2012 — 18 February: Saturday
The promised rain has yet to arrive1 but the clouds up there are both thick, dark, and scudding across the sky animatedly. My own level of animation is somewhat lower.
I must say, that rain currently looks remarkably like sunshine in a 50% blue sky. I think I could use a late breakfast — it's 11:20 and (this) man cannot live by tea alone.
"Copy that"
When Junior was here last week he mentioned an improved file copying utility: TeraCopy. Might give it a whirl.
There's a track (Us and Them) from "Dark Side of the Moon" playing. I bought that album before I met Christa, played it to her when introducing her to Pink Floyd and, a lifetime later, she's now already been gone for over four years. I will never understand Time.
Mr Postie has just delivered a voting package for the chance to select one "Member Nominated Director" for the IBM UK Pensions Trust. I've made my2 choice :-)
I've been experimenting...
... not entirely successfully, with loose leaf tea. It's a bit messy, and it quickly gets rather too strong (stewed, to be honest). I wonder if I've still got a tea cosy anywhere...
I dip,...
... from time to time, into my copy of "The Salmon of Doubt". Although I bought this in May 2002 I'm in no particular hurry to finish it because — after all — when it's read, what further Douglas Adams remains? Here's a little gem:
Oddly, the industry that is the primary engine of this incredible pace of change — the computer industry — turns out to be rather bad at predicting the future itself. There are two things in particular that it failed to foresee: one was the coming of the Internet, which, in an astonishingly short time, has become what the computer industry is now all about; the other was the fact that the century would end.
IBM paid me quite a lot of money at the end of 1999 simply for carrying a pager, and agreeing to remain sober and available to get into the Hursley Lab in the event of any Y2K nastiness. As I reported, four weeks later:
The Y2K went very quietly until about two weeks in when I discovered a niggle at the main external FTP download site. The server I send material to was timestamping it
with a numeric field whose value, for the 17th January 2000 was
42949653960117
which I find faintly sweet, somehow. Quite whether that's a "BC" or an "AD" seems pleasingly irrelevant, don't you think?
It's a very clear, starry night out there at 22:20. Brrr.