It’s a shame that many people don’t seem to accept the horror we face. Over the last forty years there has been regular news about how we are fucking the planet. Every news article I have read which tries to explain the science and evidence behind what we have done to Earth implies that we don’t understand the positive feedback mechanisms but we know they are happening. The climate has entered a phase of accelerated warming and the time to stop our emissions was twenty years ago.
Even if we stop now there’s been enough damage caused that will mean the changes will go on for years. Basically it’s fucked. It was fucked ten years ago and possibly even twenty years ago. This globe is dying through the lack of action of those in power who could change things.
Yesterday I had a “spare” couple of hours. So I went to see the film 1917. Formalities first though. The tide on the river was in the middle. I could see mud flats glistening in the setting sunlight but the level wasn’t much lower than the edge of the flats. Part of me wishes I had stopped to take a photograph because it was scenic with the falling sun and reflective water and mud.
After watching the film I rated it and tweeted the result. There’s a whole communication here discussing the rating system and it’s here.
So, what did I think of the film? I really enjoyed it. As much as someone can enjoy entertainment where the slaughter of millions of people is involved. The themes of “what is right”, “how sacred is life”, “who has the right” have been playing over in my head for the last year or so and I’m am no closer to any answers to my personal philosophy but ultimately I am aware there are no ultimate answers to those questions.
This film was technically magnificent. Beautifully shot. Amazing. The story felt a little “Saving Private Ryan”, but it was different enough to stand on its own. Whether the events in the story happened I do not know but this film displays the shock and horror of the war. I should have rated this film an 8 but in reality I don’t think I will watch it again, so it must settle for a 6.
I was temporarily distracted during the film and there was a strong smell of perfume near where I was seated. I am sure that it was one of the brands SJR used to wear and the smell of it took me back to the early 1990s. I’m not sure of the brand but there were two she used to wear and one was Poison by Dior. It is a curious thing how smells can have such an effect on memory. I wonder what the brain chemistry is for that?
This site has been having some issues over the last couple of days and I’m not sure what’s causing it. There may be some problems with the DDNS systems or there may be worse problems. It seems that the site works at times and not at others. This is not helpful. Working or Not-Working is normally the best. If something works well then there are no problems. If something doesn’t work then causes are more easily found. If the problem is intermittent then you are screwed.
I one had a strange problem with a car I owned which, when the morning was a special type of damp, wouldn’t start. I got used to looking at the weather and then attempting to park the car so that the bonnet faced the rising sun. This normally worked and the car had dehumidified enough to start. When taking this vehicle to the garage it would be working and so it was nigh on impossible for them to track down the problem. When it wouldn’t start I couldn’t get it to the garage. I sold that car, but was honest about the occasional problem with it. I bought a motorbike.
I hope to investigate the issues this site faces as I know there are at least four people who read this stuff regularly. I aim to keep you all updated. In the mean time, if you’ve managed to read this you know there may be problems. If you haven’t managed to read this then you also know there are problems. Simple.
It’s kinda nice that after this entry into a new [arbitrary] year lots of companies trying to sell something email with a summary of what I did for 2019. I wrote about my cinema trips in this communication. I’ve now had an email from Strava with a link to my summary for the year. They had some flashy graphics and moving things but there was a summary for me.
2019 Fitness
I think the important thing to note from this summary is although I ran/rowed quite farand that not all exercise sessions were included the second law of thermodynamics still runs true for humans.
Energy in – energy out = getting fat
While my fitness has stayed mostly constant, there have been periods of time when I didn’t exercise much because of other commitments. I have recently been eating too much which means I have to start eating less to balance it out. Having to buy new trousers was enough of a warning and it’s time to get the fat burned. I have spent quite a large portion of the last decade aiming for a particular mass and not reaching it so it might be time to make my goal more reachable as we head into the 20s [also noting that it seems to be getting harder the older I get].
Recent exercise sessions have been run-walk rather than run because of extra mass considerations and so I hope to get back to full-on running soon. Also, my number 5 mess dress uniform was quite “snug” before I gained this extra mass and I need it to fit at the end of April.
Mount Everest is 29,029ft tall and it turns out that over a year I have gained slightly more than that in altitude.
