2010 — 29 September: Wednesday
I got back from my day trip to my now retired one-time ICL office mate Ian1 just a half hour or so before midnight. He was on fine form and in full flow, so I spent the day listening rather more than I talked. It's an interesting experience keeping up conversationally with a semi-manic Mensan of wide interests. But what are chums for, after all? Besides, the state of parts of his house makes mine look almost tidy, which predisposes me favourably.
On that front, Staples has now conceded defeat, and is apparently willing and prepared to collect the damaged bits of their various attempts to deliver the final pair of bookcases to me, and to refund their cost. I shall therefore now consider rebuilding and placing one of my desks at the back end of the "study / books" room. If I do, this will be in the space that the final pair of bookcases would have occupied. Alternatively, of course, I can simply find another supplier of bookcases...
It's 00:20 and I need some sleep. G'night.
Death drug shortages
I am against capital punishment. I don't believe the State should be in the business of killing its citizens. It's wrong.2 Perhaps it's a paradox, but I reserve the right to defend myself (and my immediate family). And I have absolutely no problem with a freely-chosen and rationally-made decision to end life painlessly and quickly in situations where its quality has dropped too low as a result of terminal illness, or the ravages of age — exemplified three years ago by Christa's cancer and currently by dear Mama's dementia. (Or being "away with the fairies" as Ian put it yesterday.)
Of course, (as a fully paid-up woolly-minded bleeding-heart sandals-and-socks [and bearded] liberal "wuss") I have been known to agree with the argument that some of our more damaged citizens are, to put it brutally, not "worth" the oxygen, water, and food they consume while being kept alive but incarcerated at my expense. Particularly after they have through their activities and choices damaged some of their fellow creatures, often terminally. Naturally, I have no easy solution.3
Running out of supplies of a key medical component of lethal injections strikes me, at a stretch, as one of the more bizarre solutions. (Source.)
Definitely time (09:22) for breakfast!
Smile:
Little else can demonstrate as clearly as a shelf of books (or possibly a refrigerator) who we are or imagine ourselves to be. This last argument has been given less respect than it might. Great and fancy libraries astound us, but it's the personal library where a scholar's serious work begins. Lose the personal library, and we become less than we are.
Nobody sees what's on the shelves of my refrigerator...
Afternoon dawns, as it were
Before you know it, and more than adequately soothed by the Thomas Tallis stuff while creeping for several minutes past roadworks by Asda on the return journey, I'm back from Soton with a replenished supply of dear Mama's favourite choccies, a trio of DVDs...
... (one highly recommended by Ian — although I've only [relatively] recently read the book) — and a growing suspicion that it was time I made some lunch. It's now raining... must be autumn. But the inner man is once again pacified. It's 14:03 — what's next, Mrs Landingham?
Persiflage as a search aid
As I was listening to my friend Ian's tales of webmastering woes4 I could see he might benefit from (and I recommended to him) the fabulous desktop indexing tool (Copernic) that I already find so incredibly useful. It's often helped me find stuff buried among the 150,000 or so files that tend to sprawl untidily hereabouts. For example, as I listened a few minutes ago to my just-delivered remastered CD of the sublime...
... "Wish you were here", I knew I'd previously noted Pink Floyd's studio albums. My strange memory knew that I'd find that "list" on a diary page near the word "persiflage". Just don't ask me how I knew that. So, one one-word search later :-)
Of course, I bought the original vinyl album on the day of its release in September 1975. Today's 1992 remaster replaces the Japanese import CD I paid £20 for when it was the only pressing available in 1984. Not only were all the sleeve notes in "furrin" (of course) but the CD itself was indexed within its two tracks, rather than using chapters. Today's CD players (for all their many sonic improvements) have long since forgotten how to access index points. And I gave away my original Marantz CD63T player (a snip at £550 when launched in 1983) back in 1990 to a young IBMer who was on his way back to Yorkshire. I figured he'd need it in that benighted place.