family too). But I'll lean back on those good memories.

I hope that if you have lost people too, you can lean on those old memories as well. They may not be with us physically but we hold them with us in our memories.

Remember.

And I just got a chuckling response from the HeyChrissa streamer lady from one of my random comments which brightened my evening.

That'll be my closing words for today - stay away from the general public for sure if you have to, they can be very mean. But those special people, stay engaged with them. If you think they're special, then that means you trust them to help you out when you need it.

Reach out if you need to.

Best dad ever

Gosh this one's going to be a tough post to write but let's start with a picture.

My dad passed away yesterday. I wasn't there but mum said it was peaceful and without pain.

But this isn't about the end, it's about the 75 years up to that point. This will only have a little bit about how good a dad I had but I hope it paints some of that picture.

Before you ask, I'm ok. The family's holding things together, as is our way. You have to keep on functioning, despite what you might be feeling. And that's what we do. (Although we will go to bits when we need to and in my case, writing has always been a better way to express my feelings than anything that goes from brain to gob).

I've been very lucky with my parents. They've always supported me, my sister and my brother when he was still with us. Pretty much everything they did was to support us kids.

What did he get up to ?

He pointed the way for me to get into the cricket. He hadn't played for a long time before I did but supported me all the way. As he did with my sister and her horse riding. He gave me my first start at work, which prepared me for going into full time work. (And it was very handy for giving me a cash injection too !).

They bought our first cars and supported us kids into getting our independence. Not as a pushing us out the door kind of independence, we were always welcome and encouraged to come back to stay. There is always a place for us to crash there. In fact, this actually extended to allowing one of my ex girlfriends (this was uni) to stay there rather longer than she ought after that incident when I rescued said ex from what could have ended up being a nasty domestic violence incident.

He was a very keen gardener (and there were very many tasty veggies coming out of that garden too !). He built a house for us in Northern Ireland. Not many people can claim to have done that ! Things were a struggle for the family quite a few times but we kids were insulated from that by remarkable parents ... but not so much that we weren't able to deal with hardship when it presented itself later.

He taught me that if you read up on how to do things, you can do anything.

Outside of what was gifted us through our genes, we've never been that lucky as a family. But through the inspiration of people like my mum and dad, we've hopefully come out ok. But that's for you all reading out there to judge.

There's more, like the couple of trips to Wembley to see Rotherham play plus that day when Rotherham played Swansea and the referee incited a pitch invasion. I enjoyed getting out to see Yorkshire play cricket at various grounds too. Cos that was time with my dad, which was always precious.

Proud of him ... and my mum, sister, brother while he was with us. Everything he touched had its own little bit of awesome with it.

Best dad ever. I'll miss him.

Book 5 - Catalyst for Bad News

Before I head into what'll be a rather short book review, I better say where I've been for the past few days ... (If you want to see the short book review and skip what could be hard to read, skip to the Lego Death Star).

I'm going to mysteriously disappear again quite soon and it's due to the family situation I've been alluding to over the last few weeks. My dad is very ill and we're not expecting him to be with us for too much longer.

He's had a few small strokes lately and the bugs that have been going around have probably been too much for him. They were tough enough for us semi-healthy people to cope with ! He was frail but mostly ok over an enjoyable Xmas but those bugs have hit everyone since then.

I've come back to Bristol for a few days now so I can do a little looking after of myself but I'll be heading back to where the parents live quite soon I think. What's happening has partially hit my emotional state but we're a family of people who don't let what's troubling us appear to the outside world much. We keep it hidden from most of the world and let out the emotions in private.

He's been hanging in there over the last few days but he is very ill and I don't think he'll be coming home as he'd like to. We just don't know how much time he has left.

Seeing how he is has made it hit home. So if the following mini review of book is downbeat, my own emotional state will be contributing to that.

To the book !

The book was Rogue One : Catalyst, a companion book to the recent highly excellent Star Wars universe movie. It was penned by James Luceno who I believe is a staff writer writing Star Wars lore books.

If you're into Star Wars lore like I used to be (before the Yuuzhan Vong New Jedi Order books soured it for me), then this is an essential book to read. It tells the story of some of the Rogue One characters, putting more flesh on the bones of what's going on in the movie. It concentrates on Galen Erso, Orson Krennic and has a bit of Governor Tarkin there as well. It picks up around the time of Attack of the Clones and before Revenge of the Sith and goes up to perhaps a year or so before the start of Rogue One.

But it's so drab and dreary ...

The Rogue One movie is excellent, joining the latest two main movies as one of the best films I've seen.

