2012 — 21 November: Wednesday
OK, I give up. When did it become 01:11?1 Better get some sleep; I may yet get a visit from my chum Chris in a few hours from now. G'night.
Rain? Again? That's nice
I've just been watching a 20-minute YouTube rant about the host of perceived inadequacies and mis-steps committed2 within the Win8 desktop v "new" (mustn't call it 'Metro' anymore) Tablet-oriented UI. I really had no idea how exercised people can get about this stuff. To me, an OS should be like perfect background music in a movie. If I notice it consciously, it's not perfect.
I've yet to encounter perfect software. But I've only been looking for 42 years so far.
It's 09:02. I need some breakfast and another cuppa. [Pause] Come to think of it, if software had become perfect I'd have been out of a job. Who needs user manuals in such a Utopia?
I love the way...
... random little facts slowly accrete. For example, nearly three years ago I discovered that AS Byatt and Margaret Drabble were sisters. This morning, I just heard Clive Swift mention his (now long ago) first marriage to Ms Drabble.
It's a (minor) miracle
The very latest Firefox, when combined with the very latest Flash, can once again handle a simple BBC video-in-a-popup window without crashing the plug-in. (Just like Chrome and IE10, in fact.) Now, if only there were something worth watching...
Hello, rain. Just couldn't stay away, could you? Buoyed by my recent triumph with Flash, I shall further improve the non-shining hour by (once again) attempting to repair the AMD graphics card control suite now that it purports to support 64-bit Win8 Pro. Oh happy day. Here we go...
An unedifying 10 minutes or so spent watching it stalled at this point...
... then failing to let me cancel "Just while it finishes up its current process", and I took out my Task Manager hammer and banged the process on the head. At least that still worked.
Having sent...
... my birthday 'twin' on his way, time to see what Mr Postie dropped off earlier. Three dollops from Uncle ERNIE for dear Mama, and a couple of films for me:
Christa and I saw "P.S." down at Harbour Lights — the act of looking it up on IMDB has just triggered yet another Flash crash, so that was a very short relationship... "No reservations" is a Hollywood remake of the original German film "Bella Martha". Still, at least the original writer / director worked on the new screenplay.
I was looking for...
... something entirely different — obviously — when I unearthed an ancient (you can tell by the colour of the paper, which is why I scanned, and OCRed it) battered copy of "Wightman's Arithmetical Tables". Don't laugh: at some point pretty early in my education I either forked out 8d of my pocket money for this or, more likely, nicked it from Big Bro.
It contains a list of planets that doesn't include Pluto (thus bringing it bang up-to-date, I guess). But here's another bit that caught my eye:
SHIP'S TIME
Ship's Time is measured in "watches" of four hours each, calculated from noon or midnight. Four to eight p.m. is divided into two periods of 2 hours each, called "dog-watches."
Thus 12 to 4 p.m. is called the afternoon watch, 4 to 6 the 1st dog-watch; 6 to 8 the 2nd dog-watch; 8 to 12 the 1st night-watch; 12 to 4 a.m. the middle watch; 4 to 8 a.m. the
morning watch; 8 to 12 noon the forenoon watch. A bell is rung every half-hour to show how many half hours of the watch have expired; e.g., 6.30 a.m. is "Morning watch 5 bells."
All this, for the sake of a chance to repeat (fictional) Captain Jack Aubrey's favourite joke:
"Why do they call 'em 'dog-watches'? Because they're cur-tailed!"
Furless felines
Adapting a hint from Len, I repeated the graphics card s/w gorp installation, this time opting for 'custom' rather than "fling in everything including the kitchen sink" mode. And it seems to have worked. I once again have the Catalyst Control Center (sic) interface, which has pinned itself to the right hand edge of the top line of my new-style3 'Start' display...
... back up and running in about two minutes flat, while the error log is pleasingly null. Now back to our scheduled programming.