Simon Bisson

Of course.

a group of astronauts are standing next to each other and one of them has the number 8 on his helmet ALT: a group of astronauts are standing next to each other and one of them has the number 8 on his helmet

Them or…

Getting close to the 1500 book mark in my ongoing "review everything I read" micro-review project.

Recent Listens: All Systems Red. Kevin R Free reads the first of Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries. I had avoided this as Kevin's role in Night Vale was deeply creepy and I worried that would carry over to Murderbot. I was wrong. Instead, we get a sympathetic portrayal and growing empathy. Worth it.

Heh; I was the XML lead at a consulting company round about then...

Oh I agree with that; the one issue I have is that we don't yet have the demand for wokloads that require that level of data parallel compute.

(Though |I could see banks using it for massive Monte Carlo simulations, so I may be wrong. As building out good predictive frameorks has value.)

He is such a superb musician; charting the psychogeography of Sheffield in much the same way as Iain Sinclair's novels did for London.

The new release of it is excellent!

It amuses me how many regency romances rely on the speed of the turnpikes...

Exactly; it's the only one that needs the numerical methods backbone that the GPGPU accelerators provide.

I mean, I will stan for the finitie element method seeing as I used to write electromagnetc modelling software, but there is only so much you can do with CUDA beyond running neural networks.

Recent Listens: Legends And Lattes. Travis Baldree reads his cozy low stakes fantasy. It's interesting hearing an author's take on characters I loved when I read the book; the result is that what I thought were minor plot beats turn out to have much more significance. A new look at an old friend.

Yin and Yang Pebble and Ben asleep on Mary's chair in the office. Putney, London February 2011

I do!

flic.kr/p/9g7VMm

This isn't going to end well... Ben, our half Maine Coon looking annoyed with the world (as usual). "You have failed me for the last time, Mr Bond". Putney, London September 2009

Not forgetting his resting “You have failed me for one last time, Mr Bond” face.

flic.kr/p/6ZpiCn

I believe they were different Butterworths!

Recent Reads: The Rise And Fall Of The Trigan Empire Volume VI. Close to the end of the run of the classic strip, a change of writer from Mike Butterworth to Ken Roscoe. There's also a new focus, as the Romanesque Trigans go to space. Planetary romance becomes space opera, with the usual melodrama.

Here’s a fun fact for me: I once spent several months working in Ada Lovelace’s house.

One thing notable in this volume is Ken Roscoe’s overt space opera shift, away from Butterworth’s planetary romance stories. And then I see he was editor of Speed And Power, which is best noted for its publishing of glossy illustrated Clarke and Asimov shorts.

Managing Azure VMs with Project Flash Microsoft’s tools for monitoring virtual machines bridge the cloud and the underlying data centers.

Microsoft has been developing a set of tools to help manage Azure-hosted VMs for some time now under its Project Flash banner. Project Flash is still under development; however, the current set of releases is mature enough to start using them in your own deployments. Story by @sbisson.com.

So many crazy cross US road trips!

36 here.

The cover of a large collection of 1970s British comic strips.

Into the sixth volume of the collected Trigan Empire, ending Mike Butterworth’s tenure as writer. Also the first printed book since my lens replacement.

Pretty much; it's like the Official Secrets Act where you can't say if or if not you've signed it.

RIPA has similar provisions.

They also make credible paperweights.

It sounds like you're playing a real world version of the classic Douglas Adams-authored adventure game Bureaucracy.

I still have a couple of the Continuum USB C hubs; they actually work quite well even today!

Area Man institutes t-shirt purchase freeze

TFW you feel seen by @theonion.com.

(And yes, I have an Onion "Area Man" shirt...)

They still do that at places like The Savoy Grill and The Wolseley...

I was writing CORBA IDL in the 90s for 4GL programming. It's totally CORBA.

(Or DCOM or WS* or gRPC or ...)

This week I came across Cherry Red Records three Musik Music Musique compilations, charting the first 3 years of the 80s in UK electronic pop.

They take me back to my formative years of radio listening. Also I finally get to hear Thomas Dolby and Matthew Seligman's early work in The Fallout Club!

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.