2012 — 28 February: Tuesday
It says something1 when the first news item in the weekly Ubuntu newsletter is about "a new startup sound for possible inclusion in the upcoming 12.04 release". I've been wondering (vaguely — it's a core skill of mine) what to do about my Ubuntu 11.10 desktop system up in the reading room as mostly I find myself switching it on just to keep it fully patched. Still, a spare, working PC is a spare, working PC. One never knows...
I also wonder vaguely why it is that, no matter what time I go to bed, I wake up almost exactly six hours later. Which is why I'm currently sitting here, supping a cuppa, and in a position (should I choose) to hear the 07:00 news in a few minutes.
And here's me thinking...
... "Ted" was merely the name of a favourite childhood tortoise.
Giving a talk at TED, the technology journalist Steven Levy has written, is "a rite of passage for an Internet-age intellectual." The conference makes the Stuff White People Like list. In last year's The Muppets movie, the character Scooter is updated to be a Google employee and TED attendee.
Pity. I always liked Scooter.
So, I'm browsing...
... my copy of Sebastian Carter's "Twentieth Century Type Designers" — as you do — and I find a couple of amusing quotes in the section on Matthew Carter, the chap who designed "Galliard". This was one of the earliest fonts I paid good money for back in my Acorn DTP days. It reminds me of one of my earliest 'serious' books on typography from that now distant era — "Anatomy of a Typeface" by Alexander Lawson. This (of course) is set in Galliard. And, before you know it, although somewhat circuitously,2 I end up reading an online interview with Donald Knuth:
I used Galliard... and silently corrected a typo :-)
Time...
... for another trip over to the care-home. [Pause] And back, frustrated, after finding literally nowhere to park at the home, and some of Winchester's traffic in chaos with an ungoodly length of North Walls reduced to a single lane. That's a wasted 21.4 miles. Tea, Mrs Landingham. I need tea, now.
I shall walk my frustration off in the vicinity of Farley Mount tomorrow...
It's getting late, and...
... I've just found another ancient Polaroid print that I took, in Meisenheim, on 29th October 1981:
Here's the previous one. And with that... g'night.