2010 — 3 October: Sunday
Were I in the habit of using my iMac as other than a gigantic iPod then I might get quite excited about news of a new version of "Scrivener".1 It's also coming to the Windows platform.
It's raining, which knocks any walk on the head, but I have a semi-infinite pile of stuff to do hereabouts and have just enjoyed my first cuppa, and corrected a two-day glitch on my latest quarterly calendar — thanks, Zeno! It's already 10:04, Mrs Landingham, what's next?
Breakfast!
Elementary, my dear Hoyle
Nice overview of one of my favourite scientists, who also happened to be an excellent SF author. Source and snippet:
He had already developed the idea of nucleosynthesis as a key component of the steady state theory... For the idea to work, Hoyle calculated that inside stars carbon would have to exist in a very special state: the 7.65 MeV state of carbon-12.
Hoyle insisted it must exist and this, says Marcus Chown in his book The Magic Furnace, was simply "the most outrageous prediction" ever made in science. "If [the 7.65 MeV state] did not exist, Hoyle reasoned, the universe would contain no carbon... Thus Hoyle was saying — and nobody had ever used logic as outrageous as this before — that the mere fact he was alive and pondering the question of carbon was proof the 7.65 MeV state existed."
He was, of course, from Yorkshire!
I see there's an excellent Claude Chabrol film on BBC4 tonight. It stars the gorgeous lady he was married to at the time.
I don't "tweet" but I was mildly surprised to read that the US Library of Congress catalogues every tweet. (Source.)
Minor triumphs
While my salad was defrosting on the kitchen windowsill (traditional home of fruit pies in past times) I was pondering2 a minor-league conceptual breakthrough. I already keep all my DVDs and Blu-rays randomly dispersed across a series of identical CaseLogic folders. The folders are labelled with a single letter externally,3 and the pockets inside are numbered from 001 to 264. Each disk, therefore, goes in a pocket with an "address label" such as "P040" (A single man, Blu-ray) or "K093" (Cool & Crazy, DVD) and so on. That's the physical storage system. The virtual system, of course, is a database that holds details of which disk title lives in each pocket.
Given that I've now decided to house my CDs physically in exactly the same way, I first thought I'd need another "index" system to let me find whatever CD tickles my audio palate from time to time. Of course, I don't. A 12cm silver disk doesn't need different housing or indexing simply because it has a different set of digital data recorded on it. Conceptually, I can simply "move" my CDs from the "Audio" database across to the "Video" database rather than fiddle around defining and adding a new data field. And why not simply extend the existing numbering system, too? I can easily filter database queries by type to extract subset lists of CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays for my web pages.
The fact that I've also decided to scan all the CD artwork is merely my normal insanity breaking through, much as the sun is starting to, now that the rain has given way to occasional patches of blue sky, but with clouds scudding across, too. Ever onward. It's 15:18 and I owe me a cuppa.
Stratosfear...
... is the excellent choice for "featured album" on this week's Freak Zone. But now (18:53) it's time to feed the inner man. I've just finished refreshing my video lists here. The database filtration works perfectly — unlike the data entry clerk.
I became a Peter Tinniswood fan on first reading his 1968 comic novel "A touch of Daniel" back in February 1971. My cousin Jayne had already given me a copy of the follow-up "Mog" as a birthday present, but I saved that until I'd read the earlier one. His final play is on BBC Radio 4 this Thursday — thanks for the tip, Brian.
Mr Staples is due to pick up his broken bits and pieces of several bookcases on Tuesday. And there's a walk tentatively pencilled in for Wednesday. Mind you, the feather warcast is looking pretty diabolical at the moment. Ho hum. It's 21:18 and I'm back in the arms of BBC Radio 2 for another 40 minutes max.