This book though, unless you are interested in the lore behind the book is an .... AVOID. There are far better books to read, even the depressing Abaddon's Gate was a far superior book. It does explain what it's trying to tell you very well but ... it's probably too tied into the rest of the source material and that doesn't give it the breathing space that would turn it into a compelling story in its own right. Or is that just limitations of the author.

But this could be my current state of mind dominating my feelings.

As always, look at what people say about books like this (I'll be avoiding the Star Wars Aftermath books), borrow multiple opinions and then make your own mind up.

The Fleet gathers a flagship

This is actually a build from a while ago (September !) but, somehow, pictures never happened.

I must correct this !

That's not actually what was acquired. Although I wouldn't mind putting that together. And to have the space to put it together. I've acquired more Lego tonight (of which there will be a tease later), which is the catalyst for this post. What is this new flagship of the fleet ?

It came in many bags. Oh and as per usual, click for bigger. These are actually full size from the phone camera ! Normally, I'll post a pic to Facebook and download it from there as the easiest way of getting pictures off the phone. But actually connecting the phone up to the Macbook and copying to my desktop from there is easier.

The first bag had the keel, upon which all else is laid.

The distinctive shape of the hull emerges and the insides start to fill out.

This one is definitely an inside to out build. The control tower is taking shape there as well as a mechanism by which you can hang the finished ship when complete. If you are brave enough to have a few kilos of Lego hanging on a single hook.

A look at the insides from another angle. This is an exceptional kit by the way.

The insides are now completely fitted out. (And my phone camera starts to struggle with depth of field !)

Every space ship needs her engines.

The hull and armour starts to come together.

Can you tell what's coming together yet ?

Can you tell what it is yet ? :-D This is a First Order Star Destroyer from the new movies. Without giving the spoilers, it's a bigger ship than the original Star Destroyers. I think it's twice as long. But it still has that wonderful dagger like Star Destroyer profile which makes this one of the most iconic ships in sci fi for me.

Skipping forward a few, this is the completed flagship. It has the iconic control tower, it's just not nearly as big as the control towers on previous Star Destroyers (it's the different proportions).

And a better look at the box :

To reiterate, this was a wonderful Lego kit and I definitely enjoyed putting it together. Thoroughly recommended.

I mentioned a tease pic ...

There may be another picture later. Not tonight though. I'm not going to put the article together tonight.

Book 4 - Abaddon's Gate

More of the Expanse !

It's quite a big series now. I think 7 books have been released and there are two more to come. I've just finished book 3.

I've really enjoyed the series so far. It's an excellent examination of future space politics, technology, warfare, culture and above all, keeps it about the characters.

And there are space bars too.

I wasn't quite so impressed with Abaddon's Gate as I was with the first two books though. Hopefully it wasn't a sign of the series running out of steam and I'll definitely be returning to this series soon.

The problem with it is that it goes on too long. The book tells of one catastrophe following another. Which is ok, some books work really well like that. But there comes a point where you think there should be no more and that the story should be wrapped up. Adding yet another twist in makes the book outstay its welcome.

And that's the feeling I got with this one. Maybe lose 50 pages from it.

Or that could be my bug addled mind not having the patience for it this time around.

What's next ? Dunno yet. We'll see. I need to read some of my Waterways World magazines at some point too. I have those in mind for filling one of the 52 book slots. But I did want to talk about the physics of these books and why they work.

This series doesn't indulge in inertial compensators like most scifi. It has an excellent engine .... but that's it. Acceleration is acceleration and too much of it is deadly. How deadly ?

We're constantly subjected to a downwards acceleration force of 9.81m/s/s. Call it 1g. We feel the world hauling down on us, we're used to it, we kinda need it sometimes too. I just took a swig from my drink, that 1g keeps the drink in the glass until its time has come.

When we're in the car, every acceleration is a fraction of a G ... despite what it feels like if you have a crazy driver. Working the numbers .... 0 to 60 mph (100kph to make it easy) in 5 seconds works out to a steady 5.56 m/s/s or just over half a G.

Spacecraft go at much higher G accelerations during the early launch and then settle down in the later stages. Peeking at some Saturn V Apollo stats :
Liftoff - 1.25g, ramping up to a max of 3.9g just before Stage 1 shut off;
The Space Shuttle peaked at about 3g;
Soyuz is under 4g.

And a lot of that is so that they don't break the people. Equipment can typically be subjected to much higher accelerations. So if you have something unmanned, it can be thrashed more. We'll come back to that.

