Seasons Change With The Scenery
Monday or not, today had a very Friday feeling about it. It certainly had an autumnal feel, with heavy showers and angled yellow light illuminating the landscape beneath dark skies. We’re almost at the point where I’ll go into the garden to find the apple trees and climbing hydrangea have dropped all their leaves overnight. Morning was marked by squabbling chaffinches at the birdfeeders at the back of the garden, with the occasional goldfinch body-slamming its way to the sunflower hearts. This afternoon I had a nap.
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Inevitably, news emerges of another disaster for the world-beating track and trace system that the UK government contracted out at huge expense, without competition, and seems incapable of contract-managing. This one involved test results being fed into Excel and exceeding the available number of columns, thereby missing sixteen thousand positive tests.
There’s no shame in using Excel when putting something like this together when you’re trying to do the initial modelling and roughing out of process and information flows. There is shame in using it for a critical production system when lives are at stake. I’ve seen it said that when you’re in a hurry, as here, you can’t expect someone to learn programming language skills from scratch; perhaps, but you can expect it when you’re paying several billion for a professional job–in that case it’s reasonable to expect the contractor to employ people who, you know, know what they’re doing.
Heads should roll, but they won’t.
In the US, the size of the cluster around the White House continues to grow and, as I write, 45 has said he’s going to leave hospital today. That’s his right, but it seems monumentally stupid to me. Having said that, monumental stupidity seems to be the MO of him and his acolytes.
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Music: another random one from my LPs. Bookends is the most interesting of Simon and Garfunkle’s albums for me (your mileage may vary). It’s quite experimental in its own way, and in many respects superior to Bridge Over Troubled Water which I wrote about in my 1970 music pages.
The Bangles had a hit with this too, which is nice. A Hazy Shade of Winter
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