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When I was a newly qualified actuary, part of the induction process into life as a professional was to watch a video in which an accountant was in the dock accused of professional negligence squirming as he was cross-examined by a barrister. I’ve been reminded of this over the last couple of years, as a colleague and I have spent the best part of 2 weeks sitting in court rooms …

It's been a while since our last update; generally because there was a bit too much going on and then too much to report. Doh. We're going to take a leaf out of fellow indie manufacturer Electric Flapjack's book and split the catch-up posts across project, rather than temporal, lines. The client projects we had on have continued, so there's been a regular drum-beat of air quality sensor and Bluetooth …

‘Bound by tradition. Controlled by no one.’ The film boasts some stunning landscape shots Starring Basima Hajjar, Ashraf Barhoum, Fatima Al Taei, Yagoub Alfarhan and Haifa Al-Agha. Written and directed by Shahad Ameen. Produced by R. Paul Miller, Stephen Strachan and Rula Nasser. Basima Hajjar plays Hayat The people of a small coastal settlement sacrifice some of their daughters to unseen sea creatures (we only get a brief glimpse of …

November 25, 2024 Tip of the Week How to Do a Relentless Three-Point Attack. Teams, Coaching, and Foot I’m rushing to get this blog out since I’m coaching at the MDTTC Teams Camp over the next three days, getting our players ready for the North American Teams, Fri-Sun, Nov. 29 – Dec. 1. There are currently 910 players and 226 teams – here’s the listing. There are 14 MDTTC junior …

Beyond US military and economic support for Israel as its imperial outpost in the region, an estimated 160,000 Americans live in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and are some of the most active participants in the ongoing campaign of terror against the indigenous Palestinian population. Israeli settler terrorism as a movement also draws inspiration from two Americans infamous as the godfathers of the campaign of …

Vincent Price shows us how to cook trout in a dishwasher. Also cucumbers, pears, zucchini, and some kind of sauce: Not a joke, as our right-now-current and soon-to-be-ex-president would say. Apparently, you can cook trout in a dishwasher. Who’da thought? Something about the machine’s steaming capacity, I gather. Just…don’t use the rinse cycle. Seriously. When it comes to cooking, I’m a Thank-God-for-the-defrost-button-on-the-microwave type. Cooking was a skill I could never …

The pyramid of the 1975 Seward time capsule in Nebraska, billed as the world’s largest, photographed in 2021 and scheduled to be opened in 2025 (Library of Congress) Time capsules are fascinating to me. They can be incredibly boring, as people often stuff them with rather mundane items like coins, American flags, and bibles. But every once in a while they can be thrilling, with unique items just waiting to …

Well, here we are again. I’ve returned to the cool damp climes of Britain, and apologise for the long break in entries, time slips away quickly when on holiday. Now where were we . . . Ah yes, Woodstock. After Woodstock, I travelled east to Massachusetts to visit new acquaintances. We drove around central Massachusetts searching for elusive autumn colour one day. The colour wasn’t spectacular this year, but even …

Hi CA, In the last year two people have gone no contact with me (she/her). One is a former colleague (she/her) who has burned many bridges in our professional community. She’s been basically blackballed in our specialty area and had to take a position doing similar but much less exciting work after she was fired from her last job. Around the same time she stopped talking to me because she …

Writing in Practicing New Worlds, Andrea Ritchie documents a pattern of crisis response that, far from interrupting the crisis, merely serves to continue it. I will quote at length here: Yet, as conditions worsen and urgency increases, as millions are increasingly mired in economic and climate crises while billionaires bank on our suffering, as the Right rises around the globe and comes for our throats with a clear intention to …

Feeling a bit blocked on the writing front to be honest. Which isn't great when a book chapter about the crisis of the Conservatives is due this Saturday. Ho hum. Past experience suggests that when I moan about "not feeling it" or having "nothing to say", it's enough to uncork the barrel and watch the torrents of words spill forth. Here's to hoping this is one of those occasions. On …

Every once in a while, a reminder is overdue that photography does best what, well, it does best. It’s shocking to see how often photographers feel the need to dress up their wares by comparing their pictures with other media (“painterly”, “poetic”, …). Ignoring the question which paintings they actually refer to — Titian’s, Rothko’s? — or what exactly “poetic” is supposed to mean, it’s weird to observe a medium …

In Go, sometimes you need to get a pointer to a constant value. This is normally easy, but only if you have a value, not a constant. Let's say you or a friend are dealing with the AWS S3 API and you need to pass a value to one of the parameters: _, err = s3c.PutObject(ctx, &s3.PutObjectInput{ Bucket: "mah-bukkit", Key: "something", Body: bytes.NewReader(fileContent), }) Doing this gets you a compile …

I've written a lot about railways in southern Ontario over the years, mainly because that is where I grew up. One place that I've had precious little to share anything about is Strathroy, a small town at the southwestern edge of Middlesex County. The town lends its name to the Canadian National Strathroy Subdivison. Strathroy is amalgamated into the surrounding Caradoc Township. Located about 35 kilometres west of London, it …