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17 results for “amcvittie”
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The whole thing stinks. The crooked guy who runs the private bridge paid a visit to the white house and now the opening of the publically owned bridge continues to be delayed. https://mastodon.hongkongers.net/@cbctop_mirror/116581545788659057
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I have no idea.
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My boss told me to log off at 3pm. She’s a good one. It’s been a week.
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I THINK this plane type is what we took into Isle Royale. I don’t like flying but the float plane was magic. https://mas.to/@canyakker/116580526624880367
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“Why the fuck can’t I detach this?” Is a fun Figma game
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Not a stupid question. Came up during a legal department driven accessibility audit at my old job. https://mastodon.social/@anatudor/116573217086009396
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Many of my neighbors do not have running water in their homes as the shut off relief runs out and families inherit old houses with systems in need of repair. Detroit meanwhile has high rates as we subsidize the suburbs.
“For the past 25 years, Detroiters have borne the bulk of stormwater upgrades – a capital program that has exceeded $1.5 billion.
The approximately 680,000 residents of Detroit have borne these costs despite accounting for only 23% of GLWA’s 2.9 million wastewater customers.”
https://mastodon.social/@bridgedet313/116572345245498725 -
His nose is 5 for 5 tonight even though I’m not sure he can always hear the clicker on a successful find anymore. He likes to try and cheat more in his old age though. Keeps trying to sneak a look around the corner before I’ve got it hidden. #Nosework
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Work let alone work travel between now and New Years is just wrong.
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🇷🇺🇺🇦🤜🇮🇱🇺🇦 Joku slaavilais-ukrainalainen tšad päätti antaa kyydin juutalais-asovittien komissaarille, joka yritti siepata hänet. #huumori #nationalismi
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Reading Time: 3 minutes
For years I have worn Suunto, Garmin and Apple watches. During this time I have tracked hikes, climbing, scuba diving, snorkeling, swimming and more. Recently I felt the desire to wear a Casio watch as I used to do when I was a child.
Over the years these “watches” have given you live information about barometric pressure, altitude, depth, and other information but with time they gave you the chance to track what you were doing by GPS. After this they started to track your steps and your heart rate 24 hours a day, except for when you’re charging. It went from being a watch that you used for the time, and to track acvities. Now they track everything.
The only time they do not track you is when you’re charging the watches.
The advantage of a Casio watch is that you can wear it for years in a row, without ever taking it off, except for when you’re flying, before you need to replace the battery. You get to the end of the day and you don’t need to charge it.
Of course, you don’t need to wear it for three to five years in a row. You can take it off when you’re showering, sleeping or other. You can even take it off for a tan, if that’s what you desire.
What sets the GBA-900 apart from other Casio and smart watches is that it gives an analogue display, rather than a digital one. it gives the time with a digital display but it’s small and hidden behind the hour and minute hands at certain times of day.
The advantage of an analogue watch is that you know the time as fast as a digital watch, once you take some time to re-habituate yourself to reading a less precise time display. I say less precise because you need to re-learn the art of reading analogue time.
Tracking
It automatically counts the number of steps you take in a day and estimates the amount of energy you burned in a day. If you want to track a walk then it’s simple. You start the timer when you start your walk, and stop the time at the end of your walk. It then uses the time information and your phone’s location data to extrapolate the track of your walk. You can then get it to sync with the phone and keep track of your walks over time.
No False Inputs
I found that with the Xiaomi activity Band 7 and the active band eight I would get false manipulations with the touch screen. With the casio that’s impossible, due to it using button presses.
Playing
If you’re playful then, at night, you can charge the fluorescent paint on the hour and minute hands with a flashlight or your phone’s light. At night you can then check the time, by looking at the glowing hands, rather than pressing a button.
Beep Beep
Do you remember that 80s or 90s sound. The Beep beep that we would hear once an hour, every hour? This watch allows you to live with that signal notification. It could be useful, if you want to keep track of time, without constantly staring at your watch. “Beep beep”, time for lunch soon.
