2012 — 21 February: Tuesday
Simple pleasures1 remain pleasurable. News coverage of the (I gather) upcoming Olympics spasm doesn't make the list. Tribalism and tribal conflict leaves me stone cold. Yep; definitely a grumpy ol' man.
With luck, there's a chance I shall meet up with another such this morning, as my chum Chris is on the lookout for a NAS device in the wake of the recent failure of the single-point-of-failure external backup drive he'd been using for the last four years or so. He wants to combine the NAS with a print server, too. Tomorrow, I may watch as an Android Tablet PC settles into a new home with a new owner over in Winklechestershire, and I shall be enjoying lunch and a gossip with my chum Iris on Friday. If I manage to squeeze in a walk on Thursday I shall obviously be needing the weekend to recover...
Bit overload?
Freeman Dyson's son has been chatting to Kevin Kelly:
Wired: Did they see computation in the quasi-biological ways you do?
Dyson: The moment von Neumann got the computing machine running, Nils Barricelli showed up, trying to evolve self-replicating, crossbreeding digital organisms. He encouraged
strings of code to replicate with small variations to compete in solving a problem or a simple game. The winning code gained computing resources. Like biological life, no one designed them.
Fifty years later, I went back to the basement storeroom where the project was started, which at the time was the institute's main network server room. One of the servers was working full-time
to keep out all the self-replicating computer viruses trying to get in. Barricelli's vision had come true!
I generally had trouble encouraging my code to run, let alone reproduce.
Mysterioso
The "Sold" sign in my neighbour's front garden has just been partially obscured by a "For Sale" sign put up by a rival establishment. [Pause] Another house is now much more visible as two trees are removed from its front garden. And — what with it being technically somewhat over an hour since the morning ended — I've now given up waiting for Chris and have just nipped out on a supplies run. The mighty hunter/gatherer returns, clutching a mango (inter alia) in triumph. Definitely time for lunch.
Bother! That silence is the sound of my music drive going offline. Now, what the hell makes that happen? [Pause] Golly! I now know more than I really wanted to about running Win7 commands in "elevated" mode, and my level of operating system paranoia has also elevated somewhat. But a reboot, followed by a much longer than usual Windows starting screen, and a quick inspection of the events log, seems to suggest the drive suffered a transient 'not ready' problem during a paging operation. Fingers crossed. (Link.)
Having nipped...
... back out for a soothing drink of petrol (not for me, you understand) and a little pootle around, I'm minded to ask why has the UK pump price of the stuff gone up by 40% in the four and a twiddly bit years since I started driving?
By the way, the mighty (mango) hunter/gatherer had no idea the 'pip' of that fruit was so huge, and he feels a little cheated. Messy, too. Very tasty, though.