Rick's b.log - entry 2015/10/11

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Sunday shenanigans

You who would desecrate this land of the rising sun... With my advent, I, the Yato god, lay waste with the Sekki and expel thy vast defilement! Rend!
That can mean only one thing - a second season of Noragami, this one called Noragami Aragoto. Umm... the somewhat dumbass Yato is the God of calamity, his spirit-boy assistant is also his sword, and the girl with the cat tail is a normal schoolgirl, only the one you see here is her spirit (her body is unconscious somewhere). It's hard to explain (and there's a cast of a dozen others at least); let's just say that it leans heavily on Shinto legend. This is a series the deals with aspects of Japan's unique religion that is more or less the polar opposite to Kamichu!.

If you like cute dead girls, bucketloads of dark humour, and zombies - it's also the second season of iZombie.

One of the final vide greniers of the season, I picked up three things for a total of five euros.

When I was unemployed, many years ago, I used to watch random things on TV, and one of the more amusing things was a bizarre Icelandic creation called LazyTown. This was the story of a young pink-haired girl that moves in with her... what is it, Uncle? All of the town's residents are puppets, with the exception of a superhero called Sportacus (I'm not making this up - Google it!) who is incapable of walking anywhere, he backflips, somersaults, and rolls and such (he was a gymnast in real life), and the nominated "Big Bad" called Robbie Rotten. He likes to be lazy, the kids (real and puppet) like to be active, so Robbie devises plans and disguises that make Wile E Coyote seem like a genius. His disguises are actually awful yet it seems to fool people all the time, episode after episode. There's a load of "it's better to be healthy" thrown into the mix (for instance, an apple is referred to as "sports candy"). There are songs that are pretty catchy (if a little too saccarine-sweet ~~at times~~). And the whole thing takes place in this freaky bendy-walled town with a colour palette off the scale; so much so that it could easily pass for being a live action animé.
In short, it was often one of the only programmes worth watching. So, yeah. A euro for the first four episodes on DVD? Why the hell not?
The intro theme explains who is who and introduces the entire setup:

Next up is a puzzle. China, perhaps? MB (the puzzle makers) usually say where scenic things are, but the credit for this is photolibrary.com so it could be anywhere. Still, a nice photo.

Finally, at last, a printed copy of the closest thing we have to an official guide to C that isn't dry ISO/ANSI specification documents. Running to 272 pages (including prefaces and index), this might help to clarify some of the dusty corners of C, as well as being some useful revision for the parts that confuse most people - pointers. C is perhaps the only language on earth where something like *p = (void *)**q[&r]->s[t].u or void *(*func)(int *); can compile into legitimate code. Whether or not it is correct code is an entirely different question. ☺

A video of my own now: Étrelles (the town of the vide grenier, near Vitré and not so near me!) has a wonderful outdoor aviary full of budgies and cockatiels. See for yourself.

Now and Then, Here and There

I found some photos taken with my crappy little APS camera - the one that never quite seemed to manage to get anything in focus. I passed the photos through my photo scanner, and then went out to take some pictures. What you see is 1998 versus 2015. Or a span of seventeen years.

Looking up the front

We start with one of the smaller sets of changes. The willow in front of the outbuilding is no longer, having been replaced by a binary system Oak, and a wild cherry behind it - both self-sown. The weeping willow at the end is a lot larger, as is the pine in the middle. There were two pines, but one succumbed to a hurricane a few years ago.

The path through the field

A track passing through the field, with a tree-lined ditch to the side. It was scenic. Unfortunately the Common Agricultural Policy encourages maximal usage of land, so anything that isn't a crop is wasted space. Yup. It went. All of it. And that's just some of the devastation wrought by the neighbouring farmer in his zealous desire to remove inconvenient hedgerows and turn everything into a single never-ending field. It isn't just him. Another week passes, another hedgerow disappears. And then they complain about land erosion and poor crop yields. What the hell do they teach 'em at agricultural school? How to fill in subsidy paperwork?

The pond

The shocking one saved for last. We had a pond. Quite a nice pond. One day, in 2004 or 2005 (if my crappy memory serves me, but don't quote me on it), the aforementioned farmer decided to grub out the long ditch connecting all of his field drains. As water was flowing at the time, it is pretty much a "no brainer" to guess where the mud and silt accumulated. He begrudgingly arranged for a bloke with a backhoe digger to dig a channel (as digging out the entire pond was too ~~expensive~~ complicated). This leads on to the second no-brainer of the paragraph - namely one does not "dig" a channel in mud and expect it to stay. Hell, anybody who ever made a sand castle in their lives will know the principle at work here. Also said farmer is quite good at maintaining the ditches up until our land boundary, and has done diddly-squat for the ditches along our boundary. We had 'em dug in 2003, it's a shared responsibility. Accordingly, the third no-brainer - what happens in unusually heavy rain (as the world seems to be experiencing more and more these days) when a flow of water meets an impediment? Here's a hint.

Me?

There's a very blurry picture of me, I won't bother scanning it as it could be any Rick-shaped person. So... um... I'm a little bit fatter (I blame chocolate and McDo), my hair is greyer, and... that's about it. I would like to say I'm wiser and more mature but people will believe VW's executives telling us it was all just a couple of rogue engineers before they'd believe that. While I make use of Windows (this is written using Notepad++), I still use RISC OS. I watch animé - perhaps more now than back then (some of you may have guessed from the sub-title of this part of the blog entry). I guess that's about it. I'm seventeen years older, but not a lot has changed really.

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Gavin Wraith, 11th October 2015, 23:08

Ut hora praeterita sit nostra vita, as the actress used to say to the bishop as he got his breath back. Ah, the mysteries of time. You live in pretty surroundings.

The K & R book on C is a wonderful classic. I also recommend as a good read The AWK Programming Language by A&K&W - the same K. Do you suppose that in some distant future people of taste will appreciate good writing in the humble genre of programming textbooks, as well as in novels? Why not? Because the trendy will accuse them of nerdery!

VinceH, 12th October 2015, 13:24

Kernighan should have had his name after Weinberger's for that book. Silly people.

My name, 23rd October 2015, 12:48

I hope not only in this humble genre. I think K&R on C and for example Crockford on JavaScript's Good Parts are worth reading for the human language as much as for the computer language.

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