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About joesportugal

Developer

Nicola Cafe, Coimbra

Como as coisas mudam, e não para melhor.
Este era o Café Nicola antes de 2015.

[English]
How things change, and not for the better.
This was Cafe Nicola pre-2015

Na minha última visita, não estava assim. Infelizmente, não estava com a minha máquina fotográfica.
O TripAdvisor tem algumas fotos, incluindo uma de uma sanita com o assento solto e encostado à parede, juntamente com fotos de pratos — que tentação…

O Café Nicola tem um site, uma apresentação de diapositivos aborrecida e irritante de embalagens e chávenas de café – aparentemente nada para mostrar os seus cafés – ou será que temos de entrar naquela saco de merda Facebook para ver o que oferecem?

[English]
Last time I visited. It didn’t look like the above. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera with me.
TripAdvisor has some photos, including one of a toilet, with seat detached leaning against the wall, alongside pics of dishes – how tempting..

Nicola Cafe have a website, a boring, irritating slide show of packets, and cups of coffee – nothing apparently to showcase their cafes – or do we have to login to that bag of shit Facebook, to see whats on offer?

What price a game of Cricket?

Qual o preço de um jogo de críquete?

M4011M-1402

Take a school, All Saints in Gateshead UK (Now gone thankfully)
Take a so-called game of Cricket, a stupid teacher batting, and a group of unprotected small boys fielding.
A visit to hospital, x-rays, a broken cheekbone a near loss of an eye.
No-one held to account, no action by parents NAFF ALL.

Imagine uma escola, a All Saints em Gateshead, no Reino Unido (que felizmente já não existe).
Imaginem um suposto jogo de críquete, um professor incompetente a rebater e um grupo de rapazes desprotegidos a defender.

Uma visita ao hospital, radiografias, uma fratura no osso da face, quase perda de um olho.
Ninguém foi responsabilizado, nenhuma ação por parte dos pais. NADA DE REGRESSO.

Green Man Review

It isn’t often I refer directly to another site, other than to pass an opinion. But I suggest folks look at A Green Man Review.
The theme rings very true. Though I find it very hard to think kindly of several folks, starting with His Most Absurdly PumpedUpNish, Mr Donald Trump. What are the the good folks of America thinking about? All he and his cronies see, is more dollars, and more power to themselves. Screw everyone else.

What are you? ‘Sinistro’ or ‘Destro’

The BBC have posted an interesting article on the merits or demerits of being left-handed.

Devils Hand

The main reason for reserving one hand for eating and one for using a pebble to clean yourself after the waste has been expunged, was one of simple good sense. No-one I know enjoys eating shit.

Sadly, even when good facilities for cleaning both hands became available, folks who preferred to use their left hand were stigmatised. My experience as a child, an example of ignorance and stigma by my father. Picking up my knife with my left hand at the dinner table resulted in being struck on the knuckles with whatever he held in his right hand, and I was lambasted as being ‘cack-handed’ – IOW shit-handed. Even later there were similar remarks when I used a screwdriver to remove a screw. ‘They never made anything for left-handed people Joe!’. Probably true, but turning a screw anti-clockwise is easier with the left hand, than it is with the right – at least for me. I drive a screw in with my right hand and remove it with my left.
Later on, I worked with him on open steel work, building the extension to a switch-house at Blyth Power station (another project I’ve out-lived) He was embarrassed when I unloosened a reluctant nut, using a spanner in my left hand – one he couldn’t budge.

The simple truth is he’d created a ‘monster’ someone who made best use of his body, irrespective of the nonsense preached by others.

The BBC article highlights the use of latin in language. Sinistro and Destro are Italian adjectives for left and right. In the UK left-handed folks are ‘sinister’, right-handed folks are ‘dexterous’.
So good sense in early human behaviour has been handed down to us as an insult and a compliment. Complete twaddle.

Intelligence? IQ tests demonstrate how good you are at IQ tests. They serve no other purpose than to categorise folk, and provide yet another label that psyche’s love to stick on people. If I was wearing them all, I would resemble a badly misdirected parcel by the once-Royal Mail.

Me? I thank my father’s ignorance and stupidity for making me virtually ambidextrous. I thank myself for the endless irritating questions I asked him, and for cross-questioning the rubbish told by some teachers at school.

Is the BBC publishing AI Slop on it’s website?

BBC Account of Bridge damaged once again.

Quote from BBC Account: “Network Rail said over-height vehicles crashed into the bridge over the Cambrian railway line despite numerous warning signs, causing more than 1,110 minutes of train delays and the A470 to temporarily close.”

Updated: 1st December 2025
Seems like my observation was correct, but…
What is a road bridge?
It’s a bridge carrying a road over an obstacle.
So Network Rail’s account is complete rubbish, and the BBC blindly copied the rubbish.

