2012 — 10 May: Thursday
See, the thing is, in my simpleminded universe1 a catalyst is something that assists or speeds up or enhances without itself being involved or consumed or affected. But in the Wonderful World of Windows, the "Catalyst Control Center" is a noisome lump of software that AMD's Radeon graphics card has foisted upon me. It comes out to play — largely with itself — on every start-up or re-boot to "enhance my visual experience", except (like this morning) when it stalls at some perceived obstacle, sits there dumbly sulking, and stops other things getting off the ground. Like a simple web browser.
And, to add insult, it clearly reveals that it's overlooked an 'update' for the last couple of weeks in any case. Not that these ever seem to do anything but add support for yet more PC games of violence and mayhem that leave me stone cold. I have now unticked the little box that says "automatically check for updates" and will await further undevelopments.
Tea, Mrs Landingham? My first cuppa is already a distant memory. And I'm down to my last 50GB of space on my system drive. Amazing. Make that 60GB. I've just cleaned out a portion of the Augean Stable. Is it time for breakfast yet?
Plus ça change?
Interesting to see this now-venerable comment by MIT professor Sherry Turkle (from her book "The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit") as reviewed in August 1984 by Christopher Lasch:
In the course of the last decades programmers have watched their opportunities to exercise their expertise in a spontaneous way being taken away. Those who are old enough remember the time when things were different as a kind of golden age, an age when a programmer was a skilled artisan who was given a problem and asked to conceive of and craft a solution. ... Today, programs are written on a kind of assembly line. The professional programmer works as part of a large team and is in touch with only a small part of the problem being worked on.
I wrote my first few programs (in Algol60) at the Hatfield Poly (as it then was) in late 1969. Not that I recall it as a golden age. Nor would I have described myself as a skilled artisan. I prefer my occasional bursts of programming to be widely separated by more congenial bursts of, well, almost anything, actually.
Lauren Laverne has just recounted a lovely Maurice Sendak anecdote. He once responded to a young reader's note of praise with a little doodle. The youngster was apparently so taken with this that he promptly ate it. The distraught mother wrote to Sendak to tell him this. He replied to her that there was no higher praise... it was his best-ever review, he said.
You know what?
I'm not even going to ask what these chaps? chapesses? are getting up to on the side of my recycling bin. I shall just leave them to it.
Perhaps Brian would know? [Pause] Right. Time I wasn't here. TTFN
Home again, home again...
... jiggety-jig. (What does that even mean?) Well I never. It turns out to be one of the Mother Goose nursery rhymes... so where's my fat pig?
Instead, I've just settled for a (delicious) prawn mango masala meal with a couple of dark choc hob-nobs for "pud". The return navigation was untroubled, and I managed to miss the one-way bit that's caused me grief in the past. But there was a nasty bit right at the start as I tried to get over the smooth and very slippery mud on Ian's drive in the valley and hill carved by his heavy Volvo immediately before the exit to the road. It wasn't until I thought to lock the Yaris manually into first gear that I made it out. That's a driving first for me. And another bit of tyre tread left behind.
The first of last Monday's Blu-rays showed up just before I set off this morning. Compare and contrast this...
... with the previous film I saw young Mr Timberlake in. Let alone the one with Ms Seyfried. Both vastly different performances, and genres.