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We are collectors. We don’t just collect books, we collect everything we like that we find on the beach. Beachcombing is our hobby, which is not only motivated by the joy of searching and finding, but is also healthy. It’s a luxury, a relaxing pastime that gets us away from the computer screen and onto ...

⤳ Highlight of the week was convincing my friend Matt (owner of the amazing When Spaceships Appear record shop) to come down to South East London for a spot of record shopping, a few pints and a pizza. Along the way we stopped in at the Book and Record Bar in West Norwood and the Four Quarters Arcade Bar and Bar Jazu in Peckham. ⤳ I started watching Mr & …

Despite the fact its already February, I am going to do another of these annual end of the year reflections. They’re likely to be of little interest to anyone else, but I find the practice useful. I’ve previously done these for 2020, 2021 and 2022. What follows is a mix of personal reflections on the year, as well as a brief lists of the things I’ve enjoyed watching, reading and …

Sounds dirty, doesn’t it, getting your palimpsest on? In fact, it’s the broadest sort of euphemism for swearing. It’s not total absence of profanity from a text or conversation. Profanity is there, legible in occasional traces despite the better-behaved language that effaces it. When your grandmother says she never swears, I call bullshit. When authors avoid profanity but acknowledge that their characters (including a narrator) swear just beyond our hearing, …

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(Photo by Lauren Lulu Taylor) I am losing a step. Actually, I believe the technical term is “becoming an idiot”. To be honest (“At least you’re being honest!” says my friend Chris, champion of dad jokes), … wait a minute, … Continue reading →

Introspection only gets you so far. Gut feelings are not a particularly good way of evaluating the outside world. Gut feelings are a reflection of all our biases and intuitions and heuristics. Those all grow, largely unconsciously, out of our experiences. Our experiences are our own; they do not generalize. The phrase “the plural of anecdote is not data” describes all the reasons gut feelings are not reliable for evaluating …

In the Chinese Zodiac, this is the Year of the Dragon, beginning on February 10, 2024. The Dragon symbolizes power, nobility, honor, wealth, and success. Those born under this sign are said to possess intelligence, confidence, tenacity, and courage; they can also be, at times, temperamental and impulsive. Famous people born in the Year of the Dragon include John Lennon, Bruce Lee, Martin Luther King Jr., Adele, Stanley Kubrick, Robert …

It’s that time of year when the garden is coming back to life and my seed growing fingers start to itch. It’s too soon to sow anything here though. Anything I sow inside will get leggy in search of light and anything outside will just rot in the cold ground. I’ll have to wait until March but that’s not so long away. Meanwhile I’ve done my seed audit, raking through …

Edgar Award© Mystery Writers of America. DB here: Some good news for Perplexing Plots. It’s gotten positive reviews in various places; they’re sampled on its Amazon page. Most recently, Geoffrey O’Brien has written a very generous review for the New York Review of Books (February 8, 2024). He has, needless to say, kind words for Martin Edwards’ monumental Life of Crime as well. More broadly, he shares his insights into …

Snowy Greetings, Chris has been sprucing up things around here and on his list has been to build a new entrance bridge that leads to the Farm Stand store’s front doors. This new bridge replaces our old one and it has beautiful bent willow decoration. Local artist, Michelle Taylor, has been creating a new Farm Stand sign, since the July hail storm ruined the existing one. The new sign will …

A beer festival? In Wigan? With rave reviews and recommendations? Well I wasn’t going to miss that! The late kick off (doors 6pm) on a Thursday was less of a deterrent and more of an excuse (as if I need one) to spend the afternoon exploring the lovely pubs of Wigan. And yet…I am back on SlimmingWorld now and, after the disaster of Preston the other week, I knew I …

Following on from the first bits of Irvine, I walked from Puffers Cafe towards the coast, via the edge of the Scottish Maritime Museum. This whole area was regenerated in the 1990s with some substantial Georgian-style buildings. Past Boyd’s Automatic Tide Signalling Apparatus, there is a cracking big beach. It was wet and windy, so I stuck to the beach park – a wide open area in between the beach …

You can get surprisingly far, before it bites you, with only a fuzzy and incorrect understanding of how you should read from a TCP socket. I see this often in (failing) Protohackers solutions. Once you are over the initial hurdle of reading enough documentation to actually get a TCP session connected, there are 2 key things you need to understand: TCP gives you a stream of bytes, not packets. read() …

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