2012 — 4 January: Wednesday

One advantage of waking unusually early1 is it brings my initial start-up cuppa that much sooner. The other (this morning, at least) is that I get to read a delicious overnight email rant that much sooner. Corresponding with a chap in Seattle is reminiscent of that old (Asimov, surely?) SF story about women and full duplex communication wherein both parties chatter away simultaneously, unlike chaps who basically take it in turns and suffer a lower overall rate of idea interchange thereby.

Since the topic was fonts and website design I'd better not say too much. Besides, I've drunk my tea.

Of course, one disadvantage of waking unusually early is that, after you've drunk the tea, and noted it's still quite early and dark, you switch the light off to grab a few more of those needful forty winks and resurface somewhat after 10:00 when the clunk of the letterbox being stuffed with yet another unwanted pizza delivery flyer (or worse) more or less disperses any remaining fragments of unconsciousness.

It's not raining. Nor is it windy. But it is unenticing out there at the moment. The moment being 10:38 or so.

Putting your foot, erm, in it...

This annual item is always good for a giggle. Click on the pic for the source:

Celebrities and Science, 2011

It's a jungle out there

With added sharks! Here's a nice example of understatement:

Although Safari is required to spark the system crash via HTML, modern operating systems should not allow usermode applications to bring down the machine.

John Leyden in The Register


You think? I long ago expunged that particular browser. And I got rid of Chrome (yet again) just a few minutes ago. It exceeded my irritation threshold (yet again). Same goes for my latest attempt to co-exist peaceably with Apache just running as a service for 'localhost' serving. It's just too much like hard work. And I don't enjoy hard work.

Lunch, Mrs Landingham?

Blimey

I thought I'd just been spending a few minutes puttering around with some web tidying and tinkering with some software, but I can't help noticing I'm now hungry, and thirsty, and it's already 17:17. In fact, I've just done the curtains and blinds routine. But I have no idea what happened to the afternoon. Good (un)job I'm retired!

[Pause]

Right. Apache efforts have finally met with success. Or to put it another way, I seem to have managed to discard all the bits of XAMPP that I don't want / need while just leaving a simple Apache server running as a Windows service and, erm, servering away, SSIs and all, at my 'localhost' address. I must say, BlackBeast Mark II is a damn' sight faster than the little Asus Eee PC at loading my little local stash of web pages :-)

Meanwhile, Tom Ravenscroft has been playing some simply superb music while 'sitting in' for Gideon Coe on BBC 6Music this evening.

  

Footnote

1  I regard any time before 06:00 as early unless I'm being forced to travel somewhere for someone else's convenience. In which case I regard it merely as hellish.