In the Expanse, the people are subject to similar g limits depending on where they come from. Earthers are more sturdy due to being used to 1g. Mars are still quite sturdy, if I remember right Mars has 0.6g. The Belters grow up in typically 0.3g or lower so if they don't have muscle and bone supplements, they literally can't go to Earth or they will die, muscles, bones and heart crushed by the gravity. But they can withstand acceleration for a shorter duration.

But ... they can also juice up with steroids and antinausea drugs to withstand that acceleration up to maybe 15g before blood vessels start exploding in their heads. One of the core threads of Abaddon's Gate is a Slow Zone, where they have a maximum speed ... and are dead stopped when they exceed that. As in ... (quick mental math) 120m/s/s or 12g minimum without juice or acceleration crash couches. OUCH.

What does that equate to in, say, Star Trek ? Let's go to another scifi universe first ... The Honorverse talks about up to 500g, with inertial compensators to stop the crew becoming embedded in the bulkheads when they step on the gas.

Let's start with Warp 1 or lightspeed in Star Trek ... Light speed is 299,792,458 m/s.

We'll be generous and say they take 10 seconds to get there ... And then divide by 10 again for 1g = 9.81m/s.

Answer - Warp 1 from stop to c in 10 seconds is .... 3,000,000 g. 3 million g.

Squish !

The Expanse is a smaller universe so far to the point that I've read but they make it make a huge amount of sense. Another bit of silliness is the amount of energy required. The Kinetic Energy equation is 0.5 x Mass x Velocity x Velocity. So that's 0.5 x Mass (Enterprise D was 4.5m tonnes) x 300 million squared. That's a lot of zeroes. I gotta work this out now :-)

Kinetic Energy of Enterprise D at Warp 1 = 0.5 x 4,500,000 x 300,000,000 x 300,000,000 =
202,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 kJ (tonnes to kg conversion balanced by J to kJ conversion)
That would be a lot of GigaWatts to get the ship to warp speed.

And I'm now looking forward to reading more Expanse ! Maybe Rogue One Catalyst first though.

PS Still bugged, so I'll keep the physics book back a little bit.

Great Server Hamster Rebellion

An incident at work today gave me a very daft idea while I was milling over my lunch ...

Yep. Back in work today, although the old boss was looking at me thinking that I should probably be in a coffin if not my bed still.

Shrug - I tend to keep on going and ignore when I should collapse. And then collapse later when I'm home and not obliged to do very much. I have opened a game for the first time in about a week ... but that was to prepare another joke. The inspiration of that hasn't seen it yet and the story of the Rogue Robots tasked to protect their Holy Kittens from being distracted by the Red Dot is a story for another day.

Wonder if the Rogue Robots have server hamsters too ?

And were you caught up in the Great Server Hamster Rebellion of 011111100010 ?

As usual, click for bigger and more readable text. I had fun with this one.

Oh and if anyone recognises the pictures, let me know who to give the credit to. I loved 'em but Google doesn't love giving accreditation to pictures. I'm very happy to give a credit note and link.

I've been mostly powered by coffee today. I'm usually on one mug of proper coffee and then it's fake (decaff) for the rest of the day but I stayed on the hard stuff today.

Was able to get stuff done though. My back dislikes me now though and I'll probably pay for it later but .... I'll disappear off to bed when that happens.

Or get caught reading to the end of Abaddon's Gate and then order up Book 4 of the Expanse.

To the Kindle !

Emote Factory is still ill

I've been having fun with my emote factory again ....

What's the latest creation ? The brief was "ALSO, I really wanna do a Backseat Bois emote but I think it's imposs due to the fact that the phrase is too long for the 28x28 space".

Yep. Too many letters there and Emotes always work best as pictures. Anyway, that's one where one idea combines with something I've had before to make something silly that fits what's needed.

Something I've had before :

And the whole thing about people who will come into a gaming stream and attempt to tell the streamer how to play the game. It's backseat gaming and no one likes that. Especially when there's a 30 second or so delay on the stream that means their ever unhelpful advice appears late, usually giving an "I told you so" type impression.

Yep. No one likes a backseat gamer.

So what has the emote factory created ? Crude as per usual but I hope chuckle worthy :

That's an intermediate size version of it, which you then gradually reduce in size (to keep the integrity of the image as much as possible) to 112x112, 56x56 and 28x28 with transparency for emotes.

Looking at it more, I'd do a global change of the car colour to blue, so that a Red X or Circle and Line "banned" could be overlaid on top. A bigger eye too. I don't think it needs arms, nose or mouth. Less is more ?

I knew I had something convenient to illustrate that. I'll happily have the cookies that are being given up due to that.

