2013 — 10 February: Sunday

Let me guess. It's raining, again. Right?1 I've been driven off BBC 6Music by their recent DJ import from Radio 1. And off BBC Radio 4 by their religious nonsense. I'm now dithering between some over-played classical selections or (perish the thought) some of my own music.

Tales of the OCD

To my chagrin (but, sadly, not my total surprise) my online collection of video titles had until a couple of minutes ago somehow managed to fail to include one of the trilogy of TV films made from the first three Armistead Maupin "Tales of the City" collections. Since that's my current and highly enjoyable (re)-reading, I just thought I'd check... and there it wasn't. I've also just ordered an early outing from Simon "The Mentalist" Baker — a series from over a decade ago, called "The Guardian". Nothing to do with the Grauniad, of course.

I was recently told of a conversation between two of Iain M Banks' Culture minds2 wherein one accused t'other of obsession. T'other replied:

Obsession is just what those too timorous to follow an idea
through to its logical conclusion call determination.

Quite so. [Pause] This is true, too:

I never came across one of Laplace's "Thus it plainly appears" without feeling sure that I had hours of hard work before me to fill up the chasm and find out how it plainly appears.

Nathanial Bodwitch (1838) in Maths quotes


I recall one trip to the parental home from what was then Hatfield Poly (30 miles on a combination of buses and trains) spent reading a slim volume all about Laplace transformations and only managing about five pages, in between staring abstractedly at cloud formations. (And it wasn't even "required" reading. The past is truly a foreign country.)

Furthermore, it (the past) remains mutable. There's an interesting WSJ piece by Kevin Helliker here unpicking some of that tangled web woven by Capote's "In cold blood" — the film of which has a fantastic musical score by Quincy Jones, oddly.

The Commission...

... on Living Standards reckons my "equivalised" income puts me slap bang in the middle of UK households, give or take :-)

Moolah

Typical, in other words. I shall crack open a bottle of 'bubbly'. When I've saved enough to buy one. I think Prof Tufte would agree with me that their graphic could do with some work.

The afternoon is looming up, but the rain rains merrily on. At this rate, we shouldn't have to wait long for the guvmint to appoint a Minister for Drought. And then do another U-turn.

It should be safe...

... to resume BBC 6Music now that Jarvis Cocker's on duty, as it were. Meanwhile, on the topic of being safe, I've just redefined the File History settings for my overly-cautious little operating system. It took nearly 24 hours to realise that the disc furniture has been moved around more than somewhat before the 'Action Center' threw a reproving minor-league hissy fit. I've pointed it to a remote corner of one of the new drives (a mere 2.11TB spare should be enough to placate it for a while), patted it on the head, and also assured it it doesn't have to worry about anything in the "Music", "Pictures", or "Video" libraries.

If it's content to back up the contents of "Documents" every six hours, that will be fine by me. That's where I keep a little over 1.2GB of 'molehole' files and a few other bits'n' bobs. Or, at least, it is if I've correctly understood how to add a virtual pointer to a conventional directory/subdirectory structure to one of these new-fangled fancy-pants "Libraries". Everything else is already backed up in numerous external (and some offsite) locations, not to mention my Buffalo NAS RAID array, because I'm frankly a lot more cautious about losing data than Windows is.

24 hours? Tsk, tsk.

It's still raining, by the way. We're in full-on "Gloomy Sunday" mode. (One of the fabulous songs [the Billie Holiday version, Disc #1, track #8] banned by the overly-cautious little BBC back when it knew better than we do what was good for us...) I have more recent versions recorded by Marianne Faithfull, Sarah McLachlan, and Sinead O'Connor. (In case you wondered.) Not that I've heard them on the Beeb. (In case you wondered.) My caring Copernic Desktop Search asked me if I meant "Glory" rather than "Gloomy"? It's always sweet when software worries about you, don't you think?

Right! It's time for my evening meal. 18:21 sounds about right.

I don't always...

... catch on quite as quickly as other folk. For example, it was only when hearing Man's 1969 track "Sudden Life" a couple of minutes ago that I finally realised why it sounded so familiar: it uses the same two-note, equal-interval, pattern — though in a different key — as Cream's 1966 "Spoonful" but you try telling youngsters that today...

Having just updated the Raspberry Pi web server's software, and noticed it's finally stopped raining, I shall turn in while I'm still ahead on points. G'night.

  

Footnotes

1  Yes, but at least it's a heart-warming +3C out there. Yuk.
2  Thanks, Len. Though how you (and my son) can read his stuff baffles me.