2013 — 19 November: Tuesday
Bright morning sunshine, a touch of frost, and the most ginormous hairy spider1 on my bedroom ceiling. That, at least, has been safely decanted via some hi-tech magic, out into the back jungle. Christa would be proud of me.
A spot of breakfast...
... will precede my expotition to Ikea. I think my antipathy stems, in part, from the way they force you to enter on the top floor and then wend your way back down towards the exit. Clever, but somewhat sociopathic (like all the best large Corporations and their bean counters).
I'm in no great rush...
... to find out whether an 'afterlife' exists — I strongly doubt it does — but this snippet from a book review made me guffaw:
In a story that may be apocryphal, but I suspect true, the late Yale philosopher Paul Holmer was once asked how he, a professional philosopher, could believe in Christianity. He replied, "Because my mother told me."
'Nuff said.
Buried...
... in the comments to an El Reg article (rant?) on home media playback is a link to this XKCD on standards, and how they proliferate.
This is all...
... very well, but the truth is I index the 100,000 or so files that actually matter to me and that constitute the set of "user data" I'm interested in that lives on BlackBeast. So what the heck are these other 3,159,574 "items" I idly wonder?
Were I able (or inclined) to examine and assess one of these items every ten seconds, working round the clock, it would only take me a little over one year. Not going to happen.
Meanwhile, I'm back from Ikea. The new strip of LED lights is safely in place, shining a brighter light on the phone. I also ventured a tenner on a dimmable LED lightbulb replacement, though I now have to sort out either a BC (bayonet) to ES (Edison screw) adapter or an ES fitting for the ceiling light in the front of my living room. I think I prefer LEDs to compact fluorescents. My Guild Navigator / companion in shopping crime today picked up eight fluffy brown rats to use as dormice stuffed through the handles of teapots for his upcoming "Alice"-themed wedding of #2 daughter — the film buff.
Shed a little light
Although I bought a pair of 20W dimmable CFLs to replace the two incandescent bulbs in the living room (already 3.5 years ago), I was only ever able to use one of them, as the other flickered regularly. Neither had been guaranteed to work with all available dimmer switches, so I couldn't be bothered to return the one that flickered, and have simply done without a ceiling light above my PC desk. (Might explain the number of typos, of course.) But, following a quick trip out to B&Q a few minutes ago (ostensibly in search of either the adapter or the fitting I mentioned above) I actually ended up buying the last bayonet-fitting dimmable LED bulb they had. This frees up the non-flickering CFL for use in the back of my living room, while the ES-fitting dimmable LED bulb I got in Ikea earlier today screws neatly into an ES fitting on one of the shelves behind me.
End result? Two dimmable main (ceiling) lights — one CFL, one LED — and a dimmable (but non-dimmed) LED shelf light. I would say "brilliant" but let's give it time.