2009 — 3 October: Saturday
An evening of scanning. And the music of William Orbit (plus John Major on the poetry of Kipling). Tonight's picture is from 1984; I'm pretty sure this was on the boat ride out to Hurst Castle. Whether I was the photographer, though, is an entirely different question. I probably was.
A quarter of a century passed in the blink of an eye. Amazing. Midnight... and so to bed. Yawn. G'night.
Spiked
Overnight Big Bro (who obviously has some time on his hands) pointed me to this (latest?) variant of "Did you know?" (or "Shift happens"?). It's 5 minutes on the progress of IT (basically). I mildly suggested that he should research the "spike",1 though its date is constantly receding. As for the 2013 date for computing to equal a human brain... don't you believe it! In fact (fact, get it?) the Internet seems to be living proof that an infinite number of monkeys typing away has yet to produce the works of Shakespeare even if he had 5x fewer words to play with!
It's 09:33 and definitely time for another cuppa.
This sounds like fun. I wonder how many times I read it to Peter when he was a small person? I still remember buying an expensive (£25) book by Selma Lanes of Sendak's sublime artwork on my last-ever trip to the ICL HQ in Putney. (5th March 1981 as it happens.)
Comment is free
As is becoming the norm (and, I suppose, in direct contradiction to my comment about monkeys) the comments here are far more interesting than the original article "Revenge of the nerds" by Andrew Martin. I particularly liked the one by "BeautifulBurnout":
The maths geeks took over in the 80s, love.
Prior to that it was the engineers and the productive types who were MDs of companies. Then from the 80s onwards suddenly it was the bean-counters.
And that is when it all started to go sh1t-shaped. When the cost of doing something over-rode the value of what was being done.
There are some...
... who might think that being able to lay one's hands on one's first-ever (pre-decimal) payslip as a 17 year old aeronautical engineering apprentice in September 1969 is carrying the art of the squirrel a step or so too far.
Not that that was what I was actually looking for, you understand. And the very next week, my basic pay shot up to £6 7/6d by the simple process of (my) becoming 18.
This tidying up and sorting out lark is strangely addictive, and has now spread to the various bits and pieces that have been sitting, somewhat neglected, on one of the PVR hard drives. Where will it end? It's 15:23 and rather grey outside. Meanwhile, back up in the loft...
... and down, an hour or so later, with the last big box of DVD artwork, but left pondering the question: "So, where's the missing Seinfeld then, smarty-pants?" (Actually less smarty-pants, more covered in scraps of fibre-glass loft insulation pants.) Never mind, there's still nearly 90 minutes of BBC Radio 3 jazz before the opera warbling commences.