And Finally
The Apple watch nags you about washing your hands for long enough. Garmin and Apple nag you about being too static for too long. By using a Casio watch you escape the gamification that makes Apple and Garmin so annoying to use. It was fun, until you realise how unforgiving they are, streak wise, and until you realise that they’re designed to get you adddicted, rather than interested in your own progress. I like wearing a simpler device, especially while I walk more than I cycle, hike, or other.
https://www.main-vision.com/richard/blog/wearing-a-casio-gba-900/
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My triumphant return to The New Stack: There's been a resumption of the debate among #infrastructure software #developers over whether decoupling an organization's functionality into #microservices in the name of #scalability reduces complexity or re-introduces it. This happened when Amazon Prime Video engineers made an architectural decision, and chronicled it in their blog. For a streaming video monitoring function, they moved _away_ from microservices, they said, and back toward a #monolithic architecture, for purposes of simplicity, speed, performance, and cost reduction.
Before long, the whole debate fired up again: Microservices only buys you so much scalability, some said, but eventually the complexity of its messaging between services eats any speed gains you had at the start.
At least that's what Prime Video's engineers appeared to be saying. But a close examination of their situation by world-class experts, including from Amazon Web Services (AWS), revealed that the devil was lurking outside the details after all and out in the open where we should have seen him: Yes, they had consolidated some #StepFunctions, but in so doing, they actually went the other direction. They made a microservice; the blog's author simply didn't realize it.
So what was this debate truly about, then? Do we not know a monolith when we see it anymore? Are we so quick to take sides in a debate that we've lost track of what we're actually arguing about?
No, that wasn't a digression. I'm still talking about #cloudcomputing infrastructure.
Anyway, do take some time today to read this article, which features an all-star cast including Donnie Berkholz @dberkholz,
Lori MacVittie from F5, David Mooter from Forrester, Laura Tacho, Ajay Nair from AWS,
@microsoft CVP
Brendan Burns, and one of the original microservices champions, Adrian Cockcroft @adrianco.https://thenewstack.io/amazon-prime-videos-microservices-move-doesnt-lead-to-a-monolith-after-all/
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“You’ll Have Had Your Tea”: the thread about a press fabrication of a popularised myth
This thread was originally written and published in May 2023.
In June 1983, the City of Glasgow launches its fondly remembered “Glasgow’s Miles Better” advertising slogan, as seen below in curious company with Margaret Thatcher. This confident, cheerful self-promotion of the City is something that Glasgow seems much more comfortable and at home with than Edinburgh and its more recent, insipid, uninspiring, cringeworthy attempts like “Inspiring Capital” or “Incredinburgh“.
“Portrait of Margaret Thatcher, Glasgow’s Miles Better Campaign”, Norman Edgar. Photograph from Lyon & Turnbull auction listing, August 2013, where it fetched £1,062Of course if you focus-grouped a sample of self-respecting Glaswegians on what Edinburgh’s slogan should be, you would likely find “You’ll Have Had Your Tea” in amongst the responses. As any resident of that City will tell you, in Glasgow they’ll ask you if you want to come in for your tea, in Edinburgh you’ll get the former cold response. Which all got me thinking… (you know where this is going now, don’t you?) Just where and when does the phrase/jibe “You’ll Have Had Your Tea” come from?
Now, if you’ll Google this for yourself you’ll find what I consider to be an incredulous claim that it originates with Mackintosh of Borlum of all characters, in 1729. If you don’t know the story of the eccentric Brigadier, it’s worth a refresh. By 1729, he was an ageing Jacobite has-been, noted for his spectacular military derring-do in the 1715 rebellion, matched only by his incompetence as a leader. By 1729 the septugenarian warrior lived in captivity in Edinburgh under bond. It is claimed that our hero tired of being offered the faddish new drink of tea, which he found weak and effeminate, and so went around informing his hosts that he had “had his tea” in order that he could instead move straight on to a harder, manlier drink.