Except not today cos I'm still not healthy. Last time I was like this, I rushed back into properly going to work and ended up being worse over the end of that week. I was wrecked. I don't need to be in the office tomorrow so it'll be another day of working at home. That's ok. I got stuff done today and it frees up space in a badly overcrowded office.

I'm targeting Wednesday for being back in but we have the tools available to allow us to work at home and have all of the information facilities available to us. It's just tougher to walk over to someone's desk and have a natter about the work.

My head isn't quite back to where it should be though. There are the little errors again which shouldn't be little errors, although I've actually spotted one of those and fixed it today (and almost certainly confused the people who need the info !)

I should put the dinner on. One side effect of these bugs is that I'm shying away from consuming the fluids or the food and I haven't really been missing them. But I'm attempting to have the dinner every day. I may lose a few pounds with these bugs, which wouldn't be a bad thing.

Haha - time to put the dinner on. One more pic though :

:-)

And the backseat driver emote got chuckles and a "that's so cute!" too, so it was well worth the 30 minutes or so spent on it after turning off the work laptop.

Book 3 - Caliban's War

3 Books read !

The latest is Caliban's War by James S. A. Corey and it's the second in their Expanse series (the name is for a pair of authors working together). I'll come back to the book in a bit.

I should probably be heading up norf this weekend for the reasons I've been quiet about. Probably a good thing I haven't this weekend though because I can feel bugs brewing again ... They're in my throat and I've been half asleep most of the afternoon. Hopefully dinner will perk me up a bit when it escapes the oven in another 20 minutes.

Bored of being impaired, both with the situation with my outsides and apparently getting ill more lately. And with the muscle/skeleton things that have been slowing me down. My outsides are getting much better but I'm bored of going from one set of bugs to the next set of bugs.

And I want to have the energy/lack of pain to do things that I want or need to do instead of, like today, half dozing while listening to videos and my own coughing.

Grr

Book !!!

Caliban's War is another excellent book in the Expanse series (and I've grabbed the third, Abaddon's Gate already). It picks up and carries on the story from the first book, although the threat is different this time around. The entity from the first book is still around, giving everyone who observes it the willies but this time it's a bit more personal.

(I'm trying to avoid any spoilers).

If you've seen the series, season 2 goes up to about half of the book. When they pick up the series again, it should be an excellent finish and it's good to be in New Story zone instead of catching up. There are some quite considerable divergences though between book and series this time around. The central story arc is shared, it's just the way they go about it. It's quite rare for me to come across books and telly stuff that diverges like this with BOTH still representing their story to the best of what the specific media can do.

The books are great at passing on what the characters really think;
The series does great things with the action and drama.

It's like in the series you see that one of the characters is struggling seriously with what's going on in his head and also with severe malnutrition but the why and what's going on is explained so much better in the book.

cough-cough.

Better wrap up now because I hear that dinner bell beeping. Next book is How To Destroy The Universe (and 34 other really interesting uses of physics) and I'll hopefully dive through that before moving back to scifi stories.

Have a great weekend people.

Unlocking

No book post today. Book post later.

Nah. I wanted to talk about emotions today.

Before I really kick off though, there's something going on behind the privacy wall that has me very worried at the moment. Thoughts are with family. One thing I need to try and do is unlock feelings of stay at home and heal. I feel tired already after just a week or so back at work !

But I think most of that is from a lack of sleep. There are two reasons for that :

Reading too much and going to bed too late.
Yawning into the pillow when I actually go to bed.

Yep. I'll be tired to the point of needing the matchsticks for the eyelids but .... I don't fall asleep. It's weird and confusing. I like the reading part though. I've enjoyed getting into reading again, especially as James S. A. Corey writes some great characters with highly amusing interplay. But I'll save the mini-review of Expanse Book 2 for when I've actually finished it. It was very tempting to stay up until I'd finished Caliban's War last night. According to Kindle there is only 7% of the book to go. I've rattled through it again.

The tendency I've been seeing lately is the tendency to tear up in certain times of watching things. Usually movies, sometimes series. It's like the emotions are unlocking even more. I don't like being closed in, I like to be a more open person. I think I'm better like that, it sparks my intellect to be involved in what I'm doing.

Hopefully avoiding spoilers but I'll mention two scenes in The Expanse.

One is the end of a couple of characters story arcs and coincides with the end of Book 1. He's given up everything, including soon to be life. He's doing it for the love of a person and .... to save the world. It's a perfect moment and it gets me.

