Rubenerd

Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian something we all predicted, and were warned about as early as 2016. There’s obviously an editorial slant to this, but the listed companies and actions are all too real:

… Dyson’s announcement came on the same day that P&O revealed that it will be re-registering its entire cross-Channel fleet of ferries under the flag of Cyprus. To their credit, P&O were upfront: they’re doing this because of Brexit. Similarly, Sony is moving its European HQ from London to Amsterdam. Meanwhile, Bentley is stockpiling parts, and Dixons Carphone and Pets at Home are making similar moves. “We don’t want families to run out of food for their pets” after March 29, the latter company said in a line that, oddly, did not appear on the side of a bus during the 2016 campaign. Again, these firms could not be clearer. In the words of Bentley’s chief executive: “It’s Brexit that’s the killer … It would put at fundamental risk our chance of becoming profitable.”

I’ve come around to not blaming people who voted for Brexit; there are legitimate grievances against the current economic system, and this was a way to voice it in a political system that had ignored them. But it’s increasingly clear—glaringly so—that Leave voters were lied to, or at best mislead about Brexit’s economic consequences.

But what about that widely-disseminated talking point that the EU needs the UK more than the UK needs the EU? Andrew Walker wrote for BBC News:

All these figures point in the same direction. The UK looks more exposed in the event of disruption to trade relations. That is not to say the impact on the EU would be trivial, far from it. The EU 27 would undoubtedly face significant economic harm from major disturbances to their trade with the UK. But on the basis of the trade data, the “they need us more” claim looks very shaky.

To put it into perspective, the UK contributes 66 million people and $2.9 trillion in GDP to the EU’s population of half a billion and $19.1 trillion GDP.

I wrote about American Express’s new logo last October, and illustrated its missing CA ligature the following poster in Sydney’s Wynyard station:

Amex originally had lots of different images for their latest Explorer card. I’m having trouble remembering what they were, because anecdotally all I’ve seen lately is this particular one on public transport, billboards, and such. Their market research must have indicated its holiday imagery had the most impact.

I mention it again because it’s even started appearing on their online banking logins, as shown below without the overlay of my account details:

I’ve had nothing but positive experiences with Amex themselves; the only negative ones were with social media trolls. But the idea of being stung by a charge card company doesn’t seem appealing.

Maybe these jellyfish are harmless. Maybe those swimmers are marine biologists, navigating the waters of personal credit to avoid late payment fees and interest. But not everyone is a marine biologist, and could find themselves in trouble if they don’t always have the funds in their bank account to pay off the card in full at any time.

Wait, now I see what they did there.

The following numbers do not have seven in them:

• 197
• 𝐞
• 123,144,237

This one does:

• Eighty-seven

Before you say it, you’re welcome.

Microsoft Bob represented the Will assistant with this delightful 256 colour graphic that blinked and moved its eyes. Peter Cook summarised him in his famous send-off song with Dudley Moore with:

We leave this mortal coil upon which we strut and fret our weary ways, as Shakespeare put it. God bless him. What a delightfully odd man Shakespeare was. Bald but sexy.

I’ll remember William Shakespeare for his sonnets; poems named for the classic Mac SCSI hardware manufacturer. Pigeon-liver’d scuzzi could almost have been a Shakespearian insult, up with which I would not have put.

They’re often a bit cliché, but there are always a few forum signatures that justify their existence with something profound or at least mildly interesting. Here are some of the latter:

• “There are no mysteries, only a lack of information.”

• “There are no miracles, only unknown scientific facts.”

• “The Doors of Wisdom are now open to everyone without exception.”

• “The only way forwards is not backwards, unless you’re travelling on a circular path, which on Earth is all but inevitable, unless you’re a flat earther, in which case you’ve lost a dimension and think pizzas are the width of noodles.”

• “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”

• “He who doesn’t want to see is afraid of discovering.”

Okay I admit, they were all transcribed from the same signature except for one which I blatantly made up. I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader to guess which.

The New York Times has a great cooking section, but this 2014 recipe for no-knead bread is still among my favourites:

Here is one of the most popular recipes The Times has ever published, courtesy of Jim Lahey, owner of Sullivan Street Bakery. It requires no kneading. It uses no special ingredients, equipment or techniques. And it takes very little effort — only time. You will need 24 hours to create the bread, but much of this is unattended waiting, a slow fermentation of the dough that results in a perfect loaf.

I know carbs are frowned upon in the 21st century, but we’re also supposed to exercise ten times a day and consume our body weight in water and kale before lunch. Sometimes you deserve to treat yourself.

I started baking bread in 2006, but this is the simplest and tastiest recipe I’ve ever come across for it.

The video is also interesting; I loved seeing the inside of that bakery. One day I’ll get to go back to New York and check them out.

(I subscribe to half a dozen newspapers, including the New York Times. If you have a spare few dollars a month, consider throwing some into the pot to support journalism).

In our ongoing series of things you already know, unless you don’t, you can get the current week number using the C-style date(1) tool in your *nix of choice:

$ date +"%U"
==> 02

I use week numbers everywhere, especially for task lists. I saw them a lot in Singapore, but I’ve never seen them used in Australia.

This hotel in Hakone, Japan looks amazing. I saw it in a brochure we brought back from our Odawara trip after AsiaBSDCon last year, and found myself staring at these pictures for ages.

I’ve been writing this blog since late 2004, so I thought it’d be fun to see what I was writing a decade ago to the day. Today’s entry regarded the site appearing on blogged.com:

While checking my server records I noticed I was getting a few hits from Blogged.com. It seems they added my blog to their database and filed me under “miscellaneous” and “management”. Funny how my blog has as much to do with management as an echidna would have to do with a large shoehorn, but there you go. The miscellaneous tag I’m not disputing, but then again wouldn’t every self respecting blogger have more than a few miscellaneous posts in their blog that were off the primary topic?

The links are dead, because of course they are. But the ever-brilliant Wayback Machine had a copy. Under featured posts they also mentioned:

• An Internet Explorer Twiter ribbon thing
• Celebrating a fortuitous 1,888 posts
• Saying goodbye to the urlTea shortener
• A Twitter outage
• My review of the third Bakemonogatari episode

Wait, Bakemonogatari was a decade ago? That’s mortifying.

Update: I realised this was a year and a day ago, not a year ago. Close enough.

In the space of one day I read at least ten people complaining that those complaining about Slack’s new swastika were not complaining about important issues. Either it was all biting satire, or they couldn’t apply the same logic to themselves.

I reckon 90% of the hot takes I read online fall into this category of self-redundancy. If that isn’t a term, I’m coining it now!