{"id":2238,"date":"2021-04-23T21:33:19","date_gmt":"2021-04-23T21:33:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=2238"},"modified":"2021-04-23T21:33:19","modified_gmt":"2021-04-23T21:33:19","slug":"friday-23rd-april-2021-day-403","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/04\/23\/friday-23rd-april-2021-day-403\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday, 23rd April, 2021 [Day 403]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another beautiful day today to wake up to. Meg and I were a little delayed because Friday is the day when our\u00a0domestic help calls around and we took the opportunity for her to work some magic wonders on Meg’s hair which is getting a bit ‘out-of-control’ until we have it done a week on Tuesday. I asked our\u00a0domestic help \u00a0to make over Meg’s hair so that when we\u00a0went to bed\u00a0this evening, I would feel I was climbing into bed with a different woman (and I think she succeeded.) As we were a bit later that we\u00a0would have liked, we \u00a0picked up our newspapers and then tried to occupy one of our preferred ‘top’ park benches but they\u00a0were already fully occupied. So we made do by sitting and looking over the lake which is, of course, what we used to do at the start of the year. But then, on our way home uo the\u00a0<\/span>hill, we ran into both of our closest (Catholic) friends and to cut a long story short, we have invited them\u00a0both round to have a nice English cup of tea (or something even stronger) next Monday afternoon. We are just hoping, of course, that the weather holds out until then but it is true to say that once we have a high pressure established like this, they tend to\u00a0persist for quite a few days (I think that low\u00a0pressure systems ‘bounce’ off them) We do not mind the weather being a tad cooler so long as we do get completely rained off. Actually, we intended to have a similar little ‘soiree’ last\u00a0Christmas time but evidently one of the COVID-19 lockdowns intervened.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Our domestic help has forwarded me a recipe for rhubarb gin which\u00a0sounds simple enough to make. According to the recipe, as well as\u00a0rhubarb some orange peel is involved and a rather exotic ingredient of either a\u00a0vanilla pod or some vanilla bean\u00a0base (which I must admit, I have never even heard of) I have been sent the Jamie Oliver recipe and all seems straight forward but I never\u00a0thought of baking the rhubarb to release ? enhance? some of the flavours. As we have a small clump of\u00a0rhubarb growing, I\u00a0<\/span>might as well as make it something useful and, at least, I have all of he gear such as Kilner jars and sterilising fluid.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Last night whilst I was playing with my new HP computer, I found a way of getting my old DOS statistical software to work under Windows 10. I downloaded a specialist piece of software called DosBox which enabled my old software to run. I had to\u00a0find out how to ‘mount’ a\u00a0specific folder after which the software would run. I even found a way\u00a0to configure it so it utilised more of the screen surface and was centralised. One piece of software I was glad to resurrect\u00a0<\/span>was a program I had written called EzeStats<\/em> After development, this was eventually bundled with a statistics textbook ‘Jon Curwin and Roger Slater with Mike Hart: ‘<\/span>Numeracy Skills for Business<\/em>‘(Chapman Hall, 1994) Having looked at this piece of educational\u00a0software some decades after it was written, I was struggling to remember\u00a0exactly how I did it. This is what I think I did. I utilised a simple text editor to write the\u00a0<\/span>words for one screenful of\u00a0information. Assuming I could work with 80\u00a0characters a row x. 25 lines, each screen could contain 2,000 characters. But each character occupied two bytes – the first was the ASCII\u00a0code of the\u00a0character itself and the second was \u00a0a colour encoding for that particular byte (making 4,000 per screen). I think I then utilised a\u00a0utility called ‘Paint’ (nothing to do with the Windows program of that name) which enabled you to ‘paint’ the foreground (or ‘ink’) and the background ( or ‘paper’) for each screen. Some screens asked you to choose a character which gave an answer to a tutorial type of question – to capture\u00a0the responses and to send you to the screen which told you whether you had the correct answer or not,\u00a0I think I used a\u00a0batch file which could send you back and forth amongst the various pages. Somehow, all of these pages get\u00a0stitched\u00a0together (perhaps via the batch file) and then I think I used a program to take a batch file and turn it into an executable file (.com or .exe) This is how I think I did it all, but it certainly still runs incredibly slickly and I think the entire\u00a0tutorial course runs to about 40\u00a0screens of information, all stitched again into a fast, colourful and incredibly concise little\u00a0system – I think the total size of the two main .exe files only cane to about 20k in total (and the public domain version of the MicroStats program was only about 37k). Those were the days when memory was expensive and\u00a0programmers had to make every byte count!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Another beautiful day today to wake up to. Meg and I were a little delayed because Friday is the day when our\u00a0domestic help calls around and we took the opportunity for her to work some magic wonders on Meg’s hair which is getting a bit ‘out-of-control’ until we have it done a week on Tuesday. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2238"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2242,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2238\/revisions\/2242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}