JQW

Toumani Diabaté, notable Malian kora player, has died aged 59.

The fault is with some corporate anti-virus software known as Crowdstrike - a dodgy update was pushed out that causes PCs to crash hard. There's a fix, but it needs physical access to the machine to delete a file, and if the PC is running BitLocker encryption it also needs the recovery key for that device typing in. Now if that BitLocker key is stored on a server that's currently down...

What? The chap who used to sing Mule Train whilst hitting himself on the head with a tin tea tray?

Ours was real, as I recognised the name of a couple of his nominees, and assumed, correctly, that he was a member of the cricket club they both volunteer at.

Geographically speaking, The British Isles doesn't include Jersey or Guernsey, as they're situated just off the coast of France. There is some argumentary evidence that they may also include the Faroe Islands, though.

I presume that if either of them did cark it today it would have been embargoed until after the polls close.

Our polling station, a local church hall, was busier than I've seen it before, with a queue outside when I left. Some of that queue may have been for the café that's held in the room at the back every Thursday, though.

You could have applied for a Voter Authority Certificate for free - you simply had to upload a photo to the government website and provide various bits of personal info such as date of birth and NI number.

I can only ever recall having someone knock at the door once during a general election, and that was some young Tory boy many years ago. I simply shut the door in his face.

I've only seen 14 Tory election posters throughout the entire campaign, and all of them only appeared in the same empty shop window some time on Monday. The last time this place didn't elect a Tory at a General Election was back in 1906.

No - but Diego is probably going to post about them to the Fallen Fauna thread shortly.

Electoral Calculus has Reform of all people winning this North Yorkshire seat with 57% of the vote, which is complete and utter nonsense. I suspect they're relying on on-line polls which are susceptible to bot activity.

'Everlasting Love' was also a no. 1 for Love Affair in the UK.

I'm sure I met Fartage around 1998/99. Back then I worked for an IT company in Yorkshire. Most of our business was selling and support an obscure operating system, but it's days were clearly numbered as the only new sales we were making were to existing customers, whilst others migrated away or closed down. We had a few other departments, including an 'internet team' who sold firewalls and routers to businesses, but clearly had no idea what they were doing, as I was once called on site to a business in Leeds to sort out their mess. Anyway this 'internet team' moved on to developing a web server package, which was essentially just a WiKi server to which Word and Excel files could be uploaded and translated into HTML. The clever code used some third-party document conversion libraries and Lotus Notes (really!) as web server. Notes was a terrible webserver, and the whole system could be locked for minutes by running a single query. I was the one who had to log support calls from the two disgruntled test sites and fob them off with excuses. It wasn't helped by the fact that a couple of programmers were hopeless. The idea was then raised to float the company on some stock market to gain extra funding to market the thing. We liased with some finance organistion in the city, and their contact was someone named Nigel with an odd surname. He once turned up at the office for a meeting, and it became an all-night piss-up which I wasn't pleased about. I despised the stuck-up git, and all he seemed to bother about was money. I recall a document being printed to hype up the software around the time of the floatation. It was full of claims of things the software could do that certainly weren't true, some were things we'd not yet written, other were features that we hadn't yet tested. There were also claims that the system could be managed from a Mac web client, which was clearly false as I'd briefly tested that when using our only Mac to support something else, due to the system being coded to only be managed from a certain version of Internet Explorer. It was essentially a tissue of lies - a bit like some manifestos! I walked out of the place a few weeks later as I couldn't stand the mess the company had become. The company was also renamed to that of this awful software. We could have sold and supported differnet operating systems to this day, but instead they went around this route. The company collapsed soon afterwards. It looks like this flotation was nothing more than a sure-fire get rich scheme - now, I wonder who benefitted the most from that?

The heavy rain here reminds me of something funny that happened at either the 2001 or 2005 General Election. I used to take long bus journey into work through a lot of rural areas. On the Wednesday before the election the roadside fences of one large area of farmland were festooned with a lot of small signs, about A4 sized, emblazoned with the name of the constituency's Conservative candidate. It rained heavily overnight. The glue used to attach the paper sign to the hardboard was water soluble, so by around 8am most signs were simply blank, as the paper sign had fallen off during the deluge. The rest of these signs were pasted over ones from a previous campaign bearing the name of some other candidate not standing that day, and these were on display instead.

FFS! Just block him, please!

The speed of sound is around 330 metres per second, so at this distance the engine would still be heard for a few seconds after impact.

I've just seen the Statement of Persons Nominated for my constituency, and I recognise a local married couple amongst the names nominating the Reform candidate. I didn't expect to see their names there at all. Plus the local nutter who constantly runs vendettas against planning application is the Proposer for one of the fringe parties.

Sunak's constituency of Richmond contains two major military bases - Catterick Garrison and RAF Leeming. The chances of him now retaining his seat must have slipped considerably.

Kruijswijk and Van Barrle of Team Vimsa-Lease A Bike taken to hospital.

This seems to be the particular Spitfire involved in today's incident: https://www.memorialflightclub.com/blog/bbmf-spitfire-mk-lf-ixe-mk356-75-years-old

If it's at RAF Coningsby then the aircraft is likely to be from the RAF's Battle of Britain Memorial Flight.

Michael Ellis too, apparently.

I can recall another two UK bands with the same name. The first was a glam rock act that renamed themselves as The Radio Stars. The other was a rockabilly revival act that had a couple of hits in the early 1980s

I've heard it's not a manager, but someone 'upstairs'.