2010 — 28 March: Sunday
Given my slothful day it's extraordinary how tired I am as it winds toward the end. Still, the crockpot was a success, the next small batch of stewed plums are cooling their heels (as it were) ready for their breakfast duty, what's left of the hair has been washed, some emails have been exchanged, a large further chunk of Bujold has been enjoyed, and I'm about ready for some sleep.
Will I remember, do you suppose, to put the clocks forward? Remains to be seen. But not tonight, at least. G'night.
Episode #200?
Listening to NPR's weekend Fresh Air with an interview between Terry Gross and the creators of "South Park" is a hoot. They've just cracked me up with an amazing two-minute lampoon neatly skewering the international banking scam system. As for the second coming of L Ron Hubbard... "Dad... Tom Cruise won't come out of the closet!" Cool. Guess which diminuitive actor's "people" demanded that that episode be pulled?
It's 09:27, sunny, and I have a fresh cuppa. What's next, Mrs Landingham? Clothes? OK. Now, how about the husband and wife team behind...
... "Snopes". Also cool.
Having laboriously reset the clocks on the microwave and the brain-dead1 Panasonic PVR (which offers an "auto" setting but obviously hasn't got around to using it) I just have the bedside alarm to go. I've given up trying to get the Yaris clock to do what it's claimed it does in the manual. Besides, Time is largely an irrelevance. I'm retired, you know. But I shall still attempt to listen to the divine Emma on this week's "Desert Island Discs" though it will mean tuning away from the Seattle edition of Prairie Home Companion for a while...
How does one differentiate between satire and reality these days? (Indeed, I may have those two links inverted.) Meanwhile, the divine Emma has picked a Tom Waits track and taught me the correct pronunciation of Víctor Jara's last name. Pretty good going so far.
Super-intelligent?
I really don't know whether to laugh or cry at the suggestion here that my species is super-intelligent. Though the idea that it's a genetic accident is certainly a wry one. As is the idea of an anti-antimacassar:
Theories indicate that equal amounts of antimatter and normal matter should have been created in the Big Bang. Thus the universe should have its fair share of antimatter galaxies. These in turn should be filled with antimatter stars with their own antimatter worlds. If we take the idea of this mirror-image universe far enough, we could envisage these antimatter worlds containing antimatter people who live in antihomes and sit on antichairs with anti-antimacassars on the back. At least that's the theory. Unfortunately, despite considerable efforts, researchers have found not a single atom of antimatter in their searches.
It's had some 13,000,000,000 years in which to disappear, but one has to wonder where it's all leaked away to. Interesting article. Right; time for another cuppa. It's 16:01 according to the newly-reset wristwatch.
What a world of pain is...
... embedded within the following innocent paragraph in my OS X Leopard manual's section on "Configuring Apache":
Apache's configuration files live in the directory /private/etc/apache2. Unless you've turned on the ability to see invisible files in the Finder, you'll have to navigate there in Terminal. Listing the contents of the directory shows the file we've come here to see: httpd.conf.
Dammit. All I want to do is "switch on" Server Side Includes... Google assiduously enough and you eventually unearth gems such as:
In any Open or Save dialog in Snow Leopard, simply press Shift-Command-Period to display hidden files and folders. This command is a toggle; hidden files will be displayed as you navigate various directories in the Open or Save dialog
To (slightly) mangle an exasperated acronym... WTF is that documented? Honestly, if I had sixpence for every time I've had the urge to strangle over-clever programmers, I'd be a seriously wealthy chap. You should not have to resort to "TinkerTool" no matter how whimsical its name.
Enuf already
It's 19:44, which may explain my light-headedness.2 Couldn't be all the sodding Apache and OS X documentation, could it? The web server serves, but does not yet understand SSIs despite my forced edit to the read-only config file. (Thank you Vi.) It has yet to grasp the concept of ".shtml" versus ".html", too. Nor does the root document yet live quite where I want it. And, to cap it all, it turns out you also can not change the short (account / user) name assigned by OS X, and I need it to be "david" rather than "dcm".
This is all extremely irritating. I really shouldn't have to dabble with all this cr*p. All I'm doing is setting up a second local web server on the iMac to save myself the temptation of buying another little box. (Not to mention several hundred pounds.) This is preparation for something of an upheaval to one or both of the XP boxes.