2009 — 7 January: Wednesday

Tonight's picture? Christa and our amazingly clean (and then almost brand new) gas cooker back in the Old Windsor kitchen. To describe this cooker today as "venerable" is hardly to scratch the grease on its surface!

Christa and our then-new cooker in Old Windsor, in 1979?

The Jon Ronson programme on Stanley Kubrick's vast research archive was fascinating. I also note that, when the boxes were finally being carted off to a university archive storage facility some eight years after Kubrick's death, the music chosen was Brian Eno's "An ending (ascent)" which seemed absolutely appropriate. G'night, at 00:30 or so.

Good? morning world

This will hardly do! It's 10:20 and I'm re-surfacing. (I got up briefly nearly three hours ago to down the next antibiotic, made a cuppa, read about a third of the [provoking] Laura Miller book, and then dozed for another hour or more.) Now, as my next cuppa brews downstairs, there's some lovely Stravinsky (the Symphony in three movements) to get things going. And it's a mere minus 2C already. I shall have to venture out today in pursuit of the tasks lazily left undone yesterday... I'm delighted to learn, by the way, that Diana Athill's latest book did indeed get the Costa literary prize.

Where do I want to go today?

Once upon a time, a lovely little software company registered as a trademark the phrase "Where do you want to go today?"1 (which struck me as insanely megalomaniacal, stupid, and outrageous, but let that pass). As a minor protest at the time, I kept the phrase "Where would you like to go today?" on the sitemap of IBM's internal Java web pages until I got bored with it.

I find some of the subtext here vaguely worrying:

Microsoft is beginning to incorporate more natural-language detection into its Office products, though. Ten years ago, they kept candidate words on a single Excel sheet for review by a higher-up. Mike Calcagno, a member of Microsoft's Natural Language Group, says the company now scans through trillions of words, including anonymized text from Hotmail messages, in the hunt for dictionary candidates. On top of this, they monitor words that people manually instruct Word to recognize.

Chris Wilson in Slate


Why not just license a respectable dictionary?

Love is the drug... dept.

Personally, I'm scared of recreational, and other, drugs. I also observe the well-nigh total failure of the UK's long-running "war on drugs". But I worry, too, about a series of Home Secretaries more worried by what tabloid headlines say about them than what committees of experts advise them to do (or not do). There's an interesting piece (and associated comments) here.

Back (at 14:09) not quite in time to avoid "The Archers". Shall ingest a (non)soupçon of re-heated crockpot, the antibiotic (see previous para!), and a cuppa before setting out again on Round II.

Is there no end...

... to software ingenuity? Random examples: Portable Apps, LocoScript on a stick, and Wiki on a Stick.

35 years ago...

I joined ICL at the Beaumont, Old Windsor HQ of their Education and Training outfit. Beaumont is a nice country house set in a park within half a mile or so of the river Thames, just down the road from the JFK memorial at Runnymede, just across the road from one of Emil Savundra's2 houses (or so I was told), and just behind a pub called the "Bells of Ouseley" (which gets a mention in Jerome K Jerome's lovely book Three men in a boat). I worked at Beaumont (initially as a trainee instructional writer, and latterly as the manager of the writing team) from February 1974 until August 1978.

I've just been sent a scan of a newspaper clipping by one of my ex-colleagues. It seems building renovation while turning the former ICL offices into an hotel has recently uncovered a largely-intact 1870 chapel with altar and stained-glass windows — boarded up since the 1960s. Well, fancy that!

Hidden within the Beaumont building

A couple more clerihews

I mentioned clerihews last July. Here are two more, found on the web site of an engaging little publication that I shall now have to look out for. The first, apparently, is indeed the first (in that it doesn't contain in its first line the name that was to become the defining characteristic).

2 clerihews

Nearly time for the Hubble documentary. Oh dear. Which blithering idiot decided a science documentary had to have an irritating continuous New Age instrumental musical backdrop? Never mind — on Sunday there's a Maureen Lipman night, with a repeat showing of "Eskimo Day" by her late husband. Another (video) gap can be filled in.

  

Footnotes

1  Back in 1998, I was told (and have always resisted checking, in case it isn't true) that the choral background music for the US Internet Explorer TV ads was the Confutatis Maledictis from Mozart's Requiem. The words of the final blast of music that accompanies "Where do you want to go today?" were "confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis..." or, to put it another way: "the damned and accused are convicted to flames of hell." Possibly a bit on the harsh side, even for people who use IE. Nice to think you can always trust an advertising department.
2  Fire, Auto and Marine insurance ring any bells?