2009 — 1 July: Wednesday — rabbits!
Still hot, still sticky too. <Sigh> In fact, I've actually turned down the possibility of a walk later today 'cos (basically) I'm a wuss and (in the words of Cole Porter) "It's too darn' hot". Mind you, tonight's picture of Christa and Peter (typically) at the seaside is entirely appropriate:
When they weren't digging holes in the garden at home, they were throwing up sandbanks, the pair of them. Each was as bad as the other. I would skulk in whatever scrap of shade I could find, stick my nose in a book, and grimly try to ignore the sunshine.
Having finished watching the Alan Ball vampire series, last night's second bit of video entertainment was his film "Towelhead". (It sometimes takes me a while, but those round tuits turn up sooner or later.) Actually, there's also a 100 minute discussion of the racism issues dealt with by the film (which is grimly fascinating and funny, by the way) but I may not have the stamina tonight for the whole thing. It's already 00:49 and a chap needs his beauty sleep eventually.
G'night!
Network Security 101
Not exactly rocket science. Source and snippet:
Moreover, most really sensitive networks are designed in ways that prevent third-party visitors — even if they manage somehow to penetrate the system — from doing much damage. For example, hackers who invade the email system of a nuclear reactor will not be able to blow up nuclear facilities with a mouse click. Data and security breaches vary in degree, but such subtlety is usually lost on decision-makers and journalists alike.
But it's sunny and bright, and time (09:24) for breakfast. By the way, I'm old enough to remember when the whole rail network in this country was nationalised, not just the East Coast service. How things change, heh?
What's that whining noise?
The Ondes Martenot — now there's an odd instrument. BBC Radio 3 has just finished playing me Messiaen's Fête des Belles Eaux for six of these strange beasts. It was written for the 1937 International World's Fair in Paris.
Still sunny and bright! I've decided (not for the first time) that I love retirement but hate bereavement. For example, I've just scanned, and sent off, an image of the cover of my copy of Shaw's "Back to Methuselah" ...
to that wonderful Penguin SF covers web site. I exchanged pleasant emails with its creator last night. Sad geek that I aspire to be, I'd idly browsed through the HTML source and noticed the Shaw entry had been commented out. Mind you, my copy is only a 1954 reprint, not the 1939 first edition. Checking my server logs also pointed me to Adobe for yet another update to the level of PDF Reader software (though why Adobe would have a link to me on their site passes human understanding). About ten seconds after I'd finished installing it it reported an update already. But I still find PDFs very useful. Must (surely) be time for another cuppa...
My son has published an account of his festival defloration. But what's wrong with Marmite?
Phew!
Lunch is concluding with a grapefruit. It's 13:32 and time to listen to the Media Show on plans for DAB.
Idly listening to a not-very-good "Torchwood" play on the steam radio my mind had plenty of spare capacity to go wandering. Or maybe it's the heat? Rather too many years ago for comfort (back in September 1974 — that momentous month in my life) I bought and read a book by a chap called Ben Ross Schneider, Jr, all about his horrendous misadventures in digitising The London Stage.1 For reasons very amusingly documented, he called his book Travels in Computerland or, Incompatibilities and Interfaces. I was reminded of this wonderful book (every bit as good, in its way, as the rather better-known Soul of a New Machine) by some delicious mini-ranting at the time of the publication of the second edition of that mammoth tome The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Source and snippet:
As occasional computer adviser I remember the initial horror of discovering that the carefully preserved disks containing the full text of the first edition were obsolete eight-inch floppies whose format made sense only to Granada typesetting machines long since scrapped — I kept hoping to track one down in a museum, but no luck... Macdonald had the whole lot rekeyed and great oaths were sworn that this time usable disks would be maintained forever. The subsequent publishers Little, Brown, after being anxiously reminded of this for months and responding with countless soothing noises ('Don't bother your tiny editorial heads — we've got it all sussed!'), recently discovered to their embarrassment that all the enormously many final proof corrections had been entered only on the typesetter's disks, which can't be read back into the IBMs used by our hero editors. This came to light exactly as the text was urgently needed for the coming Nimbus CD-ROM edition.
Incoming income depleters
A cheery rap on the door — it's Mr Amazon with a warm cardboard box containing four books and a DVD.
- Breaking Dawn
Young Ms Meyer has sold 42,000,000 books in half a decade. Not too shabby! - Dead until dark
The first of the Sookie Stackhouse saga - The Host
A non-Twilight book that sounds like a variant on Robert Heinlein's "Puppet Masters" or Fredric Brown's "Mind Thing" or Hal Clement's "Needle" or... - Crashlander
Bought for precisely one (new) short story — Procrustes — and linking material. I don't much care for Niven's politics, but I love his clever SF - Immortal
Who would have thought Enki Bilal would make a film?
I think I shall retire downstairs to the relative coolness of the living room — a mere 80F last time I checked. It's 85F up here at the moment (at 16:55). I'm jolly glad I didn't go walking today.
Later
It's 22:15 and, finally, beginning to cool down a little. "Dead until dark" was fun, and quite faithfully translated into the first season of True Blood. It's always interesting to compare book and film or video. I'm somewhat surprised that one 320-page book managed to provide enough material for 720 minutes of excellent TV. I shall have to read the rest, methinks. I also need an earlyish night as I have a date with my dentist tomorrow morning. Deep joy.