Film: The Bishops Wife directed by Henry Koster

 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039190/

Book read: Harrier 809 by Rowland White

 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43159425-harrier-809

An interesting book that is focused around the air war in the Falklands, and loosely around the reformation of the 809 flight.

Book read: The Secret Barrister by unknown

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36620738-the-secret-barrister

A great book about the workings of the criminal justice system - and how a funding crisis has lead to a broken system.

Boxing article - woman's view

 https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/keep-your-hands-off-boxing-feminists-and-for-once-let-men-be-men/

Beirut Article - The mystery ship

 Beirut article:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/x2iutcqf1g/beirut-blast

James Murdoch quits NewsCorp

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53617966

Galileo Replacement

UK considering investing in defunct OneWeb as a way of getting a GPS capabilitity.  How could this possibly go wrong?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-53192842

The carriers

We are going to struggle to run two carriers, who knew?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53186611

The NAO report:

https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/007678-001-Carrier-Strike-preparing-for-deployment.pdf

Description of ZFS

Coming to a Linux near you?

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/05/zfs-101-understanding-zfs-storage-and-performance/

Deserted London

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-52155029

Crisis: Store for war

Well the measures for restrictions on movement and what businesses could be open were getting ever tighter.   Panic buying in the shops and general chaos.
 
It shows how fine tuned supply lines are (fine tuned for company profit), they can't flex very easily when there is change in environment and demand.  Still it is unprecedented times, would a company necessarily be expected to devote planning for effective wartime conditions?

I felt bad cancelling a hair appointment, but within a few days those businesses were shut.  It feels you can't over react in this crisis.

I think most people "get it" and will reign in their behaviour, for once it is not about "them" and their liberty but rather the wider social good.

Government policy has being swift and fast, but I fear that is the easy bit.  Organising it and getting it out there probably won't be so easily done.

The title of this post comes from the submarine signals in times of crisis, it's short and concise and leaves you under no illusions.

Gail Porter article

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-51054027

Neil Peart Dies

A truly inspirational individual, Rush my favourite band growing up has lost their drummer and lyricist:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-51072190

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jan/10/neil-peart-dead-rush-drummer-appreciation

And of course a tribute to the drumming:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWRMOJQDiLU&feature=emb_logo
  

BBC Sounds searching (google search operators)

I've always found the browser based search on the BBC websites to be pretty terrible.

It's especially noticeable on things like iPlayer and BBC sounds where you are trying to hunt down a title that is maybe not precise.

Google has some search operators which help:

https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/


In my case I wanted to find a Clive James series, so we can restrict the search with "site" and then further restrict to the url "sounds"

site:www.bbc.co.uk inurl:sounds unreliable memoirs

Finding this directly in Sounds was almost impossible!

Of course it is getting more complicated to download the file for offline use - something the BBC try to hide away (I can't always stream stuff, so this is essential for me).  As a license fee payer I see this as a right not an optional extra at their discretion.

But the excellent get_iplayer can be used to download the programme pids from the catalogue.

Intellectual slavery - Dominic Cummings blog post

I've been meaning to read some of Dominic Cummings over detailed blog posts.   Today I read the "call to arms" on about recruiting people to aid the decision making process.

https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring-data-scientists-project-managers-policy-experts-assorted-weirdos/

It's full of technical name drop and hubris.  I can see it creating quite a stifling intellectually fearful and constrained environment (probably the opposite of what he's thinking of).

I'm nowhere near ever reading any of those papers he continually cites - but it still provided a really hilarious read in some places.

It made me think of two things:

1. Who would want to work as an intellectual slave?
2. Every Sir Humphrey is going to be working overtime to stop this guy!