2012 — 20 December: Thursday
Well, at least the rain means it isn't too cold.1 It occurs to me that Xmas is thundering down the track, but I shall do my damnedest2 to ignore the whole rigmarole. As usual. Frankly, I'm more interested in getting somewhat past the winter solstice and thereby getting some extra daylight back.
KBO.
My choice of...
... bedtime reading — a lightweight wallow in the 1950s — had me chortling more than somewhat...
... particularly in light of what I'd said (just recently) about rice pud and semolina. Turns out all too many people remember, and share, my distaste of the slimy stuff foisted on us as food half a century ago in this country. Oh, and I owned a Sooty puppet, just such a xylophone, and knew a lady with that exact model of Bush radio. Plus my Dad cut a wartime jazz piano record of a radio broadcast he made, sponsored by Oxydol. But "Rock around the clock" was unlikely to have been tolerated.
Much as I...
... enjoyed the cartoons of Saul Steinberg (who could forget the classic "New Yorker" cover showing View of the World From 9th Avenue?) the review here of a biography of the chap manages to paint an unappealing picture of the subject and snipe at his biographer.
Life is but a palimpsest?
This caught my eye. (Obviously.) Source and snippet:
Like most autodidacts, I'm a spotty reader, subject to vagrant whims, led by meandering interests. "Palimpsest" is one of many personal guides for me. It can lead to the study of memory, to historical ideas about architecture, to geology, to art history. Stay with it long enough and you may find yourself nudging the notion that civilization was created by extraterrestrial visitors.
Personally, I draw the (Nazca) line firmly at Erich von Däniken, however.
I bought Raymond Chen's book a while ago...
... though my bookmark shows me I gave up3 when I reached Chapter 10: The inner workings of the Dialog Manager. (Do you blame me?) Here's his current take on the disappearance of the Pinball game during the porting of 32-bit code to 64-bit:
But one of the programs that ran into trouble was Pinball. The 64-bit version of Pinball had a pretty nasty bug where the ball would simply pass through other objects like a ghost. In particular,
when you started the game, the ball would be delivered to the launcher, and then it would slowly fall towards the bottom of the screen, through the plunger, and out the bottom of the table.
Games tended to be really short.
Two of us tried to debug the program to figure out what was going on, but given that this was code written several years earlier by an outside company, and that nobody at Microsoft ever understood
how the code worked (much less still understood it), and that most of the code was completely uncommented, we simply couldn't figure out why the collision detector was not working. Heck, we
couldn't even find the collision detector!
Flippin' heck. I just reloaded Flash, yet again, to view the supposedly two-billion pixel image of Everest and not only did it fail to crash, I can now also once again use the BBC's iPlayer from within Firefox. It's an Xmas miracle.
I think this...
... recent little morsel from "Private Eye" suggests that Bill Bailey's remark two years ago was spot on target:
"Somehow the Tories have deflected the righteous anger at the bankers who we bailed out. The Tories manage to take that outrage and direct it at benefit claimants. It's genius. Evil genius."
Crikey! It's 20:44 and time for a change of venue / inactivity.