2012 — 12 November: Monday
I'm doing somewhat better this morning in the Great Sleep Stakes.1 Doesn't matter: I merely need to be bright-eyed (if not bushy-tailed) in time for the optician :-)
As long as it doesn't rain too hard I should be OK, but I don't intend to put money on that possibility. Meanwhile, an overnight email suggests I should listen to the latest episode of "The Museum of Curiosity" as one of the guests was the IgNobel Awards committee chap. I hadn't been very impressed by the last 'Museum' programme I happened to catch, but I still remember the annual Awards ceremony carried on NPR's "Science Friday" — at least, until my permanently-tuned satellite box 'listening' to 13E went the way of all flesh in October 2011.
Should I bother re-installing the Flash plug-in on BlackBeast in case it now plays nice with Firefox, or should I simply use a different browser?
Who remembers...
... the Cold War? Source and snippet from a review of a new book by Jon Wiener:
Pieces of the Berlin Wall are displayed at more than 30 sites throughout the United States, including a casino in Las Vegas where visitors to a men's room are invited to urinate on it. A 2009 Los Angeles art festival paired a real section of the Wall with a "Wall Across Wilshire" upon which artists painted their interpretations, comparing it to the Israeli security wall and the U.S.-Mexican border fence. Wiener gleefully notes that, even at the Ronald Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley, "Hippie Day" generated more interest from visitors than the Berlin Wall exhibit.
Where's Santayana when you need him? And another book (by George Vaillant) mauled at the same web site introduces us to a wonderful long-term study of the (supposedly non-existent) ruling class 'over there' to be found in the ranks of Harvard Men:
Vaillant is led to the uncomfortable conclusion that there are certain grounds on which nature is always more important than nurture. Having arrived at the Grant study after it rejected the idea that biology is destiny, he has presided over biology's return. "In retrospect," he writes, "I can see that environmentalism in the post-war social sciences was just as extreme as the pre-war hereditarianism had been." What a come-uppance. Gene science has brought a partial vindication of the men with the skull-clamps and the scrotum-calipers.
Closer to home, I observe that Win8 has just forgotten that "Desktop" is one of my 'favourite' locations where I pin stuff for ready access by my text editor. Mind you, I've no idea how it learned that in the first place. [Pause] Somehow while Peter was showing me how to dismiss the irritating "Preview pane" and "Details pane" from an Explorer view I'd managed to untick both "Desktop" and "Favourites". All is now once again as I prefer it.
Back from...
... Mr Postie's lair, clutching two books...
... whose author's name irresistibly reminds me of one of Arthur Marshall's collections of New Statesman competition winners in the 1980s. I believe the task that had been set was to come up with plausible new proverbs of dubious utility...
An owl in a sack troubles no man
Finally, a small advantage...
... to being of a certain age: my eye-test is paid for by the NHS. I felt so guilty about that — and the fact that my prescription has barely twitched — that I laid out £15 for a new case and two of the hi-tech microfibre cleaning cloths (which will be an unexpected treat for the 60" plasma screen). The repair to the snapped bridge on my "reading pair" — which only snapped while I was attempting to remove it to clean before my visit, dagnabbit — is actually still under warranty as it's a month under the two-year limit. Excellent.
The weather is gross out there. Cold, and wet, and miserable. But at least I got back just in time to stop Mr Postie from writing out another of his annoying "While you were out..." post cards as he wouldn't have been able to fit this...
... through my little letter box. Now all I need is a fresh cuppa, and lots of spare time.
It was the habit...
... among some IBM managers of my acquaintance (and/or observation) to claim little victories as they — as it were — went along, even if they sometimes left a trail marked mostly by chaos in their wake. I see no reason not to adopt a similar system as I wrangle Win8 more nearly to my precise liking.
So, today's little victory? I've just regained 6GB of space on my system drive2 nuking the so-called 'advanced power plan' settings by uttering a magic incantation while wearing my System Administrator hat3 — so I once again have slightly more free space than used space. (Though, frankly, quite how a 2GB initial download followed quickly by the odd few hundred MB of patches managed to expand to fill nearly 60GB of a nominal 120GB drive baffles me. I suppose I was badly spoiled by my use, for over a decade, of an Acorn RISC system that kept its entire OS in a tiddly little ROM of [initially] 2MB or so.)
I bought my copy of the...
... 'enlarged' edition of Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary in 1971, when I used to haunt the bookshops of Cambridge on a Wednesday afternoon while my fellow students did whatever it was that they did to avoid sports. He still hits the spot:
The intrepid trio are going to risk a gentle country ramble tomorrow. There will be a pub involved. Hic!