2013 — 3 July: Wednesday
Despite my best defensive efforts — long trousers — I am now sporting an irritating trophy of yesterday afternoon's casual floral engineering expedition, as it was rewarded1 by an itchy insect bite. A cup of tea is already on the case.
I find it's...
... possible to be simultaneously depressed and elated by the same piece of news. And amused by this comment, lifted from Hy Bender's excellent "The Sandman Companion" and plopped into the Pedia that is Wiki:
Writer Neil Gaiman, responding to a claim that he does not write comic books but graphic novels, said the commenter "meant it as a compliment, I suppose. But all of a sudden I felt like someone who'd been informed that she wasn't actually a hooker; that in fact she was a lady of the evening."
Meanwhile, I've just hooted at this "Font Bordello". Sent, if you please, by the chap who had temporarily misplaced my treasured CDROM of fonts :-)
This is rather less of a hoot:
But that line about the "least most untruthful answer he could publicly offer" is a modern classic well up to the lofty standards set in the days of "Spycatcher" and its economical approach to the truth. Oh for those halycon days of simple "plausible deniability". As an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times mildly suggests Antagonizing the citizens of some of our closest allies isn't a very promising strategy for increasing international security. You think? (Link.)
I'm relieved to hear that the latest Toyota recall doesn't affect my little Yaris — it's too old :-)
I heard it through the grapevine...
... has long been a favourite piece of music. It's also the opening track on the Bill Frisell double CD just delivered by Mr Postie...
... that, despite the urgings of my chum Tom, had managed to evade my little collection for nearly a decade. My loss.
I find myself...
... drawn, not for the first time, to quiet contemplation of the intriguing virtues of Oracle's VirtualBox. I couldn't help noticing it's packaged by default with Linux Mint 15, and I also see from the latest manual that it's equally available to 64-bit Windows 8. Either way, it's quickly apparent that it's also an excuse to stuff some more RAM into my poor, underused, understretched BlackBeast since any memory given to the VM is necessarily 'lost' to the host machine while the VM is running.
I enjoyed2 the ability to run a Virtual Acorn A5000 a decade ago on my little Windows XP Shuttle PC rather more than I ever "enjoyed" the dubious delights of running a dual-boot system3 on my rather clunky Gateway Pentium D machine — an early dual-core 64-bit system I bought in 2005.
If this is midsummer (and, at last, it's brightened up a tiny bit just in time for my evening meal) I hate to think what winter will be like. I shall practise with my chicken curry.
Vagrant thoughts
So there I am, quietly digesting the delicious curry, contentedly "iPlayering" last night's "Late Junction", peacefully reading an ebook, and taking a phone call from Junior who's now left me pondering this. If I understood his cryptic description, it offers a way of running scripts to set up and tear down VM environments. Needless to say, I'd never heard of it — not that I admitted that, of course — but he knows satisfied users. He was a little surprised about the SSD and the new NAS, and probably more surprised by my small-scale dalliance with Mint. Not that he uses anything but Apple stuff these days.
Still, he was basically approving :-)