Observations from a Hill

A couple of things from this week's New Statesman, which plopped through the letterbox this morning. Will Dunn on Trump, and Andrew Marr on the status quo thus far here in the UK. Will Dunn's beautifully observed sketch serves to emphasise the unreality of Trump's continuance of his own 'reality' show, masquerading as a 'Presidency'. If one looks back at any of this orange clown's public pronouncements and the context in which they are given, it is fairly obvious that he is still living in his very own, self-created Truman Show, a Man living in a fantasy of his own creation. The only difference between Trump and Truman, is that Truman was the unwitting dupe and Trump is the willing but witless participant, who has simply lost track of the boundary between actual reality and his self-confected personal 'reality'. Andrew Marr quietly takes us through the veil of the hysterical political commentariat to assess the actuality of the current governmen...

Pictured, my re-strung Komboloi , which previously disemboweled themselves when the original cord broke, a while back. My temporary repair was missing one of the twenty-three beads and the string was too short anyway, so less than optimum. Anyhow, I stumbled across the missing bead this afternoon and decided to do a proper job on them. So, here they are, replete with papas [priest - the single bead: in my case a bead with the addition of an ornate silver one] and the founda [the soft tassel, which I made from some fine thread in a pleasing dark red colour] to terminate the string. They are sitting in the rather nice old - it was described as antique - Backgammon board which I won on eBay for just over twenty quid the other day. Whilst a 1970s tourist purchase could hardly be described accurately as antique, it has a nice feel of age to it - slightly knackered? - that renders it pleasing to the eye; and I suppose that although the mid-70s doesn't seem that long ago to me, it's s...

Just mulling over the number of malicious code injection instances that are frequently wreaking havoc on all manner of victims lately, from the deserving of malice to the frankly innocent, who should not be targeted [why on earth was Citizen's Advice blitzed? Makes absolutely no sense: they're the good guys, people]. Thinking about such stuff brought to mind a post of mine from five years ago, where I described hiding a tribute to a recently deceased friend in our then software product, FotoPage, via the C command ' malloc ', which as any programmer knows is not great practice and potentially dangerous, but I made sure that I wasn't feeding my message into a chunk of memory remotely sensitive, so I felt reasonably safe in doing so [no-one lost all their data, so far as I am aware]. In that post I mentioned that I had buried similar tributes to dead people in other softwares I'd had a part in creating, not least of which was a tribute to the lately departed Fran...

A couple of things: today we went over to Beaumaris for our usual Monday light lunch of soup, chips and Bass ale. I've written before about the taking over of this ancient hostelry [The Bull Inn, blog posts passim] by a chain and its gradual decline in standards. Today we turned up to find the bottom bar and the snug - the heart and oldest part of the place - closed 'for renovations'; with a note directing punters to the newer Bistro and top bar behind, where we found a long queue [across the Bistro floor!] and frankly harassed staff [the old, experienced crew have magically re-appeared - from where?], to be told that there was a minimum thirty minute wait for food. We turned tail and headed back to Menai Bridge and The Anglesey Arms for soup, chunky chips and onion rings [washed down in my case with a couple of pints of John Willie Lee's finest bitter]. Excellent so it was.  On Saturday last, the monthly lunch club gathered at The Oystercatcher in Rhosneigr, where we...

Just a brief note tonight as I'm full of roast chicken, roast potatoes and gravy after a visit for an early supper with us by the boys, and I want to watch a documentary on the Jesus Army cult in half an hour [on terrestrial, if you're wondering about me having a scheduling issue]; some of us still use linear media, you know. I was wondering earlier about the relative sizes of the English and Welsh vocabularies, given that the largest Welsh dictionary I own is the slightly appropriately titled Y Geiriadur Mawr [literally The Big Dictionary], which consists - in my edition - of a single, albeit portly, volume. I know that the average daily vocabulary of English speakers is around 20,000 words out of a total of around 171,000 current usages and that the Oxford English Dictionary runs to twenty or so volumes; and so I wondered what the figures were for Welsh. The number of regular usages is pretty much the same at around the 20,000 mark, although the total number of current dictio...

I wrote the other day about the recent discovery that Nvidea's GPU chips have been found to be potentially vulnerable to Rowhammer attack, posing a possible massive security threat to those industries heavily reliant on the technology, not least of which are AI, blockchains and data encryption generally. In today's FT, the newspaper reports that a billion dollars worth of Nvidea chips, including the sought-after B200, have appeared in China via a black market route seemingly unfazed by Trump's export controls, tariffs and sundry other of his attempts to play the big man on the international economic stage. What the confluence of these two facts portends for the world, who knows? But it sure won't be good for the majority of us. Also in the same paper, the FT reports that the US economy is currently pretty stable and apparently unmoved by the endless crass pronouncements and executive orders that issue forth daily from The White House; going on to say that the knock-on ...