What I’ve been listening to in 2021

Here is a YouTube playlist of my now-traditional top-ten list of the albums I’ve listened to the most in the previous calendar year. (See this list of previous entries.) I listen much more to whole… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 2 years ago

Spoileriffic thoughts on Wandavision

I got a recommendation from a friend to watch the first three episodes of Wandavision in a block. That suggestion was solid. It’s slllooowww to get going, especially, if you’re not bathed in Americ… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 2 years ago

Let’s be clear. To be honest. Putting it simply

When writing, or indeed speaking, do not begin sentences with any of these phrases. “Let’s be clear” admits that, up to this point, you have been obscure. “To be honest̶… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 2 years ago

From the depths of time: a 30-year-old bug with a funny explanation

It was 1990 or possibly 1991, and I was working for System Simulation on an Application for Windows 2 – which at that time was a rather exotic extra that a few adventurous people were running on to… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 2 years ago

Tartes au citron et limon (second try)

Last time, I made my first attempt at baking tarte au citron (lemon tart). I made several mistakes, which I documented, so yesterday I had another go, learning my lessons from the first time. Here … | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

Tarte au citron (lemon tart)

Inspired by watching The Great Australian Bake Off, I found myself wanting to have a go at baking a tarte au citron, or lemon tart if you insist. It is essentially an egg-custard tart with a lot of… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

The Empty Nest: album and launch

As we approach the end of 2021, I have a pretty good idea of what my top ten albums of the year will be, for my now traditional What I’ve Been Listening To post. And one of them is an album I… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

They didn’t think it through #3: Stargazer

The climactic track of Rainbow’s swords-and-sorcery metal masterpiece Rising (1976), Stargazer tells the tale of a sorcerer whose slaves build a tower so they can watch him fly from it —… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

A rainbow surrounding our home

Yesterday we had an amazingly clear rainbow. And it happened at just the right time of day (4:20pm) that the sun was in just the right place that I was able to step back from the house and frame it… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

Testing with Jest: how to mock an import used by the module you’re testing

I am writing a Jest/RTL test for a React component that invokes another component. I want to mock that second component so I can have it do things like invoking callbacks that the first component p… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

Dublin Core's dirty little secret (2010)

[This is part two in a series — you should read part 1 first for context and then you might go on to part 3.] The Dublin Core — metadata made dumb Just when librarians were in despair o… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

I AM A SITH

SITH DICRIPTION I, Darth trilon am a Sith. A Sith is a Jedi who has found the true sorce to powor. A siths primary hand weapen is a Light Saber like a Jedi. Unlike a Jedi we are evil. A Jedi Trusts… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

A conservatory on the cheap

Fiona and I both love the sunshine, and it’s something you don’t necessarily get a lot of in Britain. We’ve often thought that if we had the money we’d love to add a conserv… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

An accidentally sensational pizza

An interesting thing happened. A few days ago, I made pizza dough for four pizzas, as usual. Generally, I do one each for Fiona, Jonno and me, and put the spare ball in an airtight plastic tub in t… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

What I’ve been reading lately, part 41

Emma — Jane Austen I usually think of this as my second favourite Austen (after Pride and Prejudice, naturally), but on my re-read of all six, I found to my surprise that I didn’t enjoy… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

Hands up who enjoys feeling old!

Have I got good news for you! First: the following albums, released in 1983, are as close to WWII as to the present day: Billy Joel: An Innocent ManPolice: SynchronicityMarillion: Script for a Jest… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

Metal Jester: the full story

Three years ago, I posted about an early 1990s heavy metal band, Metal Jester, whose singer Richard Whitbread had also been our singer in Anne Heap of Frogs. Since then, I’ve heard from Simon… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

What I’ve been listening to in 2020

Rather belatedly … Here is a YouTube playlist of my now-traditional top-ten list of the albums I’ve listened to the most in the previous calendar year. (See this list of previous entries.) I … | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

How much does a cup of tea cost?

However much I might lament the inexorable downward trend of everything that was once bright and good about my country, I was born an Englisshman and am still one today — which means I drink a lot … | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

What I’ve been reading lately, part 40

If I Never Met You — Mhairi McFarlane This is is my fourth McFarlane book. (Previously: You Had Me At Hello, It’s Not Me, It’s You, Here’s Looking at You). She continues to impress and deligh… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

Pulled pork

It wasn’t until my 2007 trip to Oklahoma that I realised the food called “barbecue” in the USA bears no relation to the charred-on-the-outside, raw-on-the-inside sausages that bea… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

Three recent meals

On Monday last week, I made pizza from scratch for the whole family: but because it’s hard to separate a mass of dough out into five equal parts, I made enough for six pizzas, and saved the l… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

“A little sound common sense often goes further with an audience of American working-men than much high-flown argument”

Let’s see what G. K. Chesterton has to say about Boris Johnson and the rest of our clownish government. I read yesterday a sentence which should be written in letters of gold and adamant; it … | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

We’re getting bored of all the corruption

Today I read — a little behind the curve — that Richard Sharp, who the Tory government recently appointed as BBC chairman — has donated £416,189 to the Tory party since the turn of the millennium. … | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

Hulks (five different ones). Part 5: the MCU

Well, I blinked, and the best part of two years passed since the fourth and penultimate part in my series about The Incredible Hulk. (See also part 1, part 2 and part 3). For this concluding post I… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

Paint the whole world with a rainbow

Back on 12 December last year, we had a spectacular rainbow out behind the house — so clear it felt you could reach out and touch it. Here’s a photo of it that I took on my phone, completely … | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

“Lockdowns don’t work!”

