Daily Reading (03 May 2015)

[nanila]

What have you been reading today? Everything counts, from a novel-length fic to the labels on your washing!

Comments

[nanila]

Bits of the latest Nature and lots of children's books, including some new ones at the library. As usual, not much else because weekends are full on with child care.

[alexseanchai]

I keep forgetting to open these posts in tabs and come back to them when I have read a thing. So I will comment here for yesterday: I finished reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. I'll give her method a shot...probably Saturday, maybe later today. Testing it on the clothes before going on to any other category of item.

The KonMari Method is basically "Does it spark joy?" If not, bye. Though one does observe that a strict application of that rule would send my work slacks into the Goodwill pile, and I kinda need my work slacks in order to be appropriately dressed on work days on which for reasons I do not want to wear a skirt.

[weaverbird]

Today was Avengers: Age of Ultron day (squeeeee), so what little reading there was consisted of emails, texts, and Twitter.

[davidgillon]

Pratchett's The 5th Elephant. I hadn't planned to read it in its entirety, and I had a snooze for several hours in the middle, but ultimately essentially read in (sort of) one sitting. Started out on the patio with lunch and a glass of wine, moved indoors to the couch later, dozed off for an indeterminate period, then picked it straight back up again when I woke up.

[thamesynne]

About half a dozen articles in the Grauniad explaining why the Tories are screwed (cheering, but play to your audience a bit more, why don't you?), bits of code and documentation for a couple of dsPIC Forths, and a lot of "reviews" of the DSO Nano pocket oscilloscope that all amount to "don't buy it, it's a piece of crap, if you aren't looking at at least a [scope an order of magnitude more expensive] you might as well get out of electronics". Which is disheartening :(

[thamesynne]

That seems to happen a lot with Terry Pratchett's books.

[thamesynne]

I suppose taking work slacks off when you get home and know that's it for the day could be interpreted as sparking joy...

[alexseanchai]

Heh, yeah...

[nanila]

I'm looking forward to watching A:AoU once I go back to work and can view it with my London friends. :)

[nanila]

Aw, that sounds lovely. I should make a mental note that once I'm back at work and both the kids are in nursery, I'll take a day off just so I can do this!

[nanila]

Unless you're lucky enough to have a source for an old high-end-in-its-day one, it doesn't really seem possible to get oscilloscopes on the cheap. :/

[ironed_orchid]

How were the ones from the library received?

[ironed_orchid]

I like the idea of it, but I find I have to ask "does it have a function (which can't be met by anything else here)?" before I can actually get rid of things.

[ironed_orchid]

I usually do that the first time I read any Pratchett book. And sometimes when I re-read.

[alexseanchai]

Which is a good approach too, I'm sure!

[nanila]

She enjoyed them, but I think a lot of what she enjoys about reading at the moment has more to do with interacting with the bloke and me than it does with the content (the Meg and Mog books being one notable exception). There was one surprise. We found a book about the colour green. It required a good deal of concentration as the text was denser and there were a lot of little puzzles to solve. I thought she would get bored with it after a couple of pages but we went through the whole thing and she did all the puzzles - not necessarily successfully, but she tried all of them.

[thamesynne]

there used to be a little shop next to leeds railway station that sold all kinds of random electronics bits. used to have literal columns of vintage tube scopes. i have no idea if it's still there (not been to leeds, i think, since i moved away from west yorkshire) but i wish i'd picked one up when i had the chance!