2010 — 8 June: Tuesday
Now here's a story I was completely unaware of. Looks interesting. Green beans, heh?
Another early start coming up with all those deliveries. G'night.
It's going to be interesting...
... to see what, if anything, I miss while all the portable "stuff" from what you might call the "profligate years" is out of the house. I certainly won't be missing Christa's bank statements from 1973 onward. It's 08:35 and a man with a van with a boiler in it has just been and gone, a mere ten minutes or so after Brian who (on cuppa #1 already) had professed himself pleased with his brickwork yesterday and who will need me to switch off the power at some point today while he fiddles further. He's no more impressed with my 29-year-old distribution fuse box than he was with the old boiler. I'm not surprised, but it does all I need so it's staying.
Today's tasks include breakfast, supplies shopping and — with luck — a chance to nip over to Winchester to hear Mike's expensively bass-equalised audio system while he still has (on loan) the magic Lyngdorf amplifier. It's cooler and drizzling this morning. The garden is loving it, and the vine (in particular) seems to be undergoing yet another post-adolescent growth spurt.
That's the spirit
Recall the lovely wartime poster I mentioned here, and contrast it with Steve Bell's somewhat scabrous version...
... comments about which are even funnier than his original cartoon.
Undecorative chaos
The remaining plumbing supplies were all delivered before my supplies run, and are resting in the garage. I've just given Brian carte blanche to sacrifice floor coverings1 as the poor chap was getting quite agitated in his attempts to minimise decorative damage. I'm already resigned to the idea that it's well past time to refresh such things (and, indeed, re-think them). I've been faintly appalled at the dust and debris that seems to accumulate in carpets. There's something to be said for taking them outside for a sound beating from time to time.
Not entirely surprisingly, six HP computing clusters used by those WETA chaps down in NZ account between them for a large chunk of that country's quite respectable supercomputing capacity. (Nice animated graphic.)
Educashun
Why is this not surprising? Source and snippet:
The mantra of choice produced a "do your own thing" proliferation of educational schemes, "each with its own curriculum, and methods, each with its own private management, all competing for ... public dollars" rather than laboring to discover "better ways of educating hard-to-educate students." The emphasis on testing produced students who could "master test taking methods, but not the subject itself," with the consequence that the progress claimed on the basis of test scores was an "illusion": "The scores had gone up, but the students were not better educated." A faith in markets produced gamesmanship, entrepreneurial maneuvering and outright cheating, very little reflection on "what children should know" and very little thought about the nature of the curriculum.
Lauren Laverne is just playing a track (by Johnny Finn?) with Laura Marling on it. I've only just been introduced to her fine voice.
Later
Having just taken the 146th carton, and discovered an amusing blast-from-the-past that I shall scan and publish a bit later on, it's 14:39 and time for me to hit the Winchester trail. Now, where did I put my ear-plugs?
Later still
I realise this was posted a month ago, but I've been rather pre-occupied. Well worth a skim. And a good reason not to "tweet" if you ask me.
And, reading this brought me to this lovely chap — the sensory homunculus — from our Natural History museum:
As for the blast-from-the-past... see if you can guess at which point authorship of this letter changed between Christa and me:
Good old Amstrad PCW and the Locoscript WP program :-)
Aunty comes clean on hi-def picture quality issues
Fascinating three-part read... #1, #2, #3.
Aah, I recall Mr Nyquist from my engineering signal frequency days, too.