William Mackintosh the Younger of Borlum, as a colonel in French service, c. 1707. From “Brigadier Mackintosh of Borlum, Jacobite Hero and Martyr”, A. M. Mackintosh, 1918Indeed, Mackintosh *does* write of tea in some disgust in 1729. He even writes the phrase “I am now asked if I have had my tea“. Case closed. Right? But the problem is, those 10 words are only a cherry-picked selection of what he fully wrote and without the rest, the context of what he was complaining about is gone and the meaning changes. What he wrote was, firstly:
- “Formerly I had been served with two or three substantial dishes of beef, mutton and fowl, garnished with their own wholesome gravy. I am not served up little expensive ashets with English pickles, Indian mangoes and anchovy sauces“
And secondly:
- “When I come to a friend’s house of a morning, I used to be asked if I had had my morning draught yet. I am now asked if I have had my tea and in lieu of the big quaich with strong ale and toast, and after a dram of good wholesome Scots spirits, there is now the tea-kettle put to the fire, the tea-table and silver and china equipage brought in, and marmalade and cream“
So what Borlum is actually complaining about is not about the coldness of his reception in Edinburgh, it’s quite the opposite – it’s all too nice. He is discontent that in the post-Union, Georgian capital of “North Britain”, Scottish culinary culture has been changed and gentrified by English influences and. Gone are hearty meat and drink, and in are delicate teas, condiments, scones and pleasantries. He is not being asked “You’ll have had your tea” so that his hosts don’t have to give him any, he’s being asked so that they can serve him the latest trends in conversational dining and drinking, and are most insistent on giving them to him even if he’d rather drink and belch!
That Googled explanation just doesn’t ring true – so how did it come to be on the internet as “fact”? If you read it on the internet it must be true, yes? Where does the source of this spurious claim originate? The earliest I can trace it back to is a single unreferenced line in an anonymous compendium of Edinburgh “facts” (many of them demonstrably dubious) on the Scotsman website some 20 years ago. Much of what is in the list is true, but an not insignificant amount is either not or is wishful thinking.
Scotsman.com, 29th May 2003, archived copyThe following year, London-based travel writer Benedict Le Vay included a variation of this explanation in his book “Eccentric Edinburgh“, a travel-guide to the city from the “Eccentric” series by Chalfont St. Peter-based publisher Bradt Travel Guides. This series is a light-hearted “insiders guide” to cities, trying to find their “hidden corners and spooky stories” that others guides don’t cover. So it’s not a reference work by any stretch of the imagination, and ofference no provenance for this explanation.
Page 142, “Eccentric Edinburgh”, Benefict Le Vay, 2004The Mackintosh of Borlum trail goes cold for about a decade, resurfacing in the Scotsman’s online sister publication “i” in the best traditions of Johnston Press churnalism. The unverified story has now established itself as “fact”, and now propagates itself through blogs and social media with the respectable sounding references pointing (in good faith) to two newspapers (which should know better) and a well-selling travel book from an established author and publisher.
inews.co.uk, 9th March 2017So if that is what the origins of “You’ll Have Had Your Tea” are not, then what are they? Well, the earliest I can find the phrase in print is in 1938, used by the sports journalist, columnist, playwright and comedic author and poet Albert Mackie, who had a particular love of vernacular patter. Edinburgh born and bred, but often working in Glasgow, he wrote a light-hearted essay entitled “The Pleasures of Edinburgh” in a book – called simply “Scotland” – edited by J. R. Allan and released to coincide with the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow in 1938.
“Laugh Out Lout at Talking Glasgow”, Albert MackieBut Mackie was not writing here in jest at his home city, rather in defence of it. He was pointing out that “You’ll Have Had Your Tea” was exactly the sort of jibe that a Glaswegian would come up with in their never-ending mission to let the whole world know they are the friendliest people on the planet. But we can’t credit him with conjuring the saying itself – only writing it down – as it’s clearly an established and recognised phrase at that time in Scotland by the way he refers to it. However I cannot find it printed before then in books or newspapers.
