2012 — 20 November: Tuesday
What a way to spend the first few minutes of my 'working' day.1 I'd wanted to straighten out — if only in my mind — my Win8 Pro licence key situation, as I didn't much like the idea of my two Win8 machines both running off the one key. Particularly as I'd had to slog through the automated telephone 111-keystroke re-activation process with one of them. (And hope never to have to do that again.)
After I'd explained myself and what I'd done, it turned out I needn't have worried, as I am "entitled" to upgrade up to five machines at this price and on these terms. We parted as new best friends.
Overnight rain...
... and a dull, uniform grey sky out there. No matter. In my living room, the sun is shining. Besides, I have a lunch date. But not before breakfast.
I highlighted a comment just yesterday suggesting (not unfairly) that there seem to be some crazy people dotted here and there among us, busily adding their share of blather to many an Interweb page. It's refreshing (to me, at least) to find other "watering holes", where sanity and good humour largely prevail in the discourse they attract:
As it happens, some of the same ground is covered in a fascinating book I suggested (here) that the Pope might get a kick out of. As for the ability to change gender? Start with Ursula LeGuin's 1969 novel "The Left Hand of Darkness".
Matt Manley's picture for the David Barash "Chronicle" article is rather spookily similar to the Leo and Diane Dillon cover art of my 1971 LeGuin paperback. Which my strange memory reminds me I read while on holiday in Oban in the summer of 1971.
Great phrase?
I'm not so sure, though it probably won't catch on. Source and snippet:
You have this great phrase, you say that creationists are "one of the most recently evolved species" of Christian. What do you mean by this?
Erm. :-)
This repays reading. But then, it is written by Carl Zimmer, after all.
It was still...
... raining when I returned from a nice lunch and post-lunch chat and cuppa, to find the results of Saturday evening's momentary weakness waiting patiently on my doorstep:
I couldn't...
... possibly disagree with Jakob Nielsen's well-thought-out little diatribe against my new favourite operating system — after all, I'm merely a pig-ignorant user who knows no better and needs to be led to the right place to worship. In truth, I agree that it was a rather naff manoeuvre to fit two such divergent user interfaces into one product. However, I would mildly point out that Win8 has yet to give me an unpleasant surprise. And, on my desktop and laptop, it's really not been much effort to set things up so as to dodge all those nasty "Tablet"-oriented aspects of the latest GUI.
Besides, what's wrong with inching outside your comfort zone on the odd occasion? I mean, if nobody did that, we'd never get women bishops in the C of E, would we? Oh, wait, bad example...