When I was in middle school, I had a student teacher who had gone to Australia. She said that emus weren't smart at all and would run straight into fences, not even TRYING to miss them.

Electric Multiple Units, like their Diesel Multiple Units counterparts, are trains with no locomotive and localised (one or more motorised carriages pull one or more non-motorised carriages) or distributed (all carriages have motors), all controlled from a driving position at either end of the train.

I did my initial trainspotting on the Oxted line. Bloody Fairburn 2-6-4T's but their exhaust could blow your ears off.

[Rosie] I think we all need some proof of this aural sectioning that you experienced...

(Bis) The interior of Riddlesdown Tunnel is littered with severed, now largely decomposed, auditory appendages. They are, or were, mine.

[nights] on holiday in the City of Light burning cars?

Yesterday was apparently the warmest day globally since records began. Here in B it was colder than normal, but amazingly windy.

(Bis) Ackshully it was the month of June that was the warmest month in a rather precisely defined area known as Central England. It was also the warmest, unsurprisingly, that I have personally recorded here at Plas Huws (= Hughes Hall) over the 40 years I have been an amateur weather nut and before that a professional one. Gotta be precise.

I wish I could be back in my home, but it's not ready yet. It's not even ready for living in one room. My contractor is trying to get it so I have a room and a bathroom and there's air conditioning and the outside is all okay. My vinyl siding was shipped, but delayed the last I heard.

[KS] oh my... we should bake a cake for the third(?) anniversary of the demise of your house. What's taking so long?

[Bis] Just passing through, back home now in lovely Strasbourg where no-one cares enough to set fire to anything...

Eek, they don't!

Another year, another OS upgrade, things sort of work, but also sort of don't... I seem to have broken the Whoops! feature.

It probably hasn't worked for ages, knowing me

There's nothing like working on a live site... staging, we've heard of it. Seems to work now, of a fashion

I think I've used it quite recently. Within the last couple of weeks, surely?

I am an Australian. Last week. Saturday, in fact.

What'd you do, Stevie? What'd you do?

It worked on some games, not others. Somehow, an index had got out-of-synch with the actual gameplay, which caused the de-whoopsing to fail. This is a brittle misfeature of the server code, motivated by a desire to keep the number of SQL queries to a minimum, which is probably a somewhat redundant optimisation given the tiny amount of data involved.

Glad to hear that the feature is used by people, though, as going backwards in time is not so straightforward.

Last day of working before two weeks off. It'll be a staycation mostly (we've both had a lot going on this year and we need some space to just be), but we might nip to France for a night to eat the food and stock up in a French hypermarche. On my shopping list: French washing-up liquid, which comes in lots of flavours that are way less boring than the Dutch ones, and a dozen of those glass jars of pates and rilletes that last forever. I'm hungry now.

Where are you going?

[Bis] Wherever it isn't going to be raining in Nord Pas de Calais or Normandy - a comfortable few hours' drive from home in the Netherlands. We're watching the weather radar like a hawk now...

I suggest you bring your ironing with you. Many hotels have a steam iron in the room.