2011 — 31 May: Tuesday
The sun is shining again. And I've just listened to an amusing "take" on recent events (in the perpetual "war on terror") by Pat Condell, whom I had never before heard of or from. (It's a four-minute video here. And makes a change from, say, the style of 'news' I've just been listening to on BBC Radio 3.)
Meanwhile, another example from my latest batch of scanned slides. I suspect if I looked around my loft hard enough I'd still find Peter's little string-pulled horse toy (which belonged to Christa as a child) up there in one of the corners:
Time for breakfast and then I'll be off to see my new dentist, alas. Then we'll see what further adventures await. Possibly a walk. Almost certainly an empty box of NAS to pick up from Mike and introduce to my LAN. Possibly a choco delivery to the care home. In the words of Bill Watterson's sublime "Calvin & Hobbes", the days are just packed. It's 08:11 — let's start unpacking.
Right. It's 09:47 and the chipped filling is a thing of the recent past. What's next?
Roger Water's musical choices for his 'Desert Island', for starters:
Neil Young — Helpless Ryuichi Sakamoto — Endless Flight Leonard Cohen — Bird on a Wire Chet Baker — My Funny Valentine Ray Charles — Georgia On My Mind Giacomo Puccini — E Lucevan le Stelle — from Tosca Billie Holiday — God Bless the Child Gustav Mahler — Symphony No 5 in C Sharp Minor — 4th movement
Followed — after topping up the car's screenwash and cleaning off the pollen — by a cautious cuppa. Dr Fang's numbing jab has worn off to the point where unseemly dribbling should no longer be any more likely than usual.
Our Catholic friends...
... continue to dance on the head of a pin as they weightily ponder the ethical and moral obligations they no doubt sincerely believe have been placed upon them by their imaginary friend's human-produced instruction manual:
The question of condom use by married couples to prevent AIDS has been quietly debated for years by Vatican officials, theologians and pastors. Some bishops and
cardinals have argued that a married couple in which one spouse has AIDS may reasonably be expected to use condoms to prevent transmission of the deadly disease.
Others, citing "Humanae Vitae," have said the church can never approve a practice that goes against the understanding of the conjugal act in marriage as a complete
form of self-giving that is open to life.
Or, in this case, open to death. By the way, how does one spouse in a good Catholic union get HIV in the first place? I'm only asking. At this point, I'd usually add some supposedly witty footnote about the irony of taking ethical and moral advice from such people. You know what? I simply can't be bothered. But there's a neat XKCD cartoon frame here by Randall Monroe.
Later
I left the Terastation NAS chugging away quietly upstairs to soak up all my MP3 files from Blackbeast while I whizzed over to the care home with the latest pack of chocs. To my annoyance, the Windows side must have paused shortly after I left the house, with a popup to caution me that a Cab Calloway music file would lose some of its properties (rhythm, perhaps, or tunefulness?) if I transferred it. Of course, I wasn't on hand to 'ok' this prompt so an extra hour or so was added to the transfer time. But I'm pleased with the way the NAS is easy to control and configure. And it runs both cooler and more quietly than the 24x7 Ubuntu server1 that now sits above it.
I've decided to finish upgrading my internal network to 'gigabit' by adding high-speed routers at the ADSL modem up in Peter's room and down here in the living room. (I'd already taken the precaution of laying a high-speed cable under the carpet down the stairs last summer but hadn't got the round tuits needed to finish the job.) At the moment the network is running at around 90% utilisation while the six processor cores are not exactly over-worked at 6% (if I can believe Windows) for a relatively sluggish transfer speed of 7.5MB/second. There will doubtless be some tinkering with frame sizes once the remaining high-speed cable and the new routers are in play.
I've yet to finalise the backup strategy for the data on the Terastation. This strikes me as less urgent. After all, I have the master data on the pair of 1TB drives in Blackbeast, and will shortly have it all copied to one or other of the two 1TB RAID1 pairs of drives in the Terastation. It also lives on a couple of external drives that are USB-connected to whatever machine I choose. Mind you, should one of those 1,230 NEOs strike, all bets are off.