Drinking warm water

I try to drink plenty of liquid each day, typically glasses of room-temperature water and hot tisanes, sometimes various tea and coffee also. About the only use I have for ice is for making a bowl of very cold water in which to cool boiled eggs rapidly.

With our colder weather, something new has happened: no longer do I find glasses of cold water appetizing. It would take plenty of tisanes to get me what feels like enough liquid. So, inspired by a colleague back in Dundee who used to drink plenty of warm water, I've now started doing likewise: it's okay. So, that's the new pattern, at least for now.

Airport failure; fast code execution

On one of my work trips to London, EasyJet failed somewhat for the departure back home. They called us to the gate for the delayed flight far too early, especially given that the gate was small with hardly any seats. After having our boarding passes checked, we all got to stand in a small area watching the arriving passengers disembark, then continued standing for much longer while some system loudly played the last call announcement for the flight over and over and over again. Talking to somebody else afterward, they did the same for another flight.

For the same departure, it took quite some time to even get airside because security kept stopping altogether for no obvious reason; the staff and passengers would stand around, waiting for the music to restart or whatever.

An interesting thing I learned on the work trip was about BCPL, an ancestor of C. I may be misconstruing some details but the approximate story is that its simple compact bytecode is such that the interpreter core and your bytecode programme together may run even faster than a straight machine code version of your programme because they fit better into the processor's level-one cache. It seems plausible though I couldn't find a confirmatory reference at a glance.