"Nothing but the rain"
Last month I wanted to beat my record for communications published in a month. After seeing the most I had managed previously I gave up reaching that total but had wanted to aim for 31 communications giving an mean of one per day. I even failed to make that.
I’ll try again another month. It does seem that February would be the best month to try and get that average. Let’s see what happens.
Just had quite a jam-packed weekend. Spent a little time at three establishments while the cadet team succeeded in their competition. Here are a few photos of the sights.
This place was built for the First World War transition of troops across the channel. Don’t be impressed by the aluminium cladding, just inside are wooden framed original buildings that smell and creak with history.
The above is an unheated literal brick out-house that has three urinals and three proper toilets. There are a few toilets in heated buildings but too many people for them!
I love a nice Gate Guardian. This one is very pretty. It guards the helicopters at this base.
This room is part of the SNCO Annex. It’s about 10ft by 8ft with a small en-suite. Can’t grumble, it was dry and warm. The wi-fi helped make it more like home.
That door is an illusion, it’s a thin door to make the rest of the room look bigger!
I would to have a go in this and drive it around. It would be great fun!
Next time I’m out and about I’ll take some more photos. Sometimes I can give information about it all and sometimes I can’t, it’s just not sensible to do that.
If you saunter over to this page you can see my iPhone music library. I haven’t been able to find a dynamic music counter that updates this site with a played list. I will admit to not looking too much or far for one though. You may be interested to see this list which [in poor contrast] shows how often I have played certain songs on my phone since I last had to fix the library.
A couple of things to notice. The old car would start music off from the first song in the library so the top two AP songs are possibly a little high in play-count but they are good songs nonetheless.
There’s only some metal in there. :-(. I don’t recall playing Disturbed that much but I am probably wrong.
While driving on my own in the car I tend to listen to podcasts rather than music. It keeps my attention more than music and informs and teaches me at the same time.
Many of the communications within this domain are based on films I have seen or television episodes. Whenever I go to the cinema I rate the film on the IMDB website. You should see this communication which will explain my scoring rationale. A good thing about the IMDB site is that you can download your data.
So, here’s an idea of what how many times I have used each score.
Now, the odd scored films are a worry and definitely against my general rules. The film that scored 9 was The Imitation Game and the shittiest film that scored a 1 was God’s Not Dead 2.
The mean score of my ratings is 6.36 and this compares to an IMDB rating mean score of 7.05. I don’t know what this tells us.
The top of the table is here:
I’m not convinced that the TV Episode and TV Series scores should be in there, but can’t be bothered to remove those rows from my spreadsheet. Now, I know you want the list of the bottom films so here they are:
A couple of religious films at the bottom, possibly not a surprise, but then maybe they could have made good religious films instead. I’m not against religious films, they are just badly made. And then there’s the Sci-Fi. It’s a shame that some Sci-Fi is terrible, but terrible exists in all genres.
Sorry people and Fooyah fans. I’m not going to make my target for January 2017. I had hoped to publish more communications this month than in any other previous month and I thought the total I had to beat was 32 [August 2011].
My current aim is to write more communications for Fooyah this month that I have in any past month. Quality may be affected.
— Ian Parish (@iparish) January 22, 2017
I need to warn you, if you care, that I am going to fail because I had failed to notice May 2013 when I published 68 communications.
I still think I am aiming for >31, which would be an average of more than one per day. But, as I tweeted, quality may be affected.
I hate the holidays. It messes up my mass loss.
I’m trying again. I will get below 81kg. But only if I stop eating crap. And run.
I am aware that in some places on the internet caturday is a thing. I do not care for this. Nor do I care for cute dog picture stuff. It’s quite boring, especially when associated with a meme [a word now misused]. There is a smaller, some might say darker, part of the internet where comparing the range of an ADS-B receiver is a thing. These are called “splats” and so here is my Splaturday picture.
There are other communications cover this sort of thing here and here.
Since getting rid of the Beast and buying a new car I have missed using a gear stick and doing things with my feet and left hand. I now have a hybrid car which has a stick I move into Drive position and then into Park position. That’s it. My left foot operates the manual parking brake. I really like the car. It’s comfy and drives really smooth. But I need my fix of gear stick work.
Fortunately I have a decent steering wheel for the PlayStation and I can use the gears on that. It’s not the same but it keeps the coordination going a little bit I guess.
Missing manual gears hence this #PS4share pic.twitter.com/7K5nKw87r2
— Ian Parish (@iparish) January 21, 2017
There are a few things to note. I have the gear stick set up on the right of the steering wheel to mimic racing cars.
I will say that without really thinking about it I was heel-and-toeing the game and doing it quite well while using the clutch and steering. I’ve been playing Drive Club and while the game play and feedback about handling isn’t as good as Gran Turismo it will have to do until the PS4 version of GT comes out, which given that they said 2016 is quite likely to be 2025 knowing Polyphony.
Gran Turismo Sport is now available for pre-sale in select markets! https://t.co/Y8MjDaJn08 pic.twitter.com/TRSxlmqypQ
— Gran Turismo (@thegranturismo) June 11, 2016
It’s possible that not coordinating feet and hands in a real car anymore means I am going to get better at it on this gaming device. I will still get to drive manual vehicles, most likely minibuses at work for taking people places. I feel slightly sorry for them as I remember how to use a clutch!
I had a nice day in London on Thursday past. I was attending a course which should give me decent information to help people at work. It was interesting and also quite difficult at the same time. It was good to be challenged and made to do new things. I had to walk down Marylebone High Street to get to the venue and it looked quite a nice place with small independent shops that were selling stuff way more expensive than I could afford.
I had a spare ninety minutes in the day before meeting Smith and so I went for a walk, mostly to help work off the flap jacks I had eaten. London is nice and calm, as long as you stay away from the main tourist routes. Don’t walk down Oxford Street use Wigmore Street instead.
This gives you an idea of my activity through the day. The red bars are when I was doing maths. The other bits show me walking around. I walked 20km that day compared to an average 12.4km.
This chart shows total steps per month over the last year. Quite clearly we can see that when the weather is warmer and daylight lasts longer I walk more. That’s not really a surprise.
I first thought about doing this as a joke. We will see. It distresses me so much that Trump will be President of USA. I’m not sure I’ve talked a great deal about it here. Perhaps I will over time, however, I am trying to avoid news.