I guess I have to start the new year as I mean to carry on and along with eating too much I have been to the cinema. Along the way I remembered to look at the tidal state in the river and to be honest I couldn’t really tell where it was. I think this means that the water wasn’t that still and I couldn’t make out the reflections from the opposite bank in the water. I did see a fire on one of the boats moored just off the mudbank. I think it was deliberate as it was still burning when I left. In the dark it looked as though it was the boat with a boat on it [which potentially makes it a ship].
I rated this film on IMDB and then tweeted the result. I’ve had a bit of a rationalisation of social media recently and might write about that here along with my latest bit of tech, there, that’s a teaser. Before you moan at my film rating you should read this communication which deals with how the system works. Here’s the tweet:
You know what? I enjoyed this movie. It was funny, colourful and perfectly ridiculous at times. Framing the war through the eyes of a child with his imaginary friend worked really well. I pondered scoring this film an 8 but decided I probably wouldn’t see it again and therefore it can’t have that rating.
The young actors in this film were amazing. The colour and brightness of the film worked really well to show the real life of Germans during the war. I’m not trying to suggest that this film has documentary ambitions but it does humanise the German working people rather than demonise.
It’s all well worth watching although I’m not sure I’d let young children see it even if it was a 12A.
I’ve had an email from Cineworld letting me know what good value it is to pay them money each month and enjoy “unlimited” cinema. They dressed it up as “you did this last year” but basically they want me to keep paying and I am most likely to. I don’t think there’s been a year when I didn’t make my money back on my subscription. There have been odd months which have been barren but I’ve tried to make it up when the films are worth seeing.
2019 Moovies
Some things to note. I have seen more films than this because I definitely watched one in Boston at Feb and one in Bluewater when I was off work. I may have seen others but I can’t remember where or when. So this year was at least 46 films, which is about one a week. I’m happy with that. If you click on the menu above and then personal and film it’ll take you to all the movies I’ve reviewed.
Here’s to 2020 and the films I watch then.
Addendum: The eagle-eyed amongst you might notice that my favourite movie snack was hotdogs. This is because I am not a good vegetarian and if I want “dinner” at the cinema then hotdogs it is.
It’s nice to collect whole sets of things. It completes the series, finishes the story. A long term aim of mine is to bag all the Wainwrights in the Lake District. It’s going to take a while as I live in the exact opposite corner of the country and it pretty much takes a day to get there. I’m trying to complete Gran Turismo Sport but I don’t think I’ll ever do it or if I do it will be after they bring out the edition for the PS5 [which I’ll buy obviously].
A recent trip to the Science Museum in London to meet up with the Fulham 5 meant another chance to see one of the Apollo Command Modules. There are twelve command modules around the world [USA + London]. I’ve seen three of them and I doubt I’ll ever get to see more than another two or three of them but it’s worth a try to see them all.
I’ve seen the Apollo 11 Command Module in Washington DC. The Apollo 10 Command Module in London and the Apollo 14 Module at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. I reckon there’s a chance I’ll see a couple more of them.
Apollo 14 Command Module
Above is the interior of the Apollo 14 Command Module. Just enough space for three humans to survive take off and re-entry. This conical cocoon sat atop the supply and Service Module that kept the astronauts alive. There was also the Lunar Module which they docked with in Earth orbit before performing a burn to take them out of the large gravity well.
If you think there’s not a lot of room in the CM then I suggest you go and take a look at one of the Soyuz capsules. They are much smaller and contain the same number of people. Those pesky Russians sure know how to make hard-working dependable technology!
Just been for a Noodlemass day walk and took this photograph.
County Lines on Noodlemass Day
Here are some lines over Kent on this Noodlemass day. This communication has nothing to do with the drugs gangs infiltrating the smaller cities and towns of the region.
Since early 2014 I have written communications on here detailing the kind of equipment I have in the house in terms of internet-networking-stuff. The first communication, January 2014, detailed the set up of the house. I then updated this in February 2017 with the expanded view of the network. There have been some changes. I go through phases of trying to simplify the equipment and getting it to work in the easiest method possible. This is needed every now and then as when items are first set up the quick method is used and this might not be the best. Changes happen over time.
Infrastructure 201912
The principle changes to the system are the addition of a smart lighting system and the network that runs on along with a wired connection to the lounge cluster running with a gigabit switch. The original 10/100 switch now runs clusters B, C and D. I will admit that the picture isn’t that pretty but given I’m not a graphic designer and I also don’t really care what you think I’ll leave it as it is. I will also admit that this is the second import of that picture because on the first one I forgot to add the AV amp [disaster!].
