I made the mistake of trying to read today’s puzzle before coffee, took me 5 minutes to work out what they were asking for nevermind solving it!

I had to do a complete rewrite for part 2 of lanternfish too :-)

Are you guys professionals?

I’m not a programmer/developer but I’m solving them with FME which is pretty much my day job. Although the data wrangling I do day to day is quite far removed from Advent of Code type puzzles.

It varies for me depending on the nature of the problem. Saturday probably took me an hour for both parts, Sunday only 10 minutes. I’d nearly always be able to do them more quickly in python, but the challenge I’ve set myself is to do them in FME.

Also, if you’ve done previous contests, you get to know the style of problems they set so that makes things easier.

Nine times out of ten, if you can brute force a solution for part 1, you’ll find part 2 needs a rewrite so you know to start looking for patterns or alternative ways of getting the answer. Today’s was unusual in that you could complete part 2 even with a naive solution for part 1

I was able to brute force a solution this morning before I stumbled on a cleverer way

FME is an ETL tool rather than a programming language, not sure if I’d made that clear :-)

Yesterday’s puzzle was really nice and straightforward in FME, only required one change to get part 2. Today’s part 2 required a complete rewrite. You win some you lose some

I can just copy paste the data into my workspace but most of the python solutions I’ve seen use a local txt file as their input so I wouldn’t worry about that. Puzzle inputs differ by user so you can’t just simply scrape the website.

Part 2 of Day 3 is fairly hideous to do in FME but it’s done.

First time I’ve heard of FME: is it a natural fit for coding advent calendar problems?

Based on past years, I’d say some puzzles are simpler in FME but most are more difficult (possibly impossible). I think I managed 44 stars out of 50 last year using FME and had to resort to python for the final 6.

Never seen this before, but just solved the first day with excel, is that cheating?

No, you can use whatever language/program you like

I guess that’s a no then :-)

There’s been some fairly rapid inflation on that Tuin Lukas log cabin. We paid 1800 5 years ago

Good to find out about repairs, I have a 20? year old mountain hardware jacket where the zip has come away from the fabric (bonded not sewn). 5 month old bitey puppy means I’d prefer not to splash out on a new waterproof right now.

Pixel 4a was the smallest half decent Android I could find. Still bigger than I’d like but there weren’t really any other options. Decent case is a must as I drop it often as can’t hold and type with one hand very easily

There is a saying that labs are born half trained and spaniels die half trained :-)

Such as avoiding getting dragged under a bus for a chip

She’s not actually very food motivated for a lab, she is desperate to be everyone’s friend though – dogs and people alike.

We have the Happy Puppy Handbook and Total Recall by Pippa Martinson, but the cost of training classes has been one of the cheaper aspects of puppy ownership tbh!

We have a 5 month old lab so different challenges to a collie

Are you still trying to include your wife as a named driver? I had an accident as a named driver in my dad’s car and declaring that I’d had an accident and he’d had a claim made my premiums rocket – it seemed to be treated as two separate incidents whereas my accident and his claim was one incident. I just dropped him from my policy.

Plants aren’t looking great but I’ve got plenty of chillis – Hungarian black, apache, hungarian hot wax, thai

These have all been outside from end of May onwards, puppy only picked one (Picked and dropped, not eaten luckily!)

I thought they’d stopped allowing non-commercial vehicles from Immingham. You used to be able to book on Immingham to Esbjerg but when they scrapped the Harwich to Esbjerg ferry they stopped allowing it because the demand was too high

Edit: yep, no longer can take leisure paying passengers from Immingham

“Due to UKBF port approval, private passengers are not permitted to be carried through Immingham. This means that we can no longer accept leisure fare paying passengers on the freight routes through Immingham”

https://www.dfds.com/en-gb/freight-shipping/routes-and-schedules/esbjerg-immingham

I reckon a train trip would be excellent though. There are some stunning rail routes via Germany and Denmark

I still need to get on the train that goes on a ferry before it gets replaced. It’s on my to do list

We drive to Denmark once a year normally, we’ve been up to Norway once as well. Ferries we either do Harwich or Hull to Rotterdam. Worst part is getting through Hamburg but beyond that it’s easy if fairly dull through the Netherlands and Germany (although some of that may be because I’ve done it too many times)

Like someone else said, we used ferries to get some sleep. Copenhagen to Oslo is the nicest ferry trip I’ve done, get on the ferry around early evening and arrive into Oslo in the early morning sunshine. The last part of the trip into Oslo is stunning.

