31 years ago today, a mysterious voice identifying itself as 'Vrillon', accompanied by a deep buzzing, broke into the broadcast of the local ITV station Southern Television to warn viewers of "the destiny of your race" and "so that you may communicate to your fellow beings the course you must take to avoid a disaster which threatens your world and the beings on other worlds around you". Wikipedia:
As the broadcast did not affect the video signal, it was difficult to detect its source, and the transmission disappeared at the end of what sounded like a prepared statement. Most observers have concluded that the broadcast was a hoax [no shit, Sherlock?], achieved by directing a powerful signal at the Hannington UHF transmitter.
While I don't condone this kind of hijacking, I sure would have liked to have watched that channel when it happened.
❦
Having reset my sleep cycle last night to a reasonable set of endpoints, I am not fit to write sensible code today. Instead, I've been debugging a bit, cleaning up half of the test failures uncovered yesterday.
The first one turned out to be ignorable warnings, and the second one was a regression due to improvements in Rakudo, easily fixed.
The two remaining errors require closer inspection, and unless I feel like implementing something new, I will look at them tomorrow.
But first, спать. In the meantime don't forget to communicate to your fellow beings. Spread the love. Use Perl 6. Bzzz.
