2008 — 14 Mar: Friday on my mind
Another placeholder; I'm a tad tired. It's only 00:28, too. Must be overdoing things.
Still, while Steve Harley is playing some delicious Supertramp from their wonderful 1974 album "Crime of the Century" (one of the first albums I reviewed back in the days when I wrote about hi-fi kit and so on) there's time to recall that I forgot to mention that I picked up a copy of Knoppix Hacks by Kyle Rankin yesterday — I took myself off into Southampton for a spot of lunchtime retail therapy.
It occurred to me as I walked through the throngs that there was no longer anybody to tick me off for "wasting" my money on yet more delicious dust-gatherers from the Swarovski shop; but there was also nobody that I now wanted to buy them for. (I had a tradition of buying an item of their crystal for Christa on each holiday, or whenever I went on a trip. She used to get really cross with me, even though she liked the pieces.) It's also amazing just how many young couples with children there are, wandering around. I'm a little envious. As I get older, I'm more frequently struck by the thought that life is best understood backwards, though I only know how to live it forwards.
Right. That's enough for now. G'night.
Now what?
It's 11:00 and I've been fully conscious (to the extent that I ever am, or think I am) for all of 70 minutes or so. Told you I was tired. Brekkie has raised the blood sugar level, though the vague drizzle outside lowers the spirits slightly. Still, what's going on in the world? I (think) I half-heard an inane factoid about the trains of one UK service clocking up a staggering 14,000,000 minutes1 of lateness. I also mentioned my recent trawl up through the Freeview TV channels in search (like Lily Tomlin) of intelligent life in the universe. I'm not alone in my opinion, it seems:
Broadcast journalism in particular is flawed in such a fundamental way that its utility as a tool for illuminating life, let alone interpreting it, is almost nil... Today's star journalist, however, goes to great lengths to distance himself from his trade's man bites dog heritage. To admit that what he's presenting is largely marginalia (or at best "background music") deflates the journalist's relevance... Or as British humorist/philosopher G.K. Chesteron [sic] whimsically put it some decades ago, 'Journalism consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.'
This, too, is rather delicious:
It is part of our Pleistocene inheritance that many people will resent the elitist values they associate with the rich, whether it's the opera, chardonnay, gallery openings, being able to distinguish between words such as criterion and criteria, using apostrophes properly or spouting an apposite quote from Shakespeare off the top of your head.
Professor Dutton edits one of my favourite watering places on the Interweb thingy: Arts&Letters daily. He skewers things neatly. "In the sense that it would show innumerable careers in the humanities over the last forty years to have been wasted on banal politics and execrable criticism, Darwinian aesthetics is a very dangerous idea indeed." I note that he assesses the optimum group size (for effective co-operation) at the same value put forward by Antony Jay2 in his wonderful 1972 book "Corporation Man". (By the way, Jay's 1967 book "Management and Machiavelli" is also fascinating.)
In better news...
I shall be welcoming Junior down from London and across the threshold sometime later today. I expect I'd better prepare some food, and cut a path through the clutter into his room. (Only joking, son!) Wonder if he's had time to do anything with the new wireless router — doubt it, somehow. But it will be delightful to have him around for a few hours.
Now I cannot really put off, any longer, the reloading of all those wonderful Microsoft security patches. Watch out for foul language hereabouts... It's a good job I still basically enjoy computers as well as the interesting things you can do with them. I shall also need some fresh air at some point today. I still like Fridays, too. Life is OK, I guess. Different, lonely, somewhat chaotic. But OK. Heck, I'm even listening to BBC Radio 4 for a change. (I don't care for the Radio 2 phone-ins, and there are times when the usually reliable Radio 3's choice of music is [as Christa would put it] "an awful dirge — put something cheerful on!".) Yes, my love, I will.
Nearly time (12:32) for some lunch. As it's "pi" day today (who knew?) perhaps I should have a...
I got into trouble back in my Polytechnic days for running a program to simulate the "Buffon Needle" method of estimating pi. I set it running with a loop size of one million, then detached from it (leaving it running as a background process) while I got on with one of my engineering projects in a foreground process. An irate member of the IT support team burst into the terminal room a few minutes later demanding that whoever was running job number such-and-such take it off "his" system right now, as it was absorbing every last bit of CPU time. (The PDP10 had a simple round-robin time-sharing system of allocating resources at that time, and my tiny little job was acting like a sponge, basically.) When I got the StrongARM3 upgrade to my Acorn RiscPC in 1996, I was able to run precisely the same program entirely within the cache of the processor. Needless to say, it executed some 200 times faster than what had been, 24 years earlier, an extremely expensive mainframe, but was no more accurate in its estimate.
Technological panaceas
As I contemplate the PCs dotted around my study, I find much to evoke hoots of hollow laughter in this piece about the workplace ten years hence. Particularly the bit about "controlling employee behaviour by implanting microchips in their brains". Let's hope they're not running Windows 2018.
Q: What weighs in at 87.2MB and takes 70 minutes to download and, I hope, install?
A: The accumulated batch of 84 critical security updates for my XP Pro system, of course.
And update #72 is, in the middle of this painful process, to drop everything and install Internet Explorer 7 and its associated updates. Why do I have a bad feeling about this, Luke? OK, all done, including the three that initially failed. Now (15:33) for my smart new fully-automated data backup to network attached newly-acquired humongous new storage devices strategy. Or should I nip out to buy some milk and cookies for Junior? Christa, if I weren't retired, there's no way I could do this, you know. "But you enjoy it, don't you?" Well, up to a point, my love, yes.
By the way, I know far-off New Zealandland is reputedly like Britain in the 1950s, but this report (ironically from tomorrow's NZ Herald!) implies their broadband is also a bit behind the times.
Odd fact newly remembered... dept.
I first drove the new car on 15th October last year (the day Christa went into hospital for the last time). Junior passed his driving test four years earlier, to the day.