1 July 2020 (Wednesday) - Late Shift

I had a shave with a new razor blade today. Those who sell the things advise it should be changed weekly; the old one did me for two months and was still perfectly serviceable yesterday.

Being a new month my lap-top proudly told me of how many cyber-threats it had thwarted in June. It claimed it had blocked a thousand risky connections and protected twenty-two thousand of my files (I never knew I had so many). An in the same spirit of helpfulness it then offered to shred everything on the hard drive just in case. Just in case of what was unclear, so I declined the kind offer.

As I peered into the internet I had a message from an old colleague. There was a vacancy in a supervisory role at one of the (relatively) nearby private hospitals; did I want her to put in a word for me? Quite frankly I didn’t. I’m quite content working where I am. Having spent thirty years in (what was in retrospect) a rather toxic working environment I’m very happy where I am. The travel might be “a pain the in the glass” sometimes but it is a small price to pay for not feeling sick at the thought of having to contend with certain people every day. I’m sticking with what I know for my last few working years.

I saw a family member was still posting stark staring nonsense about the supposed health risks of 5G technology. He seems to want to believe it is dangerous even though h there is no end of information disproving that which he is posting. There seems to be more and more people wanting to believe in crap which has long been disproved these days. Only a couple of weeks ago one told me that I could believe my facts and she would believe hers. Even though her “facts” were made-up bollox.

I kicked everyone out of the Munzee clan in readiness for a new Clan War, then together with "er indoors ^TM" I took the dogs out to Great Chart where we walked from the cricket club up to the river. The dogs do like spuddling in the water, but Treacle does get very over-excited. "er indoors ^TM" video-ed some of the fun. As we walked the dogs were very well-behaved, but we did have a “near-miss episode” – an idiot farmer had driven into his sheep field and had deliberately left the gate from the track to the field open. Fortunately I’d spotted that (and we got the dogs on their leads) and even more fortunately the dogs didn’t react to the sheep. You would have thought that the farmer would have taken a few seconds to close the gate, wouldn’t you?

Once home I made a cuppa, then chased up an outstanding Lego order I’d made. Seeing how I like the 1970s style Lego I’m having to order the stuff second-hand. I’ve found a website called Bricklink which is effectively eBay for Lego. So far I have only ordered a dozen or so items, but I’m getting about an 80% delivery rate. Compare this to eBay or Amazon who have never once failed to deliver in hundreds of transactions. Am I just unlucky? I was looking at getting some electrical connectors this morning. I found what I wanted and it was advertised as “from £0.14”. So I clicked on the link and saw it wasn’t “from £0.14” at all. It was actually “from £3.87”.

I played “Cookie Jam” on Facebook Games for a while then set off to work.

I picked up "Hannah" (my GPS unit) and set off to work. Earlier I'd read a minor squabble on one of the geocaching pages asking just how reliable is the mileage quoted by sat-navs when they record a route. I've always thought that "Hannah" over-estimates distances walked. Someone else was saying that their car's GPS never matched their hand-held one. But how can anyone know how accurate a GPS unit is? Bearing in mind that measuring stuff is what I do for a living I'd had an idea....

I got into my car, zero-ed "Hannah" and the car's journey trip meter and set off to work.  I got there to find both were reading twenty-five point two miles. Google Maps said the journey from my house to the hospital's front door was twenty-four point seven miles, so allowing for a little farting around driving right round the hospital's orbital ring road thingy to the car park, I'd say both were about right. So "Hannah" (and my car's odometer) are accurate (get the right value), but are they precise (get the same value on multiple measurements)?

I re-set them and measured the mileage home – twenty-five point four miles on both… but then the one-way system out of the hospital does go a little further on the way out than on the way in.

I wonder just how many other people have done this measurement... I expect most people have better things to do with their few remaining years...