Miss the Harwich Esbjerg ferry

Has he got any evidence of being on the electoral role at another address?

We had a similar situation and proof of paying council tax at another address was enough but sounds like he wouldn’t have that if he moved to share with friends

PXL_20210705_130920738 by Elizabeth Gomm[/url], on Flickr

https://www.instagram.com/p/CQ8mBvTsJpW/?utm_medium=copy_link

A crochet duck, which Ada is now going to test to destruction :-)

Having an accident as a named driver in my dad’s car when he was out the country was hard enough to sort out, wouldn’t fancy having to do it when the policy owner was deceased

I normally pot on in whatever I have to hand, pay no special attention. I have a mix of indoor and outdoor plants. First chilli well on its way

First chilli of the year

https://www.instagram.com/p/CQgu6JZMFN4/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

I don’t have a platform to easily convert it to a usable plot on the map, in particular to overlay to OS and get a GR. I am sure such a platform does exist but it is not in routine use.

You can put lat longs straight into google, both decimal and degrees. Don’t even need to be in Google maps

I’m getting rid of my virgin credit card as it’s no longer possible to manage your account online, it’s now app only

Just being in an accident can impact your insurance. I’ve been in two accidents where I wasn’t involved in making the claim, one a hire car and one a named driver. Both non fault accidents but both increased my premiums at the time.

I’ll have to wait and see what happens with the latest accident after someone decided to reverse into me last week.

This is over the space of about 17 years btw.

Second others on the whiplash, I was fine immediately after, it was a different story 12 hours later.

It was a fun call to the rental car company – “Where’s the damage?” Me: “All over” (Someone decided to make me the filling in a car sandwich at the back of a queue of traffic, literally every single panel was damaged, even the roof was creased)

Don’t they just wee in the water like everyone else?

Have a little think about what women might need to use bathroom facilities for that would never be an issue for men

I’m sure a great number are put off by being dragged round a trail centre on a bso weighing 20kg whilst their boyfriend is on 2 grands worth of bike. That’s certainly a situation I’ve seen played out a number of times over the years.

The comparison with ow swimming is interesting. I did a lot last year due to pool closures and women were always in the majority. This is despite the fact that there are barriers that might be reasonably expected to impact women more than men e.g. lack of toilets and changing facilities.

I’m being offered 1.19% repayment Vs 1.49% offset.

Need to look into this again, last time I looked the offset rates looked rubbish, far more than 0.3% difference.

I had to have a molar removed which I cracked during first lockdown and couldn’t get any treatment for. The dentist was most impressed that it had 3 roots and 6 root canals. Took forever, longer than having all 4 wisdom teeth out. Still, better than when I had a tooth removed and they left a hole straight into my sinuses.

I always find co-codamol best for tooth pain – the fizzy stuff but normally antibiotics reduce the pain pretty quickly. (Took about 5 years of repeated infections before they’d take my wisdom teeth out, damaged the next molars along hence the subsequent extractions)

If it’s literally for just getting changed purposes, then two towels stitched together at the top with a gap for the head and then at the sides with gaps for large arm holes works fine. I have an Oakley towelling poncho but this is far more restrictive for getting changed under than the two towel option (and more expensive).

I thought the dryrobes looked good until I saw the price! I’m surprised how popular they are given the expense. I’m not sure they’re that easy to get changed under, most people I know seem to use them to drive home in so they don’t have to change at all. I’m sensitive to snail parasites in open water, so i need to towel off asap so not an option for me.

Bakewell area

Wonderfully deserted in the part of the peak district where we walked today. Weather was great too, not at all what we expected.

I’ve looked at those before, but the door always seems to be on the opposite side to what i want and it’s not clear how easy it is to swap it around.

@baileyswalk – have you made a start on this?

However, I’ve realised that since I moved house in 2017 and then when the dog died Jan last year all of my low intensity long duration exercise has stopped. I do everything at zone 3 and above.

How are you measuring heart rate? My fitbit likes to say all my runs are spent in the peak zone. It’s lying.