2013 — 24 December: Tuesday
Well, at least Mother Nature no longer seems quite so intent on removing my roof1 this morning. Or the sheds, or my bins.
I shall now celebrate Alan Turing's disgracefully late "posthumous Royal Pardon" with a cuppa. Who else will be pardoned, I wonder, now that same-sex marriages are to become legal? Now there's a thought. (Interesting link.)
Speaking of marriage,...
... having now spent just over 33 years with the myriad diverse characters who inhabit the world of "Doonesbury", starting in November 1980 with:
And currently culminating with today's delivery celebrating the third generation to have married within the one family:
It seems I have now lived with Mike Doonesbury2 for almost exactly the same length of time as I spent married to Christa! It's a wry thought.
I don't know...
... exactly how much rain our sky can hold (or, more accurately, unleash) but perhaps we're going for the record. Ghastly weather. Not as ghastly, however, as the inane pap on the lunchtime TV channels. Even a few minutes of "Splash" in hi-def held little attraction; beyond the obvious one, that is. Though spotting the screenplay was by Bruce Jay Friedman led me first to "Doctor Detroit" and then, more circuitously, to a couple of further titles — "Loose Cannons" and "12:01". Watch this space.
The (now) late...
... Sir John Fairclough made an indelibly good impression on me, on Thursday 24th December 1981, when he both introduced himself to me and then promptly told me to go home for the rest of the day. Nice chap! [Pause] And precisely 14 years later, just for the record, here's part of what I had to say to dear Mama in my weekly letter — in my futile but continuous attempt to get her to show any interest whatsoever (at any point during my adult life, unamusingly) in any aspect of my "career" in the wacky world of computers:
... in between waiting for the removal chaps to turn up and move me back to the [basement of Hursley] House I was idly browsing a facility called Yahoo (one of the best of the various search facilities) for news about Northern Exposure (my current favourite TV show) and found to my horror and dismay that CBS cancelled it back in May, so if Channel 4 shows the next season it will be the last-ever set of episodes. A great shame. And next week's episode is the last for the time being...
It's been pouring with rain and quite cold down here. The Monk's Brook is something of a torrent. Today, though, it's a bit milder and slightly lighter. Still, not exactly what you'd call Christmasy.
My new project at work is definitely the hottest thing since sliced bread. It's called Java, and is all to do with extending what you can do while browsing the World Wide Web. It's also several-in-the-eye for Microsoft who have had to back down and license the same technology rather than buying it. Mr Gates does not like paying licence fees! Instead of just fetching flat, passive graphics and text Java also lets you fetch and execute little pieces of program code (adding animation and sizzle) in your PC from anywhere out in the Web. And my Pentium (at nearly three times the speed of the mainframe I tend to use) makes it all go with quite a bang. My first job is to ghost-write a book. Watch this space.
Plus ça change! :-)
I don't know...
... enough about PHP to be certain, but poor ol' molehole's server appears to be suffering from a series of (semi-automated?) hacking attempts if the 3,000 or so PHP-related error "hits" in
the server log this month are any guide. However, what I say here remains the case.
Virtual, Case 4, to be precise :-)
Merry Xmas!