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About Me

Scruff
Retired software designer living in Leeds. I used to teach bridge, but have taken a break. I'm a staunch atheist and republican and was a card-carrying member of the Women's Equality Party until it dissolved.

Favourite Films:

  • Blade Runner
  • The Ipcress File
  • Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
  • Leon
  • Once Upon a Time in the West
  • The Hunt for Red October
  • Three Days of The Condor
  • Hannibal
  • Amelie (aka Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain)

Favourite Books:

  • The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins
  • Botanical Latin, William T Stearn
  • Selected Poems, T S Eliot
  • The Dairy Book of Home Cooking

Favourite Foods:

  • Meat and Potato Pie
  • Goat Curry
  • Beef Stew and Dumplings
  • Leek and Potato Soup
  • Macaroni Cheese
  • Lemon Meringue Pie

Favorite Drinks:

  • Tea
  • Chablis
  • Grapefruit Juice
  • Akvavit

Anti-bucket List:

Things I hope I will never have to do in my life.
  • Holiday on a cruise ship
  • Watch Strictly Come Dancing
  • Visit Blackpool
  • Caravan holiday
  • Play golf
  • Go skiing
  • Eat KFC
  • Go to a pantomime
  • Go to a circus
  • Morris dancing
  • Holiday on a canal narrowboat
  • Spa weekend
  • Watch The Sound of Music
  • Eat surf-and-turf of any kind

Popular posts from this blog

Covering Your Router In Aluminium Foil

A friend was given a suggestion by someone from IT to alleviate network connection issues. The suggestion is to wrap their router in "tin foil". When they'd finished laughing, they called me for an opinion. Assuming they meant ordinary aluminium kitchen foil, the suggestion is ludicrous. The best you might hope for is that it doesn't make any difference. If it has any affect it would surely be to act as a Faraday cage, keeping external radiation out and internal radiation in. I decided to test it. I performed six throughput runs alternating between uncovered and loosely covered with a folded sheet of kitchen foil. Each run consisted of three one-minute trials, where TCP upstream and downstream speeds were averaged using TamoSoft Throughput. The server was my development PC upstairs; the client a downstairs laptop two metres from the router. Both were connected on the 5GHz WiFi band. Here are the results. The best you can say for the foil is tha...
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Ridiculous Snooker Competition Format

  This year the format for the Championship League Snooker competition is very inequitable. It works like this. There are twenty-five entrants, of which seven are placed in Group 1. They play a round-robin tournament and the top four then play a knockout to decide the winner of the group. The winner qualifies for the Winners Group, and the remaining other four of the top five progress to Group 2, joining three other players from the original twenty-five. The bottom two are eliminated from the competition. This whole process is repeated until Group 7, when only the winner qualifies for the Winners Group, the other six players getting eliminated. The Winners Group then contains the seven players who won a group. Again, they play a round-robin and the top four play a knockout for tournament winner. Players win money by winning frames, getting through to the play-offs, winning a group or being runner-up, and by making the highest break in a group. The rates for these are differen...
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Rescuing People from Cults

It isn't hard to imagine a child being brought up by parents within a small community of bizarre cult beliefs. The child would initially accept the programming without question no matter how damaging, because that is what small infants are hard-wired to do. Later they might begin to question the ideas, but everyone they know would profess conviction and it is easy to see the difficulty of snubbing their entire community and becoming a social outcast. If we were able to rescue the victim from the grip of the cult, then even as an adult it would be difficult to reverse the damage. We would need to train the critical thinking skills that all cults must suppress to exist. Our efforts might well look like the popular notion of 'brainwashing'. This is precisely what the Chinese are being accused of with the Uighurs. Some are calling it "psychological torture", and even the BBC are calling it "systematic brainwashing". "Wait a minute," you say, "...
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