Last September, we stayed in Richmond, North Yorkshire, for a few days in order to go visit the graves of my parents – it had been the first opportunity for us to see the gravestones and to pay our respects. As is normal the day we arrive in England, Donna was really tired (it’s an effect of the travel medication she takes), and so I left her napping and went on a little walk around Richmond, a town that, although I knew superficially around the market place and the Castle, was not one I’d explored in any great depth. […]
READ MOREAfter the longest time dithering around, finally someone at the Beeb got round to publishing the complete set of this remarkable TV series from the mid-80s onto DVD. I bought it pretty much as soon as it appeared on amazon.co.uk. […]
READ MORE(For background, please check out parts 1, 2, and 3 before reading this post.) […]
READ MOREOK, kids, gather round old Gramps as he shows off the first calculator he ever owned. He got it as a present for passing his O-levels. (Actually, even if I’d had the calculator prior to taking my O-levels, I wouldn’t have been allowed to use it for the exams. Unlike math tests today, It was slide rules only in those days.) Are you gathered round? Here it is, the Litton Royal Digital 5-T from 1973. […]
READ MOREOK, this one is going to be short, because quite honestly I cannot follow the proof in detail at all. Either I don’t have the required continued fraction mathematics, or I can’t follow advanced calculus proofs any more. Probably option C: all of the above. For a quick refresh of what continued fractions are, see here and here. […]
READ MOREWe’ve just returned from our annual outing to Orlando so that my wife could run the Walt Disney World Marathon. (Before you ask: 4:04:16, which is her best time for a while.) When you arrive at the airport, you have to take the train from the gates to the terminal. It’s always made me laugh when the recorded announcement, in a very Walt Disney World voice, says “This train will be departing momentarily” and I feel like quipping “when’s it going to continue?” It’s the way I tell ’em. […]
READ MOREA fun one this article: talking about digital recordings and how they’re saved for later playback. Especially CDs and MP3s. […]
READ MOREWay back in March 2009, I wrote a quick post about the JavaScript arguments quasi-array, about how the interpreter sets it up on every call to every function to hold the arguments passed to that function. […]
READ MOREEvery now and then, I get one of those – ahem – marketing emails offering me a place in some seminar that promises to teach me good business writing. I love reading them to try and find not so obvious grammar errors (Grammar Nazi, moi?) and thereby vindicate my belief that such workshops are pretty worthless. Invariably, one of the bullet points of things you’d learn by attending the session is how to write numbers in text. “Learn one simple rule,” the email goes, “and never get it wrong again.” Or something along those lines. […]
READ MOREI learned today that Ronald Searle died at his home in France on 30 December, at the end of last year. He was 91. He was, without a doubt, one of the best cartoonists of the last sixty to seventy years, with a certain inimitable scruffy style. Certainly one of my favorites. […]
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