2011 — 23 January: Sunday
First order of business today1 will be the acquisition of a few bits of fresh fodder. Somebody around here keeps eating stuff. Very odd. Still, it looks fairly mild out there; no ice to be scraped off the car.
The morning email spam (registering me for something I've never heard of, with a card I don't own, ending in digits none of mine has, purportedly charging me $29-95, and using [and telling me!] a password I'd never choose) is moderately more sophisticated than many, I suppose. Still irritating, though.
Another irritant — just discovered — is arriving in an empty Waitrose car park and only belatedly realising that they don't open for business until 10:00. Is there something I should know about a Sunday? Still, at least I now have time for a bit of breakfast before my return journey.
Hard to disagree...
... with the quote from ee cummings that "a politician is an arse upon which everybody has sat except a man".
Contrast the clear shafts of light that spread from publication of the cables with the interminable ramblings of John Chilcot's committee of pensionable British worthies and you find yourself regretting that the manoeuvrings of Blair and Bush were not exposed to similar scrutiny in 2002 and 2003. Is it any wonder that the internet generation largely supports the dumping of raw information by whistleblowers on the web when they see figures from the 20th-century British establishment like Chilcot forlornly apply to make public two letters from Blair to Bush, only to be refused on the grounds that prime ministers and presidents have a right to keep their correspondence private?
I look forward...
... to seeing Red Riding Hood by Catherine Hardwicke. Guess why :-)
Oops! I'm starting to wonder whether I should invest in a UPS unit. A momentary glitch just knocked off the pre-amp and the XP machine, with a brief network disconnect showing on BlackBeast. Though that and the Ubuntu server are still apparently unperturbed. I was just reading a new Herman Kahn anecdote (available here.)
Early day motions
(Unkind) rumour has it than when IBM installed signs as motivational and inspiring as this one...
... in their washrooms, braver employees would sometimes deface them by adding ", too" on them.
Too true
There's no pressure quite like peer pressure.
I have the opposite problem with Chua. I believe she's coddling her children. She's protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities
because she doesn't understand what's cognitively difficult and what isn't.
Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old
girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these
and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.
It's mid-evening, and...
... somewhat against my better judgement, I'm once again installing iTunes on the 64-bit Windows BlackBeast. Of course, the first thing it did was ask for another 100MB or so of updates in the month or so since I last expunged it. I'm still not entirely convinced I want QuickTime, and I'm damn' sure I don't want MobileMe or Safari, both of which were eager to come along for the ride. Nor shall I be going anywhere near Ping.
It's just finished stuffing all my MP3s and Podcasts into its library: 33,675 "songs", playing for 110.5 days, should be enough to keep me quiet for a bit. At least 10 days of those "songs" are speech items, of course. And the 233.04GB is by some margin the biggest category of data I currently have.
It's now finished downloading nearly 5,000 pieces of album artwork. It's even analysed the inter-track gaps for some 300 tracks fewer than the total I believe I have. But why (why?!) does iTunes think just over 6,000 of the MP3s are duplicate files? It parses all understanding, perhaps? :-)
Since Guy Garvey's finest hour is now in full and delectable flow, I shall simply kick back with a good book and pretend iTunes on Windows is every bit as slick and smart as it thinks it is. Even though it isn't.