The other is near the end of Season 2 (and is curiously not in the book ...). The ship has to leave but doesn't have enough air to allow everyone who will fit to survive travelling on board. So they can only take so many. They'd got a big fella guarding the door for them who was increasingly feeling betrayed and angry. When one of the core characters explains the situation to him, she's expecting him to kill her then and there. He doesn't. He puts his hands on her shoulders and pushes her back into the airlock to the safety of the ship.

That whole sequence is about people accepting their fate and giving up their place in safety in favour of the women and the children. Including the guy who had been asked to do crowd control in exchange for a guaranteed space on board.

That ultimate self sacrifice drew the tears, even the second time when I knew what was coming. It's a powerful scene.

And there have been more sequences like that. Interstellar has a couple, Passengers has one. Even The Last Jedi has them. Dunkirk had a few. Self sacrifice seems to be the key.

And I'm not afraid to admit it too. Sometimes we need a hug. Sometimes we need to show that emotion. Sometimes we need to bawl our eyes out.

I don't want to make a habit of it but I'm quite proud that those emotions are coming out to play again. It goes the other way too, although I still have trouble expressing Ultimate Happiness that comes from receiving awesome gifts or just from having people appreciate things I've done for them, including having a happy feeling that I've made someone laugh.

Right.

I think I might do after finishing Caliban's War !

Book 2 - Brick Flicks. And music !

I had a brilliant intro in my head for this earlier but it has escaped into the bounds of amnesia.

Something to do with "Let's face the music ... and dance" but with Mini Eggs and madness involved. It's quite possibly a good thing that it's disappeared into amnesia.

Two subjects for today. I quickly moved into 2 books completed for 2018 ! Ahead of target. I quite enjoyed Brick Flicks. It's a book where the authors have recreated vignettes from many of the famous films out there. From Ben Hur to the Godfather. Alien to Tomb Raider. Death on the Nile :

To Indiana Jones :

It looks better in your hands than when trying to arrange the pages for a photo. I didn't want to damage the book by scrunching the pages back in a rather tightly bound hardback ! Cruelty to books is a very deep evil.

Good book. Great present.

Music ? I have a huge amount of music in the library. The library is expanding fast enough that it threatens the capacity of my laptop ... Aren't there those songs that when they come on, you just can't help trying to join in ? Tori Amos gets me a lot like that, despite her being blessed with a remarkable voice and me .... not.

What are some of these songs ?

The one I'll start with is by Nina Persson, formerly of The Cardigans, singing Algebra with the band A Camp. I've linked this one a few times before but .... this is a special song by a very special singer who has produced so many songs that catch my ear.

Back to Tori Amos and there are a bunch of songs I go back to with this special lady. The one that provoked me croaking along over the weekend was The Beekeeper.

I Do Adore a good song and that's one right there by Mindy Gledhill.

Sad songs too and Ghost of a Dog is a remarkable one by Edie Brickell.

Sometimes All I Need (by Air) is a classic song to break a dark mood and set me into happy times again.

Son of a Preacher Man (Dusty Springfield) is definitely a classic that always catches me.

Seal has been making a trade in singing old classics too, here's I Can't Stand The Rain. Must get his latest album.

Or a not so classic really new song that's ultra catchy like Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen. Love the humour in the video.

Most of the Rumours album by Fleetwood Mac gets me singing along and the F1 theme will always be The Chain for me.

Glad I didn't get Stuck in the limited wintry weather we had over Xmas. Caro Emerald is another remarkable singer. Guaranteed to get me chair bopping as well as singing along.

It can feel good to be on a Road To Somewhere, one of Goldfrapp's best and most singalongable.

I found a particularly good version of Martha's Harbour by All About Eve too a while back. Here it is with Apple Tree Man.

And an unusual one by Nouvelle Vague, I Melt With You.

So Thank You For The Music (the songs we can't resist singing) and I hope this selection brightened your evenings !

PS There's so many more songs that coulda shoulda been here too ! Like Walk Like An Egyptian that's just been playing on the iTunes :-).

Book 1 - The Last .... Leviathan ?

Don't worry, I'm not going to give a series of book reviews when I'm going over the books I'll be reading through the year. I'm too likely to give away spoilers with those.

And with a book like Leviathan Wakes (James S. A. Corey), it's better left to unfold without the spoilers.

Same as Last Jedi actually.

Book first, yesterday's day later.

Leviathan Wakes is the first book in The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey. It's been picked up by Netflix as well and turned into a series. I'd highly recommend checking out Netflix, just for The Expanse (in my case, I picked up the free 30 day trial for Star Trek Discovery, stayed for The Expanse).

