2013 — 7 July: Sunday
I suspect1 at least one major religion reminds us that there comes a time to put away childish things "and be a man". Can't say I've ever agreed, and — more to my point — I now have evidence that Big Bro thinks along similar lines. How do I know? Well he's already suggested that Father Christmas should deliver a quadrocopter :-)
The (un)poor chap's hobbies have always been somewhat orthogonal to mine, encompassing as they do the raising of his own beef steaks (for example), but that's family for you.
Looking back...
... I reminded myself of this lovely quote from an interview with AC Grayling:
I used to be a terrible hypochondriac when I was young and a great reader of medical dictionaries. One day I realised that I was not actually frightened of terminal illness but of not getting done the things I wanted to get done.
I know the feeling.
Keeping track...
... or should that be "score"? The most recent of last week's "Late Junction" programmes I was iPlayering turned up a delightful track — the one by Timo Andres & Metropolis Ensemble — that not only caused me to surface from the haze of Taleb but even provoked me into pre-ordering the CD from across the Atlantic. Then (dagnabbit!) to my surprise the final track played ("Being Boiled") sent me off again, this time in successful search of a Greatest Hits CD by The Human League of all people, and I could shortly to have been seen downloading the conveniently "auto-ripped" copy ahead of the physical2 delivery.
I hardly dare bring myself to listen to Cerys on 6 this morning lest she once again further depletes my widower's mite. I acidly note that IBM's sliver of pension has yet to arrive in my (current) current a/c this month. I hope it hasn't gone AWOL. [Pause] Delightful to hear Karl Jenkins reminiscing, among other things, about his co-founding with Ian Carr of the wonderful Nucleus. [Pause] His latest Adiemus album, supplemented by some nice guitar work, is released tomorrow, I gather...
Having failed...
... to load an image about the Gimp on to my external web server yesterday until just a few minutes ago — call yourself a webmaster, Mounce? Thanks for the tip, Brian — I thought the least I could do now was to use the Gimp (rather than my habitual Macromedia Fireworks) to prepare this image from a screen I captured on the virtual Linux.3 Mind you, after a minor-league ponder, I ended up first writing the screenshot file in its default 32-bit PNG format to my hastily-mounted NAS from Linux, and only then picking it up from there under Win8 for the Gimpy manipulation (resizing, exporting as a JPG). Result:
This final JPG was almost identical in size to a GIF but suffered from much less banding. (By contrast, the JPG I produced with Fireworks was almost twice as large, while its 256-colour GIF was much more noticeably banded.) Since the Gimp's "Autocrop the image" function — the exact equivalent of the Fireworks 'Trim canvas' — was also trivial, I think I've decided the time has come to say "farewell, old friend" to my 15-year-old copy of Fireworks.4 I certainly can't afford to replace it by the over-priced Adobe package it lives in these days.
If things carry on like this much longer, I, too, just might end up running Win8 in VirtualBox under Mint 15 rather than the other way round. I shall have to let Brian and Len pursue that route for a while deflecting some of the icebergs before I get too carried away. It's all a matter of working out what I need to be able to do, and satisfying myself that the application set that enables me to do that (whatever the hell it is) either exists on Linux natively or can at least be run "under" Linux in either a VirtualBox or WINE environment — another route I've yet to try.
Call me a crazy fool...
... Chorus: You're a crazy fool!
But I've decided to put Linux Mint on to my massively-underused Laptop PC. And, furthermore, not as a dual-boot system, either. I did, of course, take the elementary precaution
of taking my live distro out for a reasonably comprehensive test drive first — I'm neither crazy nor all that much of a fool. Who knows? Perhaps without a Win8 Media Centre
Pack on it it will finally learn how to reset and shutdown properly. Watch this space.
In other news, I can't help noticing that most of my post-lunch glow could probably be attributed to the scorching sunshine going on out there. Which only makes me glad to be in here, of course. [Pause] I hope it's not the heat that is making my connectivity a little troublesome. Web surfing from the Laptop has been fine, but it's reluctant to allow me to connect my email client to the server after its initial burst of enthusiasm in doing so. Par for the rocky road ahead, no doubt.
There are days...
... when a new OS installs smoothly on to your hardware, accepts your choice of applications, connects reliably to your network, can see your NAS and other devices, enjoys unfettered access to the various joys to be found at various pitstops along the Information Superhighway, and generally makes you feel quite wise and justified in having chosen it as your new friend.
This is not such a day... I have just put the massively-underused Laptop PC carefully aside. Had I not done so, I would probably have flung it across the room. How many more times is Linux going to bite me before I learn to avoid it as avidly as I now avoid OS X?
To cheer myself up...
... I've been dipping into "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris. I've never much cared for the appeal to "moderates" of any particular religious faith even though one of my own guiding principles has been to pay lip service to the idea of "moderation in all things" (including, recursively, moderation itself). Here's our Sam:
Some 46% of Americans take a literalist view of creation (40% believe that God has guided creation over the course of millions of years). This means that 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity. A survey of Hindus, Muslims, and Jews around the world would surely yield similar results, revealing that we, as a species, have grown almost perfectly intoxicated by our myths. How is it that, in this one area of our lives, we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about the world can float entirely free of reason and evidence?
It is with respect to this rather surprising cognitive scenery that we must decide what it means to be a religious "moderate" in the twenty-first century. Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world. No doubt an obscure truth of economics is at work here: societies appear to become considerably less productive whenever large numbers of people stop making widgets and begin killing their customers and creditors for heresy.
I shall probably still be smiling even as I board Robert Bloch's "The Hell-bound train" :-)
Helium...
... still has its uses! Big Bro supplied the link. (Link.)