2011 — 10 December: Saturday
Crikey. I didn't even notice that the evening had drifted over into Saturday.1 I'm currently listening to the Unthanks album ("Last") and a very mournful track "Starless" that originated with King Crimson, many many years ago. Then I glanced up at the screensaver that had kicked in on the plasma screen only to see it was showing a photo of Christa from August 2006. I'm afraid the fact that (as usual) she had a lovely smile didn't stop me bursting into helpless tears for a few seconds.
Four years on, and I'm still caught unawares sometimes by this strange life and death business — it can be quite an emotional roller coaster ride...
And so, as a much more famous diarist might have said, I'm off to bed. G'night.
I suppose, if we...
... actually remembered just how nastily frosty early winter mornings can be, more of us might take flight (says he, thinking of his son on the way to Egypt overnight). Meanwhile, the BBC has just told me that the boy Cameron met with a "cross section" of his backbenchers to explain the UK's policy of isolation within Europe. How cross, I wonder?
I also suppose...
... that, having scraped a sort-of living between February 1974 (when I joined ICL in Beaumont, Old Windsor, as a trainee instructional writer) and November 2006 (when I took early retirement from IBM in Hursley after a final decade or so as a sort-of webmaster and other odd jobs in the Java centre) I can just about regard myself as a writer.2 Though I have never suffered the "blockage" elegantly described by the editor of AGNI. Source and snippet:
I will never stop hoping. If I have any inkling — my wetted forecasting finger extended — that the breeze may come, I will go up to the desk, and since simple inert sitting is too overt an advertisement of incapacity, I will, without investing deeply, try out a few words. Maybe they will yield something, a combination that flashes. It does happen. But far more often I find myself going dully back and forth, Penelope at her shuttle, weaving and unweaving, moving the cursor to the right and watching as the words materialize behind it, and then moving it back the way it came, watching how something comes back to naught, trying not to draw larger human inferences from the action. I will do this until I'm sure, until the feeling of a larger failure threatens. At that point I snap off the desk lamp and take up whatever rationalizations will get me through the rest of the day.
Amusingly reminiscent of Anne Fadiman's final paragraph of Night Owl:
It is now 3.42 a.m. Everyone here has been asleep for hours except my daughter's hamster, the other nocturnal mammal in the family, who is busy carrying sunflower seeds from one end of his terrarium to the other. After Silkie completes this task, he will change his mind and bring the seeds back again. I will do more or less the same thing with several paragraphs.
How about some breakfast, Mrs Landingham? It's 09:31 and was -3C on my porch just a few minutes ago. Brrr!
Never let it be said...
... that US network TV can't be educational. Watching that "Castle" Season #4 episode Kill Shot showed me how easy it is to use the Win7 "Snipping Tool". Proof:
Close inspection of the corners will also reveal a solution to a long-standing (albeit trivial) issue I've had with screen capturing.
Still tinkering
Now that I'm confident I have the CPU temperature under control, guess what happens if I remove both PC system case fans (BlackBeast is in a gaming case, after all, and I don't play games) and add back in the Creative X-Fi sound card? Nothing bad. a) the SP/DIF optical out works perfectly after a single reboot, and b) the noisiest thing in the living room is now the fridge in the kitchen. That's what doors are for, I suppose.
For my next trick, I'm going to remove the graphics card and play with the hdmi out3 from the motherboard. That removes the single hottest (and passively-cooled) component from the mix. [Pause] Novatech has just delivered — for safety reasons — a replacement mains lead for BlackBeast's original one (which I actually never even unpacked, having no shortage of the things here in Technology Towers). Meanwhile, good ol' Uncle ERNIE has just flashed me a £25 smile. That's very nice of him.
I shall celebrate with a cuppa.
Lunch...
... was preceded by a quick whizz out to buy a useful little Hi-def adapter kit. Including a delightful male hdmi to articulated female hdmi that does exactly what I need in flexing the hdmi to DVI plug so that I can then push BlackBeast slightly deeper into its lair under the desk. The residual noise from the top fan (now re-instated) on its lowest speed setting is acceptably faint. I'm pleased to see that removing the graphics card and just using the motherboard's sophisticated chippery has done imperceptible damage to the overall performance. Compare this result...
... with the one from last Tuesday.
It turns out that motherboard graphics and hdmi output may not quite be ready for prime time. Rather noticeable pixellation on local video playback. So the graphics card is now shoehorned gently back in place, though I took my chance to move the audio card two slots away from it. Meanwhile, judging by the 196.1MB of gorp slurping on to the Ubuntu 11.10 desktop system up in the reading room, somebody's decided to move the Linux kernel up to version 3. I hope it doesn't all end in tears.
It's now (17:35) dark and seems to be getting pretty chilly out there once again. I shall warm myself up with a nice curry in an hour or so. Yum. [Pause] Checking the external server shows no sign of what should be a GIF of the "Windows Experience" result. Yet the file claims to be there. Most odd. (Not that it's a vital picture.)
Fixed: the trick seems to be to upload the image on to the server before uploading the web page that refers to it. I have my dark suspicions... (but he's now in Egypt, keeping his head down).