My original observation was of the photo shown, It is a RAILWAY BRIDGE, NOT A ROAD BRIDGE.
Slop, slop and more slop.

Below is Network Rails account of the latest incident.
Network Rail Media

AI – There’s also those that don’t know they don’t know.

Yes. Said by a Yorkshire man many years ago. The full quote is:
There’s those that know, and there’s those that don’t know, There’s also those that don’t know, they don’t know.
The stifling effects of industrialisation on humankind are already known. Individualism in the design of clothes, carpets, curtains etc., has virtually disappeared, with the exception of those resourceful folks which chop up rags, and create original pieces of their own design.
The same can be said for almost every utensil, or machine we make use of.
The BBC recently published an article on AI chatbots Sadly they did not publish a link on their post to the study itself. I found that using a search it is here.

It’s interesting where a study of some other’s work takes you, especially when the BBC itself employs folk who simply repeat what they have read from an unreliable source, such as boasts by a company regarding a motionless wind generation system.

One such item I followed was regarding the recommendation of vaping to give up smoking. Again, the report does not provide a link to the source. So I checked the NHS website on giving up smoking. This makes grim reading. The three options ‘recommended’ are all chemical options. The NHS comments giving up is difficult: Many people try to quit with willpower alone, but going cold turkey can be tough.
That apparently is the help you get for a non-chemical approach. This is nothing short of appalling. No wonder AI chatbots get it wrong.

I gave up in 1986. After smoking from the age of 12. I’m 78. I’ll leave you to do the arithmetic.
I had a friend, who had been a smoker, but was then a member of ASH – Action on smoking and health. He advised me, and informed me about both the good things that would happen and the bad. He warned me about ‘transferring’ my addiction to alcohol or food. He also informed me of more colds, and personal plumbing failures.
It was bad, very bad at times, but ‘situation normal’ was eventually resumed. I’ve never smoked a cigarette since.
On the NHS site the chemical ‘solutions’ are presented first. Only later are you invited to contact your ‘local’ Stop Smoking Service – everyone has one, don’t you know.. Significantly ASH are never mentioned. Their summary on vaping is interesting.

My advice on giving up is simple. Don’t transfer your addiction by consuming nicotine by other means. Talk to those who have given up by ‘cold turkey’. Enjoy the extra spending in your wallet.

The Scraped Crap Leading The Blind

Take a look at this: Crisp packet gun
Yes, there will be more. It ain’t intelligent – it’s a bag of shit. What is intelligent about relying on an image recognition system that can’t distinguish the difference between a gun and a packet of crisps?

The idiots that mandate installion of this crap, should be penalised heavily. Saying ‘Sorry’ should be a million dollar fine.

BBC – Internet failure that didn’t really happen

Once again the BBC’s ‘Timely, trusted tech news‘ is neither timely, nor can be trusted.
Yup. The Y2K ‘failure’ didn’t happen on the scale predicted Thomas Germain, so why even mention it?
The reason it didn’t happen, was because tens of thousands of software engineers such as myself, fixed code, so that it wouldn’t happen – something the BBC article studiously leaves out. That some companies, and indeed some authorities ignored what they had been told accounted for several failures.
Apparently Thomas regards train delays and misprinted jury summons as ‘trivial’ – that is only his point of view.

Wickipedia gives a reasonably accurate account of the reason why remediation was required. Year 2000 Problem
It also lists a considerable number of ‘falures’ where the problem hadn’t been fixed. An example:
In New York, a video store accidentally generated a $91,250 late fee because the store computer determined a tape rental was 100 years overdue.’ – It doesn’t mention whether the tape renter had a heart attack when he was given the bill.
The BBC article: Internet Outages

AI – The madness continues

Jerry Kaplan, an early entrepreneur in AI has recently commented:
“We’re creating a new man-made ecological disaster: enormous data centres in remote places like deserts, that will be rusting away and leaching bad things into the environment, with no one left to hold accountable because the builders and investors will be long gone”

A post on BBC.com gives an account comparing the ‘bubble’ of investment now, with the hype and swipe of the dotcom.bubble.
There is one particular statement made by Jeff Boudier, who builds products at the AI community hub Hugging Face, made me laugh at its’ absurdity.
“The thing that comforts me is that the internet was built on the ashes of the over-investment into the telecom infrastructure of yesterday,”
The ‘Internet’ Mr Boudier, was built on the back of military spending, primarily by the US government on it’s ARPANET project. The ‘ashes’ you refer to are the ashes of the dreams of greedy investors in a bubble.

But I’m guessing your ‘comfort’ is an attempt to soothe concerns for investors in your company.
In a separate post I relate my experience with ChatGPT, simply a lazy way of accessing scraped items from other folks postings on the web. ‘Comfort’ is not the word I would use for idiotic crap ‘counselling’ worrying young folks about their personal relationships.
BBC post: A Tangled Web Of Dreams
My post regarding ChatGPT: Advice to young people