2011 — 18 July: Monday
I deduce1 that my busy little NAS managed to finish its RAID array scanning at some point in the last few hours either without finding a problem or by finding and fixing any problems. (I haven't yet dared to look at any logs.) Meanwhile yet another bracing dip into the largely uncharted waters of BlackBeast's BIOS settings this morning leaves me unconvinced that my motherboard would be able to boot from a PCI-E SSD, so I shall wall off that avenue until I decide I need such an incredibly fast disk for some other pointless pursuit. It's only a hobby after all.
As I mentioned here, "when I were a lad" debt was not something you could use to buy stuff with. Now it seems that our transatlantic cousins may be about to default on a scale that ought to kick news of the phone-hacking affair into the long grass that our Prime Minister clearly favours. Even our beloved fun figure and mayor of London, blonde Boris J, (busy putting a positive spin on the resignation? sacking? of the UK's top cop) has just described himself as "hacked off" with the "problem" of the "nexus" between the police and the media. He says he would be "very surprised" if the "Met" turned out to be riddled with corruption from top to bottom :-)
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
More importantly...
... Mother Hubbard's cupboard is once again a little less bare, a fresh cuppa is brewing as I type, and I reckon I've earned some breakfast. It's cool and slightly drizzly out there (at 09:51) but relatively quiet.
I'm glowing...
... with the virtue of one who has not only returned from Soton having opened a new savings account but also a) already set up a standing order to pay into it, and b) even succeeded in setting up a corresponding entry in my swish — non-Java-malware-afflicted — home accounting package to mirror this real world activity.
The view from over there
I recall being told at one point (though I should add I had no proof either then, or later) fairly early in the reign of Lou Gerstner at IBM of the use in a high-level meeting of a phrase along the lines of the need for a willingness to set about "ripping the faces off the competition". It struck me as rather robust stuff. Contrast this more recent example. Source and snippet:
News America was led by Paul V. Carlucci, who, according to Forbes, used to show the sales staff the scene in "The Untouchables" in which Al Capone beats a man to death with a baseball
bat. Mr. Emmel testified that Mr. Carlucci was clear about the guiding corporate philosophy.
According to Mr. Emmel's testimony, Mr. Carlucci said that if there were employees uncomfortable with the company's philosophy — "bed-wetting liberals in particular was the
description he used" Mr. Emmel testified — then he could arrange to have those employees "outplaced from the company."
Well, I've always been a liberal :-)
Too much...
... fiscal responsibility isn't desirable, so I was pleased to pick up (this morning in Tesco, at a bargain price) the Blu-ray of "Monsters" which got a thoughtful review, as 'film of the month', indeed, in the BFI's "Sight & Sound" — a magazine I finally stopped buying regularly shortly after Christa died. And "Deep End" was stuffed into the usual venetian blind delivery system, though I only noticed it a few minutes ago. It's a film I saw only once (at the time of its cinema release) but which has stayed with me, as it were, for 40 years. Remarkable.
It's just (17:20) been raining again, but (optimistic fools that we are) we're currently planning another walk tomorrow. It's only water.