2010 — 22 November: Monday
Just a placeholder1 until I've caught up on the sleep backlog. I'll probably pop the next batch of choccies over to dear Mama at some point, after another round of supplies shopping. Is it possible it's me that's eating all the food I keep buying?!
G'night.
It's only a joke, Fiona...
Rather than keep listening to the news this morning, I've returned to the safer playground that is BBC Radio 3. And a more satirical take on Lord Young's fall from the High Table last Friday:
In a factually devastating gaffe, Lord Young said that millions of people were enjoying historically low mortgage rates and that as long as they had a job, they had never been better off. Economists immediately checked the mortgage rates, did a few sums and realised that Lord Young was being cruelly and insensitively spot on. But the Tory peer was later forced to apologise for his sadistic, upper-class rightness, adding: "I'm very old. Look at my bow tie. I'm not right in the head. I now realise that if your income stays much the same and your biggest monthly expense goes down quite a lot then you're worse off. You don't need a PhD in maths to work that one out."
Can I still afford breakfast? Depends if the IBM pension fund follows the example of BT's. I refuse to worry about it. It's 08:49 and there's a shiny thing in the sky. What could it be?
Since it's still up there despite gathering clouds now's the time to nip out, methinks. It's 10:32...
Noon is a thing of the past
And this update (once again) comes via BlackBeast. I got back from my supplies run to find a nice, fat Amazon dropping that will be my reading for the near term future. And some vintage Bruce Springsteen to go with it. Excellent.
Some light post-prandial reading and listening.2 The Springsteen is superb. 32 years ago — doesn't bear thinking about.
Another blast...
... from one of my favourite gadflies does much to restore my natural state of goodwill following this afternoon's visit to dear Mama. His topic is resentment :-)
But another cause of resentment, I feel sure (though I cannot prove, again because of the deficiencies of character bequeathed me by my parents) is the spread of tertiary education, especially in such subjects as sociology, psychology, and anything to which the word 'studies' may be attached. Indeed, it seems to me that they might all usefully be joined in one great faculty, to be called the Faculty of Resentment Studies. It would undoubtedly be the largest faculty in any self-respecting university, and would easily pay for itself. Professors of Resentment could teach such subdivisions of their subject as the art of rationalisation, rhetorical exaggeration, preservation of a lack of perspective, suppression of a sense of irony or humour, and so on and so forth. Of course, entry requirements would be minimal. All you would have to do to gain entry is to denigrate your parents at a public examination, and there could hardly be found a child nowadays not able to do that.
It's 18:16, dark, and cold, and I'm hungry. I resent all of that! But not half as much as I resent the "designers" of Windows 7 and their arcane policies and implicit assumptions on easily sharing networked data. I shall beat this so-called operating system into a bloody pulp sooner or later... Happily, lowering BlackBeast's noise level is far simpler: disconnect and remove one fan, set its sibling to minimum speed instead of the medium setting it was on, resist any temptation to fiddle in any way with the CPU's fan, and keep a watchful eye on temperatures. Up until now, the only component that has been getting even barely warm to the touch has been a heatsink on the motherboard. Right! Time (19:19) for my delayed foodie gratification.
Nicky Horne's just played the "Private Investigations" track3 (Dire Straits) on Planet Rock and admitted that he's still listening on the exact same speakers in his current studio that he had at Capital Radio (because he stole them when Capital closed him down). That's the spirit of rock! I actually bought the track on a 12" vinyl single somewhat before I got hold of my first CD player. And hearing it on the £150,000 Steinway system last May led more or less directly to my reversion to simple stereo, of course.
Now back to my network file-sharing shenanigans.
Software?!
Frustrated somewhat, I've diverted into downloading and installing an Apache server. It's working, but now the configuration needs some tinkering to bend it to my evil will. And as I'm tired, and have an early morning session in Dr Fang's chair, I'm going to call it a day for tonight. G'night.