2011 — 5 February: Saturday
Since I'm busily falling asleep1 I'm off to bed, leaving only this little cyberspatial placeholder for a while.
G'night.
Forty years ago?
"Inconceivable!" (to quote "Vizzini"). Personally, I always liked the threepenny bit for going its own way, shape-wise.
I still have, and will not easily be parted from, a complete pre-decimal display set of UK coins that Christa bought for her father in 1974. These came back to us after his death. The set includes a Churchill crown — not the prettiest of coins.
Grey and somewhat blustery out there this morning. No matter. Breakfast and another cuppa, heh, Mrs Landingham?
On the grounds that...
... two baskets are better than one for one's egg-keeping, I've now installed Google's Chrome browser on BlackBeast alongside Firefox (which I now run with the useful "NoScript" Firefox extension as I like to know just how busy websites are, as it were, under the covers).
I'm currently using Chrome "as is" but not as my default browser. Quite why it doesn't show a "home" page by default remains a mild mystery. I tried another session with the IE9 beta last night, too. There's still something about its feel I don't much like, though I can't criticise its speed.
Time (11:15) to start stuffing my next culinary masterpiece if I wish to eat tonight.
Bearing in mind...
... the quote from Thomas Fuller about profane jests here, I confess this made me chortle:
I'd been following the not so amusing story here.
Chrome is now the basis of ...
... the interface to my email system; it's clearly optimised for Google Mail. And, frankly, ceasing to spar with Thunderbird is no big deal. There may yet turn out to be a certain amount of vaguely geeky entertainment in seeing what words or phrases in my emails trigger which ads Google Mail chooses to display (and I choose to ignore) — it also serves as a very worthwhile reminder (of course) that every word of every email is scanned and analysed, not to mention stored away on servers for as much as 60 days even after immediate account deletion. (Yes, I did read the licence agreement.)
Speaking of which, it was good to see that the hapless photographer who'd trusted five years worth of his output to Flickr did end up getting his photos back.2 I've taken a conscious decision to regard my emails as of less value to me than other material, so (in essence) I'm now casting that part of me up into the "cloud". Takes me back to an inglorious "incident" in the IBM Hursley lab quite some time ago when, among other things, I was maintaining IBM's public Java downloads and docs on a gloriously hand-crafted web site. As I recounted the tale to Carol at the time:
Unbelievagibly (TM) I was the unlucky person holding the parcel when the external server overflowed one of its disk partitions. The site (the entire public Java web site) went castors-up in Nomansland somewhere. Just gimme more space and reload from your backup, quoth I. "What backup?" came the reply. I tell you, it was straight into the Twilight Zone. Turns out they don't backup the external files (on account of them being outside the firewall, an' all) though I gather after I'd explored the reasoning (?) behind this excellent and well-thought-out disaster recovery policy that they may now consider ways of so doing in the future. Nice of them to tell me, I thought.
Anyhow, fix the problem, not the blame. What to do, what to do, what to do? Well, why don't we whack all the files onto a bigger disk for you? OK. "Energise, Mr Spock." So they moved my files (which were all apparently present and correct) to a bigger partition on a different volume, whereupon they promptly went virtual, case 3. 2,000 files vanished without a trace. Grab the backup, say I. Can't, say "they", there's no backup 'cos we've only just moved them to a new volume. But, of course, because we moved them rather than copying them, they're no longer where they were to get at. Well, where the hell (it may have been some other word) are my files? ask I, mildly...
I slept better that night, I suspect, than the lads and lasses working, with help from Philadelphia, on the (eventually successful) data recovery.
One advantage...
... in having a central heating system that actually heats up my radiators is the way I can now hang a few shirts up to dry above the radiator in the hallway. Brilliant. In another aspect of the domestic bliss that is my forcibly bachelorised new lifestyle I'm picking up some delicious traces of successful crockpottery magic coming from the dining room. Ironically, the dining room is just about the last place I ever eat, now, as its entropic level is way over my bearable limit. But I park the slow cooker on a handy worktop out there, just under the central heating boiler.
Right. It's 18:32 and time to liberate the first batch of hot goodness. Yum.
Rather later
I'm not getting any younger. And nor is the night. Time (23:13) to grab me some more sleep, methinks. G'night.