From Nov 24th, we progressively decorate the house, one item per day, throughout Brumalia - the old Roman/Byzantine winter festival - in preparation for Saturnalia.
Otherwise, we’ll have a pair of candles going for the eight sabbats themselves, regardless of anything else that we do for them, but I don’t think that candles alone really count as decorations.
Yes, fun idea. No problem with that but… that ‘flag’ is a sail. They’re different things.
Improve education for girls worldwide. A very strong link has been established by numerous studies.
Leaving aside points about driving licence numbers being unique or whatever, it would be the silver pentagram that I made back in the '90s and have worn (or occasionally carry in my wallet etc, when the cord breaks) ever since.
Facilities manager for a wildlife and heritage charity. I lead a small team looking after health & safety, compliance and building maintenance and repairs.
Ninety percent of my time is spent at the keyboard, but since I am peripatetic and move around the properties that I cover, I have a different, and usually beautiful, view out of the window each day of the week. When I am not sat behind a desk, I will be crawling through an attic or have my head down a sewer or something.
My time is spent arranging contractors for routine servicing or repair projects, reviewing fire risk assessments and dealing with outstanding actions, writing client briefs for renewable energy projects, chasing people to do workplace inspections, advising on risk assessments, updating our compliance tracker, arranging asbestos surveys, ensuring that everyone who needs training has it up to date, proving to utility companies that their meters are wildly inaccurate and need to be replaced, working out why the biomass boiler/sewage treatment plant/water heater/automatic gate/car park machine/phone system/greywater pump/security alarm/whatever isn’t working and getting it fixed and so on.
Recently went to a screening of the 1922 Nosferatu with a live accompanist creating an improvised soundtrack on violin, piano and waterphone - which was not an instrument that I had not encountered before, but evidently features in the score of The Matrix, Aliens and a range of other films. I can certainly see why - it was extremely atmospheric. I had seen Nosferatu a couple of times before - as well as the 1979 Herzog version, and Shadow of the Vampire (2000) - but this definitely added something new.
I think that the closest that I had at school was the library. Even decades later I am still happy when surrounded by books.
Otherwise, somewhere green: walking in woodland or sitting by a stream always improves things.
Excluding pretty much everything that I saw as a kid - when you go into basically everything blind - it would be After Hours (1985). I either hadn’t read anything about it or hadn’t been paying attention. Standing outside the cinema, I just saw that it was by Scorsese and went in.
I still think that it is one of his most under-appreciated films. And I loved the Ted Lasso homage, combining it with the Divine Comedy.
At the point where you and the AI can see someone straightening their tie in a certain way and you and the AI can exchange a single wordless glance and you both burst out laughing 'cos it was just like that thing that you both saw 6 months ago and found hilarious then - then maybe.
Not before.
Biggest one for me was swapping from setting the alarm as late as possible and then rushing to get out of the house, to setting it an hour earlier and using that to read, do a little qi gong and have a leisurely breakfast.
My main requirement is that it has to be available on my heavily locked down work phone and work laptop as well as my home ones. If it isnt in my face whenever I look at a screen, it isnt going to work. So it ends up being Google tasks.
Not a developer, but I will always use 2 monitors when I can - using the secondary for Outlook: inbox on one side, calendar on the other. I will also swivel this for showing presentations/plans/documents to members of my team in face to face meetings, and will move Zoom windows to in webinars etc it whilst I get on with some actual work on the main monitor.
I am - in the UK - and I think that it should be opt out rather than opt in.
I use Rainy Days for the radar, and - since I’m in the UK - the Met Office weather app, which has a Next Rain widget.
We have used ALS Testing in the past. More recently Latis Scientific. Both have been good, we swapped just because of some internal admin thing at one point.
In my case, I approached our usual plumbing contractor who have a couple of labs that they usually used. I now go directly to those labs.
I manage utility services - among other things - for a group of properties - and have had the mains water analysed for chemical and biological contamination at various times. The results have always been absolutely fine. Not just with EU limits, but far, far, far within them for almost everything and definitely well within them for all measures.
I’ve got no issues at all with drinking tap water in the UK, even given the state of the rivers etc.
The first I thought of was Dead Horse, Alaska. Permanent population 25 - 50, I understand.
I really can’t recall where I first heard of it though.
I have probably heard of a few other odd ones like this.
Never touched Instagram. Deleted Facebook a decade or more back.
Aliyev’s comments are short-sighted, delusional bollocks but… have you never had a candle as a gift?