2011 — 16 July: Saturday
Wonder of wonders1 the weather forecast is correct and drizzle is dribbling down outside. Well (sour grapes) I didn't want to go out for a walk today in any case. I have plenty of procrastinated tasks I can catch up with, or ignore further, as the whim takes me. Hello, cuppa!
I'm no fan of Facebook (or, indeed, any other form of social networking) but this is a typically well-written "New Yorker" piece. Source and snippet:
Facebook's most complicated problem is privacy. No other company collects so much personal information — from who your friends are to where you work and the kinds of photographs you take.
Advertisers want this information, but users don't necessarily want them to have it...
That conflict plays out every time Facebook angers some of its users by altering its privacy settings, as it often does — almost always to make more information public. In June, Facebook was
criticized for using facial-recognition software, which meant that people could be automatically identified in photographs. A familiar cycle followed: users complained, Facebook apologized,
and the program was modified but not eliminated.
It's a (bootable) PCI-Express RAID0 hard drive, Jim...
... but not as we know it. What an elegant idea!
And it wouldn't even snaffle one of my SATA ports. Hmmm, tasty.
Banking madness
My main online bank (more for reasons of personal indolence and inertia than anything more cogent) is Santander (though I signed up back when it was Alliance & Leicester). I've just viewed their online tutorial as they are about to re-engineer all the processes I've more or less got the hang of after four years. But it's now clear that I will need to master the black art of receiving on my mobile phone2 — and then keying in on my PC — one-time security code text messages. Worse yet, with a frequency not seen since the utterly abhorrent UAC messages on my completely unlamented (and long since Linuxed) Windows Vista3 system. Oh, and get this: each such message could take up to three minutes to be received, and times out.
Barclays (which I now use when being dear Mama's "attorney") gives home customers a neat little hand-held one-time security code generator, which is a doddle. Their interface (and indeed the interface used by HSBC, which Christa remained loyal to and whose accounts I literally inherited when she died) is also a great deal simpler than the fussy facility-rich one Santander is rolling out. I'm predicting yet another change of bank in my near future. Such good fun.
To paraphrase Kai Lung... How is it possible to suspend topaz in one cup of the balance and weigh it against amethyst in the other; or who in a single language can compare the tranquilising grace of a maiden with the invigorating pleasure of witnessing a well-contested ratfight... or that of laboriously entering financial data into a badly-designed online banking "system", let alone a Home Accounting package?
Frankly, vita is too brevis. Still, the rain appears to have stopped. It's time (13:53) for a spot of lunch, methinks. Got to keep that blood sugar level up.
Iron(y) surplus
Yesterday, a millionaire Baron4 got up in the House of Lords to bang on about the iniquitous "hereditary principle" that allows the Murdochs to control Sky. One has to wonder if his birthday (April Fools Day) has arrived twice this year.
Tea, Mrs Landingham. I need tea! [Pause] And sleep! G'night.