“The Pleasures of Edinburgh” by Albert Mackie, from “Scotland“, edited by J. R. Allan, 1938Of course, there are other cities in Scotland beyond Edinburgh and Glasgow (not that the denizens of either of those places would have you believe it), and the phrase pops up again next in the Dundee Courier in 1945, in a jokes column entitled “Heard on the Tram“, but with the butt of the joke extended to Aberdonians.
“Heard on the Tram”, Dundee Courier- Thursday 18 October 1945In 1953, the football writer Tom Nicholson – another son of Edinburgh – brought the saying up again in a Daily Record column called “Tom Nicholson Accuses / Charles Shankland Replies” where the form was for the pair to have amusing arguments over sport and Edinburgh vs. Glasgow relations. It appears intermittently thereafter in print, particularly in Glasgow’s Daily Record / Sunday Mail. In 1970 the latter’s columnist, novelist Jan Webster (1924-2002), attributed it to Scottish women in general as a phrase used when guests were being politely told not to stay too long. In 1978, Record writer Max Hodes published it in his “Official Scottish Joke Book“. Hodes wrote “funnies” for the paper and like Tom Nicholson and Albert Mackie, was an Edinburgh man, writing for a Glasgow publication. So perhaps the joke is really on Glasgow given it is Edinburgh men who popularised it in their papers.
It is’t just comedy writers who have imortalised the phrase however; the autobiographies of the prominent figures of Sir Ludovic Kennedy (1990) and Ian Hamilton KC (1994, who as a law student in 1950 was one of the gang who liberated the Stone of Destiny from Westminster back to Scotland) both use the phrase with a fondness when recalling their time in Edinburgh. Nevertheless the saying continues to pop-up endlessly in coffee table books about Edinburgh and Scottish culture, such as “Edinbuggers vs. Weegies” by Ian Black of 2003, which goes as far as suggesting a more modern ending to it (and who really actually says “Edinbuggers” anyway?)
Weegies vs. Edinbuggers, Ian Black, 2003A more outlandish – and even more improbable than Mackintosh of Borlum – provenance for the saying is Reginald Hill, who controversially attributes the saying to Yorkshire in one of his “a “Dalziel and Pascoe” novels! But – in print at least – he seems to be the only person making this particular claim. Most unusually, it has come to my attention (thank you to Al McVittie for this insight) that the phrase “You’ll Have Had Your Tea” appears in a 1974 episode of the childrens’ TV show Bagpuss, featuring Hamish the tartan pincushion and Tavish McTavish.
“You’ll Have Had Your Tea” with Hamish and Tavish McTavish, Bagpuss, 1974The saying was revitalised and spread to a wider audience in the 1990s and noughties by Graeme Garden (an Aberdonian) and the late, great, Barry Cryer in their “I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue” improv characters Hamish and Dougal, who always open their sketches with the saying. This resulted in a spin-off series called, imaginatively, “You’ll Have Had Your Tea“. The basic characters apparently date back to 1979, which coincidentally was when the Oxford Theatre Group ran a late-night Fringe review show in Edinburgh called… “You’ll Have Had Your Tea!“
I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, the Doings of Hamish & Dougal. BBC Audio cover.So there isn’t any one, definitive source of this saying. It was definitely popularised and a recognised part of inter-city rivalry by the time it was first put in print in 1938 and Edinburgh men writing in the Scottish press kept it alive thereafter. But I can categorically state that it was not Mackintosh of Borlum who gave us the saying back in 1729 and if anything this is a salutary lesson in the dangers of unreferenced, anonymous “listicles” being published and republished by seemingly reputable sources and crystallising over time into hard “facts”.
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