2010 — 12 November: Friday
A chap1 could get mighty pissed off with the idiots, morons, and malcontented sociopaths who are happy to use my email address in about four spam emails per minute. Google email is intercepting very nearly all of these. They are definitely arriving in distinct waves (I suppose as yet another machine gets turned into a zombie). It strikes me — not for the first time, alas — that humans (for all their technological cleverness) are remarkably stupid animals.
Can't say I noticed any of the promised high winds overnight, and all the local trees still seem to be more or less vertical. It's 08:20 and the "to do" list is not yet at its shortest. (Was it ever null, I wonder?)
I'm usually in favour of simplified explanations, but I had to smile at the thought that IPv4 "is running out of steam". I had no idea the Interweb was steam-powered. (Source.)
Is Economics a science?
Not by a country mile. This sounds awfully familar. Source and snippet:
The former CEO of Household International, first bought by HSBC and then brought low by the subprime mortgage collapse, is said to have bragged that his operation had 150 PhDs to model credit risk. The idea that improved knowledge will keep us out of trouble is not new. "Disraeli had asserted that the boom of 1825 would not turn to bust because the period was distinguished from previous ages by superior commercial knowledge," wrote Edward Chancellor in Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation, but there was a big bust anyway.
For some reason...
... this fascinating tale reminds me of Richard Feynman's wonderful "There's plenty of room at the bottom" talk. Similar flavour, at least. Very Zen. Commendable. Perhaps I'm going about things all wrong?
Choc horror!
The price of dear Mama's weekly choccie ration has gone up, considerabubble. I've just returned from Soton — is there any more evocative sound, I wonder, than the call of seagulls? It's chilly, and a bit wet for my taste. If I could find my battens I should attend to my hatches — if I had any.
Meanwhile, following the Sun Tzu principle: "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles" — I have equipped myself with some further tablets of wisdom for what I confidently predict will be a series of software skirmishes in my near future. Speaking of which, I'm currently stuffing the 517.3MB of the OS X 10.6.5 "update" into my hapless little "giant iPod". I shall not use the microwave oven for the duration of the download... And I'm glad I didn't use PGP's Whole Disk Encryption on the Mac as I would be now a long way up the unpaddled creek, it seems. There are some wonderful gotchas wandering around out there in the wild. At least the email spam storm appears to have blown over for a while.
It's 15:35 and I'm back from my post-lunch next-crockpot ingredients-gathering expotition. I seem to have developed a gift for nipping out just as the rain starts. Jeff Beck's "You had it coming" is assailing the ears (quite pleasantly) and there's a fresh cuppa in the offing.
This is new to me:
The logistics of...
... tomorrow's fresh air'n'exercise have just been sorted out. I shall rendezvous with my fellow-booted citizen in Marchwood, drive him on down to Lepe / Exbury or thereabouts, walk, munch lunch, and pop him back on his Winchester nest some time during what's currently being forecast as a pleasant afternoon. The morning whirlwind will consist of breakfast, packing a lunch, and loading the crockpot just before I leave the house. What could possibly go wrong with a plan that simple?
How can it be...
... five years since the weird and provocative "Freakonomics"? (It got a namecheck in Boston Legal season #5, by the way.) I was therefore delighted to find the sequel in paperback this afternoon. And, having listened with delight to the 2009 Matthew Parris broadcasts quoting from retiring diplomats' "parting shots" (derivation here) I was equally delighted to find this collection of them in book form:
On a more PC-related note:
It's apparent I also may well need to investigate this...
... I'm almost sure I've got one or two (or three or four) old PCs knocking around that would be suitable.
Start the countdown
- Two 1TB SATA hard drives fitted? Check.
- One 1GB PCI-Express 16 graphics card fitted? Check.
- One SATA DVD re-writer fitted? Check.
- Two 2GB DDR3 RAM sticks fitted? Check.
- Spare keyboard, mouse, Ethernet cable, power lead, DVI-D cable, and 24" monitor lined up? Check.
- Unused internal power leads tucked neatly out of fans' reach? Check.
- Case front and sides re-fitted? Of course!
It's 23:35 and I'm too tired now to start installing Ubuntu. (Despite having two CDs courtesy of two of today's magazines — I didn't bother to mention "Linux Format".) Yawn. I'm off to bed. G'night.