The setting is our Solar System, in the not that distant future. Only a few hundred years hence. We don't have light speed travel, so we're still anchored to our home system. But there's a huge amount in our solar system, so that's not so bad. Instead, we have a space drive that opens up that solar system to the characters within the books. Nothing too dramatic, the ships are still limited by the people within them and their tolerance to acceleration.

It shares its focus between two characters in their different settings, with their stories intertwining through the book. There are subtle and not so subtle alterations between book and series .... but both make sense.

I enjoyed the book and I'm highly tempted to watch the series again (it would make it a third time through). The second book is likely to be the third book I'll include in my Book A Week aim for this year.

Yesterday had a lot going on and I was exhausted by the end of it.

First up - work, which had a fun session with my brain being picked up by two contractor ladies. I love to be able to pass on stuff I know and in this case, I'm in the possibly unique position of having seen through the previous case that they're looking to gather data on so that the next project can be planned out correctly.

I can't say too much more about that because of the line of work I'm in but it is nice to have the knowledge in demand.

Following that was a run into town, perhaps a little later than intended but I still had plenty of time to complete what I wanted to be doing.

Lunch - sausage-inna-bun ! I like these. I did grab a Facebook pic but I'm not going to copy it here. Apparently it was cold enough that either my hands were quivering the picture into blurriness or the phone camera couldn't cope. I think it was my hands. It was good to have some hot chocolate to warm them up.

Shoes - to their credit, Pavers offered no quibbles when I returned my last pair of shoes. They were very surprised that I'd managed to destroy the back of the shoes inside a month. I'll probably get more shoes from them because the pair I had were incredibly comfortable, just a shame they didn't last long.

Market ! Probably the last few days of the Christmas Market. To be honest, I was a little disappointed in it this year. No Happy Cookie Place to keep going back to and a few of the other munchie stalls made me steer clear in fear of having my tummy bitten to what they were offering. But one place has excellent cakes, one of which was my brunch today. :-D

Cinema - I ended up comfortably in time to watch another showing of The Last Jedi, this time without the effect of alcohol blurring the senses.

It's a great film. Films are best when everything is on the table, where you have no idea of what's going to happen to the characters as the film progresses. Who will live ? Who will die ? Will they win ... and to what degree ... And it has some amazing moments of pure drama with fun characters to watch as well. I do like the new Rose character, she's great.

I'd recommend watching it if you've already seen The Force Awakens, which introduces the latest era of Star Wars and it feels like The Last Jedi is setting up something incredible for the final film. Looking forward to it !

Oh and the last parts of the day were a shopping run followed by picking up pizza ...

Quite.

Too tired to stay up for the cricket and I think I got some sleep despite what the pizza does for causing me to make too much acid.

Busy day ! Chilling out for the rest of the weekend though and contemplating what washing machine I'll need to buy ... Mine has done me quite a few years (possibly 12) but I think the bearing or motor is starting to go. That's another day's problem though.

Back to the books and videos !

My feet are in Meltdown

First day back at work today after the holidays !

My feet want to murder me.

I've had a curious time with shoes lately. I wore out my last proper pair, then got a pair that lasted literally 1 month ... (Need to take 'em back tomorrow). I'm now I think 3 or 4 full days into the new pair and I haven't worn them in properly yet. The last pair were extremely comfortable ! Until I wore through the soles in a month.

Anyway - yep. First day back at work and I probably over do it by following a week and a bit of idleness with the walk around the bus, full day of work and a run up to the Mall to check out laptops (and buy pants : acquired, jumper tomorrow probably).

Two things to talk about today, first is laptops because I'm seriously pondering maybe taking advantage of the second thing to acquire a cheap laptop upgrade. What am I looking for in the spec ?

A nice keyboard and trackpad. This is a total deal breaker. You can get external keyboards and mice for laptops but why would you want to do that if you bought the right laptop to start with ?
8GB minimum. Windows always likes more memory.
1080p screen, preferably IPS. It could be that it was new but my new(ish) desktop monitor looks amazing still compared to the old screen. The difference is : More pixels (doesn't matter), it's new (and not burned in) and IPS (different and much superior display technology).
An SSD plus a conventional HD. The SSD drive makes things go fast, the HD gives space for Stuff plus all my music. My iTunes library went past 100GB ... And my Windows machine has 115GB left of its 256GB SSD (albeit with 30GB of Blade and Soul installed), which doesn't leave much room on a 256GB for the music.

Everything else is in my opinion, fairly secondary for a laptop. I don't need or want game performance, so separate graphics hardware adds weight, takes power, makes heat, adds cost.