Other minor changes to the network are the removal of the freesat box and a complete reliance on streaming services, I wrote about that in this communication a year ago. I have no wireless television signals connected to the television, be that a satellite signal or via the television aerial on the chimney. I also now have home voice control via the Google boxes, it’s nice telling the house what lights to turn on. I have written about that but I can’t find it, see my explanations here.
The Clusters
A – The, so called, gigabit computing cluster. This is basically a PC which is now old and a NAS drive which stores all kinds of media and files. The wireless printer is in this cluster but it’s not really gigabit, you know what I mean.
B – The ADSB receiver. I send MLAT and ADSB data to 360Radar. I use a Raspberry Pi connected to a tuned aerial and decode the data before sending it to the cloud somewhere. When this system was wireless there were occasionally issues with the Pi connecting and so I now have it wired through an ethernet over power line connection. This connection runs greater than 100Mbps which is good enough.
C – The lights. I can control the lights in the house either by speaking, using the PC or via a connection from my phone. I can also control them when I am remote from the house. This is handy as I can get the lights on before I walk into the house. I could have this set using location settings but I’m not going to do that. Some lights come on at sunset and shortly before sunrise which is pretty neat. I also bought a light switch which is near the front door for the olds to use.
D – House sounds. The Sonos system is pretty impressive still and used everyday. The Sonos can read songs stored on the NAS or even stream podcasts and radio stations via the internet. While I haven’t set up voice control on this, I can but I don’t like the interface, I can control this system using the PC or phone.
E – The lounge cluster. Yesterday I wired this in using a network cable to which I attached RJ45s. I had to do this as the cable had to fit through a hole in the wall which is smaller that the connector. It was an interesting learning experience fitting my own cable. I also bought a gigabit switch for the lounge and now the devices in there can link to lumps in the computing cluster at high speed. I didn’t have any streaming issues but I just wanted to know that it was future-proof for a little while anyway. The lounge has a smart TV [it’s not that smart as I bought it before decent firmware], Blu-ray player, PS4, Amp and Nvidia Shield streaming device for watching stuff.
F – The wireless cluster. This is basically everything else. There’s a phone, an old tablet and also the Google home pieces. There is a normal Google home and two minis. These are placed strategically around the house to allow for voice control to work wherever you are.
I guess I’ll write another of these in a few years time when I consider the network to have changed significantly. Until then, happy buying of technology.
If you browse this site regularly you may have noticed that the title of the communication doesn’t immediately have a lot to do with the content of that communication. It does, it’s just not obvious.
When I review a film on this site then the title of that communication is the name of that film such as this review of Now You See Me from 2013. There is a page somewhere in the old sites that has reviews of films going back to 2004. There might be stuff mentioned about films in this page which has stuff going back to 2004, I can’t be bothered to read it all.
Some of the cadet camp communications follow a naming convention of using the RAF TLA for the base where I stayed like this one from my first summer camp as a commissioned officer. I used the term BZN for the name of the RAF Station. That way I know I can find the other camps by searching although I think the Cyprus camp was named Via Platres. This was a reference to the name of the village we drove through everyday to get anywhere from Troodos base high in the mountains.
The Lego communications follow the format of Lego XX – Kit Number. The XX stands for the number of the communication of that type. It turns out there have been sixty six communications about the building of Lego sets. The last one is here. I think quite a few cover my building of the bucket wheel extractor a few years ago.
All my album reviews are named Album – Band. This makes a certain amount of sense and along with the movies is probably the only group of communications that is easy to find. Although as I write this I am only up to the P section of the albums by name. I chose to write these alphabetically by album name because I wouldn’t then be writing reviews for twenty AC/Dc albums on the trot. It mixes things up a bit.
The main problem with me trying to be clever about the naming of each communication is that I forget what they were called and end up searching my own website to find what I wrote or thought about a particular thing. This isn’t easy as sometimes I haven’t used the words that I thought I did when writing about that topic. In one communication I reference the Olive Harvest but that doesn’t mean anything unless you have the key to the code.
I’ve basically created a mess with these communications and I love it. It makes things harder to find. I end up seeing stuff I’d forgotten about. It is also slightly click-baity for which I apologise. You see I’ve written something and it won’t be obvious what it is unless it’s in those categories mentioned earlier, I bet you can’t wait to find out what madness lies within.
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/49493993/this-is-fine.0.jpg)