“Lockdowns don’t work!” Sorry, reality disagrees. This graph shows Covid-19 infection rates from the Government’s data as of today. I have superimposed pink boxes showing th… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 3 years ago

Turns out that Brexit means Brexit. Who knew?

As the final, definitive break the the European Union approaches — the transition period that has shielded us from most of the implications of Brexit ends in 16 days — we’re starting to see h… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

Thorns in the Straw

I recorded this song for a Christmas event at my church. It was written by Graham Kendrick, who is best known for congegational worship songs of 1980s that have not necessarily aged very well; but … | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

What I’ve been reading lately, part 39

Northanger Abbey — Jane Austen I’m making my way once more through all six of Austen’s completed novels, and was interested to see how this one would hold up. Although published p… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

Films I’ve watched recently

In the last few weeks I’ve had a horrible and debilitating attack of arthritis, so extreme that for several days I was physically unable to leave my bedroom. It also fogged my brain so I was … | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

Pink Floyd in my home town

I recently learned that Pink Floyd played a gig in my home town, a little under a year before I was born (on 12th March 1968): It’s a strange thought. I am 52 years old. Pink Floyd are even o… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

Things I’ve given up on watching recently

We live in a content-saturated world. It took me a long while to get used to the idea that books are now easy enough to source that I can start one, decide I don’t like it, and just give up. … | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

Why football is important

A while back, I signed a government petition, “Review the need for a statutory owners and Directors Test in Football”. As a result, I got an email today: The Petitions Committee would l… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

Still hatin’ on Git: now with added Actual Reasons

Monday’s little diatribe on git seemed to stir up quite a bit of strong opinion, both agreeing with me and disagreeing.  As is often the case, they two camps seem to be split about 50-50, whi… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

Moussaka

I don’t honestly even like moussaka much. By my wife loves it (and aubergines more generally), so a while back (pre-lockdown) she ordered it in a supposed Greek restaurant, only to find that … | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

What I’ve been reading lately, part 38

Tremendous Trifles — G. K. Chesterton One of the better ways to approach Chesterton is through a collection like this one, consisting of 30 or 40 or so short, self-contained pieces in which h… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

Home-made beefburgers

These are very much better than anything you get in a shop. They are really simple to make. Here’s how. | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

I’m getting better at this pizza thing

I didn’t think to get a photo before I’d eaten a good chunk of it: But here is last night’s pizza — one of three that I made. Fiona’s was topped with olives and anchov… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

ScottKit in the wild!

Thanks to a tweet (in Spanish!) from Zona Fi, I have learned of not one but two series of adventure games being written in my toolkits for building Scott Adams-format adventure games! The first is … | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the statues?!

Visit the post for more. | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

What I’ve been reading lately, part 37

High Society — Ben Elton Elton doing what he does best, colliding a cast of somewhat stereotypical characters (the corrupt politician, the drugged-out singing star, the teenage runaway) and w… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

Gavin Burrows on William Hartnell’s Doctor Who

Different Doctor Who fans have responded in different ways to the shallow disappointment that is the Chibnall/Whittaker era. I have reluctantly written something about each episode, despite activel… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

Making pizza from scratch

This is a recipe adapted from one that mygood friend Charles Ledvina gave me. I have only made it once — to good effect — so I am blogging this mostly so that I have an easy way to find it. If you … | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

What I’ve been reading lately, part 36

The Magician’s Nephew — C. S. Lewis I don’t quite remember what the specific stimulus was for my starting to re-re-re-read Lewis’s classic Narnia books. But this must be at … | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

What to do with leftover rice

Now that we’re in lockdown, and it’s difficult to get food delivered, we’ve become more careful about making the best use of all our leftovers. In particular, when we have left-ov… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

Another curry

I don’t know what to call this curry: it’s sort of like a dupiaza, sort of like a jalfrezi. The key point is, it’s delicious. And the great thing about it is that the first 80% or… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago

What I’ve been reading lately, part 35

Wintersmith — Terry Pratchett Towards the end of his career — and Wintersmith is the 41st of the 47 Discworld books — it seems to me that Terry Pratchett’s heart was really in the Tiffa… | Continue reading


@reprog.wordpress.com | 4 years ago