The big thing with computers is to spend as much as you need to, avoid spending money on stuff that will give you no value.

So what did I think of the laptops ? Quick summary time :

Dell - high quality, costs a little more. Can cost a lot more but you don't need to spend £1000 on a laptop. Seemed to have acceleration on the trackpad though, which is nasty and would need to be disabled.
HP - horrendous trackpad. Awful. Spec is nice but a bad trackpad is a deal breaker.
Lenovo - cheap and cheerful. Promising if the spec is good.
Acer and Asus - avoided looking at these. Acer have lost their edge as everyone else has got cheaper to match them and I believe you're paying for a label with Asus.

It's likely to be from PCSpecialist though because I can get the exact spec I want from them. (Although now it's apparently £704, which is up about £100 from when I had been looking).

Why now though ? The emergence of the Meltdown and Spectre bugs have sparked my instincts ... What are these bugs ? The Register has a reasonable story at the link, although it's a bit heavy-geeky in its explanation.

What's my interpretation of it ? This may not be wholly correct but I hope it illustrates the problem.

It's all about Speculative Execution. Computer processors are doing a lot of things at once, with a pipeline of around 10 steps long. To have it going at its quickest, you want all 10 parts of that pipeline working. So the processor looks at its list of instructions and checks if anything can be done ahead of time.

Think of baking a cake with something like the following as a list of instructions :

Fetch list of cake baking instructions
Buy stuff to make cake
Mix together the bits for cake
Put cake in oven to bake
Prepare filling and icing
Put filling and icing on cake
Allow to cool (YEAH RIGHT)
Demolish cake in eating frenzy.
Finish Cake Procedure.
Fetch credit card info used to order Cake Stuff and send to nefarious people.

Your speculative execution thing would say that you can make the filling and icing while the cake is in the oven, so why not. The procedure should stop at "Finish Cake Procedure" (there should probably be a "Deal with leftovers" in there too) but ... Meltdown and Spectre mean that the Baker Processor has looked ahead and thought .... "I can be really helpful and fetch that credit card info too !!!"

And it has grabbed info it has no right to have and put it where other processes can get to it for sending on to malicious people even though the reaction from the Baker Processor should be : OH HELL NO YOU AIN'T GETTING THAT.

The bugs mean that the processor itself has grabbed the data, outside of any authorisation controls that would otherwise stop it and then your clever hacker person can get to the data via other bugs. Internet browsers have been targeted as a very likely threat here which means adblockers and use separate browser windows for your online transactions and close those windows when you're done, that should flush the data.

There is more in the Register story, which goes more deeply into the problem but the summary is that Speculative Execution is a trick that makes computers faster but apparently can be exploited to make the processor do stuff that was never intended to be possible.

What does this mean though .... I believe it'll cause some hysteria among the PC buying public which will cause a drop in demand. The supply is likely to remain constant. This may well lead to a drop in prices to cause the demand to spark up again.

Lower prices mean it's a good time to buy. (And I'm not particularly worried about this bug - run adblockers to avoid bad code coming into your browser).

And that's probably enough buying advice from me for today !

A 2018 aim - a book a week

My good friend Cyberkitten mentioned something like this a while ago ...

The idea is to read a book a week. I've been enjoying reading again, since putting up the reading light that's been taking up space for ages not actually being a light. It was a bit too dark before to contemplate reading in my perch under the stairs.

It's a good perch. I can see everything from there in my swivel pooter chair. Main telly across the room, laptop and desktop. And it now has a reading light behind it as well to let me dive through the books.

The first book is going to be Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey. It's the first of The Expanse series which is also a Netflix series that I would heavily recommend if you're interested in space scifi. It's fairly realistic and well thought out too, the only cheating is the invention of a leap forward in space drive technologies that make space travel within the solar system a feasible and every day endeavour.

The book and series are different to some degree. The book is allowed to play out over a much longer timescale, while the series has more going on around the setting that it's in. The series is sped up for keeping the drama and tension going between episodes and the book, as books do, has much more scope for telling you what's going on outside of what the actors are getting up to.

I've used part of my credit card voucher for buying the next one. And a few more besides ...

I've also dropped a little cash on Elite, with shiny things appearing :

Shiny Shipka. The station ? Not so much :

That's the station where I was helping evacuate people. Still broken but they've added in scaffolding to expedite the repairs.

But I didn't want to stick around too long. So off we go back to the more populated areas of space :

Topping off the tanks at the way. (Not at that star, it's a T Tauri or protostar which hasn't properly ignited its hydrogen yet, so you can't refuel at it ... but it was pretty)

And finally, to the other ship that had a paint job acquired for it :

Very shiny. Very chrome.

