2010 — 24 November: Wednesday

A well-frosted1 start to the day. It's 09:09 and I've just been dallying with some of Mrs Google's maps to confirm I know exactly where I'm supposed to be at 10:45 — it's a three-car rendezvous at the Farley Mount car park (unless I miss my turn). We shall be a party of four, not forgetting the dog. (Not "Montmorency", Jerome, but "Bob"!)

BlackBeast is currently unbooted, and can wait until I've had some breakfast. It's been showing a tendency to wake up with a paralysed mouse pointer (though only since I was foolish enough to download an update, from Microsoft, for their own hardware). And the opening antiphonic chorus from the St Matthew Passion recently finished. (My chum Geoff rates this particular arrangement of notes very highly.)

It's been asserted...

... that my Texan ISP let me down (while I was out, of course) but all seems to be well now (at 14:09) that I'm back. However, a hot bath is the next item of business. My back tends to ache when I've been on my feet for a long time, dating back to last year's nasty ice tumble. Getting older and frailer has precisely zero to recommend it.

Although it's already four years since my last working day in IBM, and, indeed, jolly nearly four years since my official retirement in January 2007, I still find much of interest in this newsletter. There's also some irony, I feel, in reading (roughly at the mid point of both "David Copperfield" and in the newsletter) of the arcane processes of the Chancery Court, still going strong, it seems, 150 years later.

If all goes according to the present plan the Chancery Division will move to the Rolls Building in the summer of 2011. In that location it will, we are assured, have access to greatly improved IT systems. These events are bound to lead to substantial changes in the practices and working of the court thereby necessitating the seventh edition of the Chancery Guide in 2012.

Andrew Morritt in Chancery Guide, 2009


Does anything ever change2 in this benighted country? Well, the Hampshire countryside remains pretty glorious, if a little too muddy at some points on today's Arctic six mile ramble. And Beethoven's Ninth is always worth hearing. Even in Mahler's performing version.

Following parts of the walking chatter, I think tonight's film choice will have to be the sadly-neglected "House of Sand and Fog". This was a DVD that arrived during Christa's final illness, and I have a tendency to keep these on the back burner. Not a rational policy, I grant you. But since giving up broadcast TV I am making some inroads into the backlog.

Having just performed the evening rites (curtains and blinds upstairs) I note it's currently all of 0C on my front porch and pitch dark. Did I say what a nasty time of year this is? Time to resume battle with the Dark Forces of Microsoft. Set sound source to PlanetRock, Mr Spock. It's 17:21. [Pause] Interesting. After a clean installation and banging back on all my drivers and applications, it seems Win 7 can cut a system restore backup image. Excellent. Nearly there, but now (18:29) a spot of supper is called for.

Having just...

... had a lovely burst of frustration dealing with yet a third horribly convoluted re-installation3 of a simple HP LaserJet 64-bit driver, I thought — for fun — that this time when I put the excellent WinSCP tool back on (for accessing my internal and external web servers) I shall (for the first time ever) try out its "Explorer" interface rather than the traditional "Norton Commander" two-pane window style that I've been using for FTP and SSH type file sessions since about 1994. So far, so good. In fact (I blush to admit) it's as easy as CyberDuck on the iMac.

Instead of fetching files explicitly over from the server, mangling them, and whacking them back, it presents me a simple view of the files on the server. I can just "edit" a file (apparently) in-situ (though it's being dragged invisibly down to BlackBeast first, of course), save it (pushing it equally invisibly back on to the server), and refresh my web browser to see the change. It's almost like working in the 21st century. Though where files take a few seconds to upload to the Texas ISP I may have to train myself not to click "reload" too quickly. This isn't an issue over my little LAN here in the house, of course.

Alas, not so simple after all. Well, not when wanting to maintain identical files both sides of my firewall. Nor can I install two instances of WinSCP each with a different style of operation. So... back to Norton Commander.

Enuf PC for a bit. Let's try that film. It's 21:00. [Pause] Good grief! Far too down-beat. Not at all right for my present mood. Tea, Mrs Landingham, I need tea!

Now, here's a sensible chap

That is, one who agrees with me. Source and snippet:

Yet our system obliges us to elevate to office precisely those persons who have the ego-besotted effrontery to ask us to do so; it is rather like being compelled to cede the steering wheel to the drunkard in the back seat loudly proclaiming that he knows how to get us there in half the time. More to the point, since our perpetual electoral cycle is now largely a matter of product recognition, advertising, and marketing strategies, we must be content often to vote for persons willing to lie to us with some regularity or, if not that, at least to speak to us evasively and insincerely. In a better, purer world — the world that cannot be — ambition would be an absolute disqualification for political authority.

David B Hart in First Things


  

Footnotes

1  A mere -1C. Nothing that the heating system cannot cope with (so far).
2  Apart from the perpetual (and perpetually unfulfilled) promise of improved IT systems :-)
3  Oddly, the second installation seemed to go completely smoothly via Windows Update. But the HP drivers support web site is right down there with the worst 250 or so IT web sites I've ever had the displeasure to fight with. It's a messy disgrace. I bet their over-paid CEOs have never tried using it.