Dinner Party

On New Year's Eve I cooked a 4 course meal for seven. Do you recognise this menu?

Mulligatawny Soup - served with sherry

Fish (Cod in parsley sauce) - served with white wine

Chicken (roast, with roast potatoes and vegetables) - served with champagne

Fruit (salad) - served with port.

It was a social experiment that had got out of hand. The previous new year one of the guests was a German and as a cultural exchange program she showed us a sketch which the Germans often watch around Christmas time. The sketch is in English, it's black and white, and involves an old lady and her butler having a four course dinner. It's called "Dinner for One". When I found out that she was coming again I decided to cook the Dinner for One menu and see how long it took for her to recognise it. She spotted what was going on between the first and second course.

Next year I'll cook something simple.

Mulligatawny soup has become my goddaughter's favourite, and even if I say so myself, the parsley sauce was excellent.

Richard "Admiral von Shneider" B

Ambiguous

 I love and hate the Engligh language. It can be very specific. We have, for example, a fully fledged verb for using subterfuge to direct someone to one particular Rick Astley video. At the same time it can be wildly ambiguous. I once boasted that I'd taken 200kg of woodchip to the tip. My mentor said "nobody can have that much wallpaper". I was talking about chipped twigs and branches that I had taken out of my hedge. In the days before Christmas my sister and I were shopping for Christmas supplies. I said that we needed crackers. "No need" she said "My husband will bring a big box of them". I was expecting the pyrotechnic cardboard party favours that you see on Christmas dinner tables. He brought a big box of biscuits for cheese.

Richard "Suzi Dent" B

Self Expression

 I must, at some deep cognitive level, be a product of my environment. I have no family history here, but I was born and raised in Devon and I've lived here for most of my life. The hedge that I'm looking after had been right here for about 400 years. As part of looking after the hedge I've bought myself a billhook. I chose the one that seemed most practical. It's not too big. It's only sharp on one side so that you could hit the back of it, and the handle can be shaped to only be held one way round. It also has a sort of exaggerated choil so that you could tie a lanyard around the blade.

I found out after I'd bought it that this is the "DEVON" pattern of billhook. At some stage, my thinking must have become Devonish enough that I can pick the billhook out of a lineup despite never having seen one before.

Richard "Nature or Nurture" B

Til Daddy Takes the T-Bird Away

 Type 1 fun is something that you do voluntarily and it's enjoyable in the moment. My best example would probably be playing on stage when you're not nervous, you're playing well, the rest of the band is playing well and the crowd is dancing. I have type 1 fun at track days after all the preparation is done and nerves have subsided. There is also plenty of type 1 fun available at rock climbing.

Type 2 fun is something that you did voluntarily, that you didn't enjoy it while it was happening, but that you're happy with after it's finished. I can think of some motorcycle and car journeys that were horrible in the moment, but I was delighted to have done them. I did a climb recently that was fun in the first half, but the rest was so difficult and frightening that it was deeply unpleasant. I actually got down from having done it and said "that stopped being fun half way up" however I was really pleased with myself for having done it.

And then there's the much more esoteric Type 3 fun, which is neither enjoyable in the moment nor in retrospect.

Richard "something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read" B

makefile.sh

Let me tell you about my deep, pure and abiding hatred for the Apache Maven build tool.

There is machine code, which tells a microprocessor exactly what to do in terms of bits and addresses.

There are procedural languages in which you tell the computer what to do. You have useful constructs like loops and logic, and named variables to store values.

There are functional languages. I'm oversimplifying it, but generally you tell the computer what value you want and it calculates it for you without any of the grubby details of explaining how it should calculate it. I class SQL as a functional language. In its purest form it has no looping structures and no variables. You tell it what you'd like to know and it decides how to get the relevant data from the disc and how to combine and process it for you. Many are the times that the query planner has come up with a deeply suboptimal order of operations and I've been powerless to persuade it to do it better. You get the right answer, but very slowly.

And then there's Apache Maven, which is supposed to make working on large software projects easier. You tell it where some things are and what you'd like to achieve. It then does what IT THINKS YOU SHOULD HAVE WANTED to do. I've spent far to long this week trying to control what an artifact was called, with persistence and the help of google, Stack Overflow, a very skilled senior engineer and an AI, we've come to the conclusion that no, you just can't do that.

Richard "And the Docs Are Terrible" B

Autotrader

 I don't have many regrets - maybe because I don't have a very good memory – but one thing that sticks with me is a car I didn't buy. In about 2018 When my Caterham was worth around £20k there was a Ginetta G40R for sale at £36k. I don't know where I could have magicked up £16k, and I doubt I'd have had the nerve, but if I did then I'd already own my dream car. It had 4 point harnesses AND inertia reel seatbelts to keep the MOT man happy. It was road legal and already had a number plate. It had fire suppression and a little aircon pack so you could have a working demister, it had a little luggage space and it also had the features that I really really want in a sports car: A roof, and doors with rubber seals.

At the weekend I had breakfast with an old chap who told me a story about when he was courting. His fiancée broke off the engagement and despite his writing to her a couple of times he had no contact at all with her for two months. What he didn't know is that his intended had a network of spies who were keeping close tabs on him. A car came up for sale and the only way he could afford it was if he sold the engagement ring. As soon as he arranged to go to town to sell the ring his fiancée realised that she needed to make a decision quickly. She conveniently reappeared and they reconciled.

What stuck with me about the story is that despite 66 years of marriage and a little while as a widower he remembers a lot about the car he didn't buy. It was a VX4/90. It's a car I'd never heard of, but it's the high performance Vauxhall Victor with a big engine (1.5l), 4 speed all syncro gearbox and two tone paint.

I now understand why the "Vauxhall Elise" was called a VX220 but I fear that I'll be on my death bed and my clearest memory will the Ginetta I didn't buy

Richard "But then again too few to mention" B