2010 — 6 April: Tuesday
I shall be meeting another IBM pensioner for lunch in just a few hours time. What larks, Pip ol' chum. So, time (00:35) for a spot of beauty sleep. Though I may yet make a start on Bujold's Memory first. It seems pretty cold out there at the moment, but I noticed earlier that the Japanese cherry tree is finally showing signs of fresh buds. Down in New Zealandland, Lis tells me she's thanking Allah for the rain. And, by the way, Ute couldn't absolutely confirm yesterday's photo as 1992 because, she says, "eight years is already an eternity these days". What could she mean? :-)
G'night.
Pensions
Start the bright new day by reading the latest IBM newsletter. Always good to hear of IBMers making career progress, don't you think?
Jonathan Ferrar, who was Human Resources Director, has been appointed to a post in Armonk and replaced in the UK by Jane Middleton. She comes from the legal team advising Human Resources in 2009. If decades of practice is followed, the Human Resources Director will be also be appointed as a director of our pensions trust. A possible explanation of putting an IBM lawyer in charge of Human Resource and on the Trust Board is that IBM expects continued formal opposition to its pension decisions and to the setting of employee rankings by pre-allocation rather than actual performance...
To recap on people changes: Larry Hirst, David Heath and Stephen Wilson were the UK executives behind the 2006 pensions deal. David Heath and Stephen Wilson have resigned from IBM. Larry Hirst, who is reported to have said more than once that if the 2006 deal did not last then "They can have my badge", is still an IBMer but not in the UK. (And strangely silent about the 2009 changes). Brendan Riley and Jonathan Ferrar were the front men for the 2009 proposals. They are now promoted away from the UK.
It's sunny, there's a lovely Ella Fitzgerald / Louis Armstrong track (Tenderly) oozing from BBC Radio 3, the first cuppa was sunk several minutes ago. All this by 09:20! And, just before I erase it, I note a "Clyde Spivey" wants to offer me a Bachelors, Masters or Doctorate degree. Unconscious nominative determinism, heh?
We also serve...
Recall my sporadic attempt to exploit the Apache server that's already beavering away on my iMac. I was trying to edit its hidden read-only configuration file the other day. Meanwhile, my indefatigable chum Brack has recently uncovered a Mac OS X glitch that he suggests might yet explain my temp file "issue" with vi... He tells me "There may just be a problem" (Mercy me! Is that possible?) "with the way vim works with its backup files,..." and it can be fixed by adding the following line to your ~/.vimrc
set backupskip=/tmp/*,/private/tmp/*
I shall ponder this while somehow neglecting to admit to him that I don't know my "~/.vimrc"1 from my elbow (though I can guess). However, I'm still leaning more sympathetically to the idea of dedicating my little dual-core 64-bit AMD HPC Media PC full-time to the task of being my server, with the forthcoming Ubuntu 10.4 Server Edition real soon now. It amuses me to continue to use my iMac as a giant iPod! (And it seems to be about the only long-term application I have for it — sticking it on top of the A/V stack in the living room doesn't exactly encourage any other use, not least because of the discomfort in working at it while sitting on the carpet.2 What would the Health and Safety police say about that?)
Insane attitudes
Three years ago, I remarked mildly on the irrationality of our transatlantic cousins' hypocritical approach to film censorship. (No less weird than the UK variant, of course.) Fast forward three years, and now it's cartoon images...
Critics have objected to this legislation on two grounds. The first, that if there is now a criminal penalty in respect of possessing cartoon imagery, this may have the unintended consequence
of lessening barriers to the possession of real imagery. There is also some concern that whether a cartoon falls into this category or not will depend on whether a jury decides the age of a
cartoon image was over or under 18.
Also, within the small print of the law, is the issue of when a sexual act may be deemed to take place "in the presence of a child". Same frame? Same room? Same cartoon, but different page?
Bring on the Thought Police! It's even been suggested that this title might be problematic.3 Somebody had better tell Waterstone's.
Later
Iris split a pot of tea with me while I sampled the quiche and gossiped and grumbled like the old fish wife I am. Great fun. It's now 14:50 and already time for the next cuppa.
Suddenly...
... it's already 23:45 — how on earth does that happen?