2013 — 14 March: Thursday
Another sunny start1 as I sup the vital initial cup. I snapped off the radio news earlier (around 01:00, that is) as I found the hysteria over the latest splendid chap who has slicked his way (as it were) up the divinely greasy pole just too irritating. I like to think of myself as a "live and let live" person in general but — given all the sickening revelations of a distinctly non-divine nature that have oozed out of the Eternal City in recent years — there are limits to my tolerance. Think of it as one of the perks of being a grumpy old man.
After yesterday's wallow2 in the final (so far?) tranche of the 'Twiglet' franchise — including, naturally, all the documentary extras — this particular grump has a lunch date today, some supplies shopping within the next 48 hours max, a date with Dr Fang's sidekick tomorrow, and another earlyish hospital-taxi stint on Monday for Gill and Chris. And those are just the things I vaguely know about. Ain't Life fun? Even if it's not a Divine Plan, it will do for now.
Consider the alternative, after all :-)
Is it just me...
... or is it a tiny bit ironic that the article here has 14 web-tracking agents associated with it (assuming my latest copy of Ghostery isn't mis-counting). Source and snippet:
This is the regime that the W3C stands to add to the Web, and that Berners-Lee has endorsed with his remarks. A regime where every improvement is seen as an opportunity to erect a toll booth. A Web built on the urinary tract infection business model: rather than getting your innovation in a healthy gush, every new feature must come in a painfully squeezed dribble, a few pennies if you want to link in directly to a specific timecode on the video; a few pennies more if you want to embed a link from the video to a web page, more if you want to move a video to another device or timeshift it, and so on.
A vivid metaphor, to be sure.
It's bad enough...
... when the lip-sync is "out" on a digital video by a couple of hundred milliseconds...
The timing of the neural events that predict behavior need not correspond to the timing of the conscious impression of choice for the choice to have been volitional. Essentially, if the conscious mental timeline is something of a reconstruction, it is difficult to make inferences from brain- and report-timing discrepancies.
Ain't that the truth?
Finally!
Yes. Dear Mama's PIN generator does indeed allow me to login to my new financial universe at Another Establishment. IBM Pensions have redirected my monthly pittance to it. And my ISP has already snaffled its next monthly payment from it. Progress of a sort. Time for lunch.
[Longish pause] I find (while multi-taskily half-listening to the evening news) that the timing of the neural events that predict my yelling at the radio more nearly corresponds to the crap that seems to spew from any and all politicians. Time for food, I suspect. But not the chicken sausages that have been found to contain DNA from Dobbin...