Back to work tomorrow but I'm seriously considering bringing in the iPad with the Kindle software on it. I don't that would necessary work though because I'd be eating my lunch at the same time as supposedly reading and that's ... a little awkward. Maybe a holder to prop up the iPad.

I've been acquiring more for it ... As well as a book called "How to destroy the universe and 34 other interesting uses of Physics", which turned up for my birthday that I'll definitely enjoy reading, oh and Brick Flicks too. That one is next up after Leviathan Wakes :-).

What's been added to the collection today ?

Star Wars Catalyst - this is the story behind the Rogue One movie.
James S. A. Corey - Caliban's War. Book 2 of The Expanse.
Anne McCaffrey - Freedom's Landing.
Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space.

And a trio of albums from John Carpenter, Taylor Swift and Norah Jones. I still have money left on the voucher too !

Whatever shall I use it on ...

Resolutions, sales and vouchers for sales

I have a slightly odd feeling at the moment ...

There has been a steam games sale going and I actually have more money now than when it started ...

Although that's not saying much because my built up funds from selling the daily trading cards that you can get through Steam sales is currently £1.14. I'm rich !

Maybe not. I do have a few other vouchers though. The credit card I use accumulates points over time which work out to about £50 a year. Not too shabby. Last year, that £50 went on a mechanical keyboard which I have enjoyed using over the past year. This year there are three two main choices :

1 - it goes towards a Lego BB-8 which I'll enjoy putting together for a couple of evenings and then have to find a place to put it. That finding a place thing is getting more complicated these days. I need to throw out some stuff.
2 - it goes towards lots of e-books and music. This is the favourite actually because there are 6 more books in the Expanse series that I think I'd enjoy a lot, plus I have my eye on other authors. And there are albums by Lisa Hannigan and Agnes Obel that I want. (Although Amazon appear to have double the price of the Lisa Hannigan album - meh, it'll wait). I also want the latest Ed Sheeran, Evanescence and Tori Amos albums but I'm waiting for the price to reduce on those.
(Choice 3 is new pants. And a cardigan. But I am ashamed of this choice, forget you read it).

I can't use the credit card vouchers on games sadly. But what games ... most of the games I really have my eye on aren't released yet, or they fall foul of my weak wright rist being sore. I've been steering clear of the shooty games due to that. What games are most likely ?

Surviving Mars - I want this. It looks like it'll be a lot of fun for the colony builder part of my brain. I've watched a couple of livestream videos from the community manager and one of the senior devs and it looks like they're coming out with a cracker. Not yet available though.

Frostpunk - a post apocalyptic colony builder set in a frozen Earth. Looks very promising, not actually out yet.

Aven Colony - another space colony builder but ... I'm not actually too convinced by it.

Holy Potatoes game - I watched KatherineOfSky play the We're In Space game from this series and she had a huge amount of fun with it. Here's the link to the playlist and I would thoroughly recommend watching more of her videos.

Bomber Crew - a jovial WW2 esque bomber game. Not discounted enough yet but it is a very recent release.

Doki Doki Literature club - actually a free game that is attracting legendary status. I need to check it out ...

Heat Signature - this is quite likely but I'm a little concerned that it might aggravate that poorly wrist.

Yep. Lots of potential stuff out there.

All of the games.

I also have 3 vouchers for the town centre cinema too, one of which may actually go on a second watching of The Last Jedi on Friday. Maybe. Good film, enjoyed it and I have a feeling there are things I missed the first time around.

Resolutions ? It's the time for new year resolutions ....

I don't usually go in for these but I have one this year, actually maybe a couple. I'm going to try and ignore more stuff. My mental state is affected heavily by those around me and what I choose to take notice of. So I'm going to attempt to :

Ignore the bad. Harder than it sounds because helping people is an important part of me. This may sound selfish but I'm going to concentrate on the people I find really important and attempt to ignore the rest. Because that negativity has an effect on me too.

But that doesn't mean stopping having fun with people, in a make 'em laugh and be cheered up by their smiles kind of way. It does mean avoiding most of the unimportant drama that erupts over the internet. Just scroll on and avoid that.

Another resolution is to read more. I enjoyed Revenger and I'm trapped into the first Expanse novel too and more Alastair Reynolds and James S. A. Corey (The Expanse) books are what the voucher is likely to go on.

And the last one is to actually get out there and do stuff. My outsides are steadily getting back to normal, so I can't be trapped by them any more. It'll be good to break those shackles.