2007 — 21 Apr: Dizzy to the rescue
The track in question being Manteca from the album How high the moon.
Ubuntu, what shall I do with you?
The Fawn is indeed Feisty, but can it be reliably tamed? I guess my choices include running it on the iMac under Parallels where I can keep an eye on it, and re-installing the Gateway cleanly with my OEM XP Home licence. It's currently a dual boot system. I've no wish to further enrich the Microsoft coffers, but having activated the licence on that particular machine I am basically stuck with it. And, though it pains me somewhat to say so, it remains the case that some of my applications seem to live and work more happily under Windows than Linux. OS X is a whole different ball game, of course.
Decisions. Well, there's at least one easy one coming up: the next book on the "to read" stack will be the new Hofstadter. Much as I love her, (this) Man cannot quite live by Jane Austen alone.
By the light of the "slivery" moon
Last night I saw the thin crescent, with Venus also shining brightly under it, and decided to take the camera out, set up the tripod, and try for a time exposure. Methinks I would have done better to read the manual. The result was a completely featureless washout. Still, tonight is another day...
Believe it or not, the sky was (still) blue to the nude eye when1 I took this. Mysterious.
Chess, heh?
Today's Guardian includes (under the heading of "Sport" amusingly) a trio of chess book reviews by Stephen Moss, from which I reproduce the following:
Neither genius nor madness is a prerequisite for playing it well, though boys (and the occasional girl) who enjoy making scale models of the Eiffel Tower using matchsticks are likely to do well.
I made a scale model of the Tokyo Tower (itself based on the Eiffel Tower), and painted it, and watched the effect of my Latin master dropping a book onto it in the school staff room. (I was summoned to repair it before it went on display.)
In another review (of Dark Space by Marianne de Pierres) written by Eric Brown, we encounter the wonderful observation: "Much of the novel is taken up by her struggle to survive when the planet is invaded by implacable brain-sucking aliens." It's always the same, isn't it? Those damned brain-suckers are everywhere you look.
Is the Office Open, Mac? You bet!
I needed a psychological boost (given that I seem to have wrecked2 my brand new Ubuntu [again] by the simple act of defining another three workspaces and moving a web browser window into one of them — everything went black [literally] with no desktop furniture, no tools, and no response to my increasingly frenzied keyboard bashing). How better to cheer myself up, therefore, than by installing OpenOffice on the iMac, running it under the X11 window system? (I've tried the NeoOffice Aqua port, honestly, but this way I can get straight on to OO 2.2 instead.)
Am I boosted? Well, it's OK so far, having once again dug out the OS X installation DVD and snaffled X11 off it. First, that is. Mind you, OO defaults to the Writer application when I light the blue touchpaper under it. Since that's what I use over 99% of the time, I refuse to worry for the time being. But one day I may wish to run a spreadsheet, or even (it's a stretch) prepare a foils pitch...
I picked up a copy of the latest Linux Format magazine, too... where's it all going to end?