2011 — 25 July: Monday

A full night's sleep1 does a great deal to restore my customary bonhomie. As does a delightful familiar-sounding piece of music that turned out to be by John Williams — the Devil's Dance from the "Witches of Eastwick". Yet another film (1987? how can that be?) to be revisited at some point.

First things first. A cuppa, and then it will be expedient to undertake a little jaunt out to repair the more egregiously gaping of the various holes in Mother Hubbard's cupboard. Somebody around here keeps eating stuff when I'm not cooking :-)

Just a 'lemonses' message

This update comes courtesy of an SSH2 session and text editing on my Ubuntu 11.04 system. Crackin' bit of cheese, Gromit!

And this post-lunch update arrives via the same route, but with a better editor now in use on Ubuntu. I must say, I'm rather liking the feel of the latest desktop. Dare I say, it's so far not making me curse in the way that OSX all too often did? It's 14:17 and I've been invited over to sup tea with Roger & Eileen later this afternoon. I was just listening to a news item about the wish of the boy Cameron's administration to establish a "happiness" index. I remember attempts to do the same thing in the IBM Hursley software lab essentially foundered after it was eventually realised that a) nobody was really sure what to measure, and b) nobody was really sure what to do to make the index go up (or even down, I guess).

Meanwhile, Mr Postie dropped off yet another attempt by British Gas to get dear Mama (no longer at that address) to buy another new boiler as — although they obviously haven't noticed that her account with them is closed — they've noticed her former boiler (no longer anything to do with her, of course, for a year now) is nearly ten years old. My own boiler was still going strong after 29 years until I replaced it with a far more efficient one last year. I admit the tarry sludge being pumped through it at the time might have papered over some of its shortcomings.

I've managed to access my external webserver over in Texas from my Ubuntu system, but am now poking around trying to discover how to save and re-establish multiple sessions with a minimum of retyping each time. WinSCP has obviously spoiled me, but I'll get there...

I've briefly skimmed...

... parts of the 1,500 page "manifesto" of the charmless chap supposedly behind the Oslo massacres. I think I'm going to need a fresh cuppa!

Rather later

My tasty evening meal is gently digesting to the 6Music choices of Marc Riley's temp. replacement. The sun is still2 shining. A fresh cuppa is a thing of the recent past. I'm predicting two main — but vastly divergent — reading choices this evening: "Ubuntu Kung Fu" and "The Golden Torc". With email and webserver access both painlessly sorted out, my next adventure will be seeing how nicely Win7 is willing to share my data and music files with the Open Source upstart. Mind you, I'm sure the Buffalo Terastation NAS would be perfectly 'happy' as a data hub. And both Win7 and Linux PCs can see that, as it were, out of the box.

[Slight pause, while I just make quite sure that's true... it is.]

Indeed, using my NAS in that way as a Charing Cross data hub also usefully forces me to place files on it 'automatically' which is not a bad discipline.

  

Footnotes

1  And sunny blue skies this morning.
2  As Eileen remarked this afternoon, you can already see that the nights are drawing in.