2014 — 12 January: Sunday
Just as you can sometimes "get nowhere by being too hasty" so, too, you can allow your intrinsic laziness to cost you many thousands of unnecessary extra mouse clicks1 over a decade or so. All fixed by a minute spent actually reading the WinSCP help material. Who reads "help" text, right?
The sun...
... is nowhere to be seen although it was a cloudless sky with lots of stars visible in the wee small hours. Breakfast would be good. Then it will be time for Cerys to weave her musical spells. She's just started with a weird Brazilian-sounding version of "Smoke on the Water". Señor Coconut (of course).
West Virginia, meanwhile, has far worse water problems than smoke:
Freedom Industries, which owns the chemical tank that ruptured, is exempt from Department of Environmental Protection inspections and permitting since it stores chemicals, and does not
produce them, The Associated Press reported. Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin said he would look into tighter regulation of chemical storage facilities...
State officials said the chemical 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, or MCHM, used in coal processing, seeped from the ruptured storage tank on Thursday into the Elk River, just upstream from
the intake pipes for the regional water company.
"Seeping" strikes me as a trivialised characterisation for a 7,500 gallon spill of some gunk that is only "safe" at or below concentrations of one part per million. I'm happy for chemical industries to adopt the Swedish model — dumping whatever they like into local rivers, subject (of course) to one, tiny, condition: they must take all the water they use from immediately downstream of whatever sh1t they output. It's called a negative feedback loop. But the idea of exempting a storage facility from inspection is simply insane.
Ever on...
... the bleeding edge, I've just upgraded the new Oppo Blu-ray player's firmware to the public beta. It claims to improve gapless playback, hdmi handshaking performance for the two hdmi input ports, and some FLAC playback failures. Perhaps now I'll be able to switch to the Humax satellite PVR without a green screen flash? Who knows? I may even be able to play those Linn 24-bit 192KHz FLAC "studio masters" via hdmi (and thus dispense with the co-ax audio link).
Of course, I could simply re-instate the recently-removed WD "Live TV HD" media player and plumb it into the Oppo's second hdmi input... It's barely had time to cool down, after all, after a year's sterling service to the cause of entertaining me.
I wonder...
... how many people will recognise this neat encapsulation? And, no, it's not Asimov's four laws of robotics!
There are four Laws. The third of them, the Second Law, was recognised first; the first, the Zeroth Law, was formulated last, the First Law was second; the Third Law might not even be a law in the same sense as the others. Happily, the content of the laws is simpler than their chronology, which represents the difficulty of establishing properties of intangibles.
And, this evening, it's piddling with rain once again. Is it Spring yet?