2014 — 20 February: Thursday
So far, it's a dull, moist, grade-A grey day.1 Were it not for my lunch date it would be a candidate for rolling over and going back to sleep. This can be a truly dismal time of year, so I'd better see what amusement I can winkle out of it.
I never attended...
... the University of Houston, but a carelessly-omitted punctuation mark from a Google email address when a distant namesake of mine did has had me (rather than him) on their Alumni list for the past several years. I've now finally snapped and "unsubscribed" from three of their mailing lists in the past week. My approach to unwanted correspondence is slightly less urgent than Mr Bennet's. You don't want to rush these things.
Dare I draw...
... this interesting piece by a cultural gadfly of mine to the attention of my friend Iris? Source and snippet:
That exhibition told the story of the Naths, a sect of wandering ash-smeared followers of Shiva mystics who codified hatha yoga in the twelfth century, claiming that their practices
gave them superhuman powers: the ability to fly, to see into the future, and to hear and see over great distances...
It didn't take long before the Naths began flexing their muscles and abusing their new power: they kidnapped women and forcibly inducted men into their order, seizing property for
themselves...
As the story of the Naths shows, yogis sometimes took very different forms from the peaceful sages the West has loved to imagine as archetypically Indian since Gandhi succeeded in
presenting Hinduism to the world as the religion of ahimsa, nonviolence.
An adjacent piece by Freeman Dyson reviews a book of "Brilliant Blunders" in the careers of five spectacular scientists: Darwin, Kelvin, Pauling, Hoyle, and Einstein. Nice to see one of my favourite Yorkshiremen make the cut. It certainly helps dispel the Black Cloud. (Link.)
If you can't...
... trust Secunia PSI to get it right, what can you trust? It reported my copy of the eBook manager Calibre as being up to date at a version seven "behind the times". How else is it misleading me, I wonder? Well, uninstalling it and then putting back on the latest version managed to find 119 programs (all up to date) scattered around BlackBeast. The earlier version had made exactly the same claim, but somehow found 135 programs to report on. I gather there was a glitch with Win8.1 recently.
I acidly note that the Windows Uninstall facility itself claims to know about 114 installed programs. CCleaner unearths 115. And the Win8.1 Start screen manages to tease out 288 separate items. Of which (it assures me) I most use just these five:
A bit wide of the mark. My Firefox web browser, for example, which is (of course) in daily use is listed by all-seeing, all-knowing, Windows stubbornly in the "Never used" category.
It's a pleasing thought...
... with its still being daylight outside at 17:23 or so that it's no longer unbearably long until the resumption of summer time (or whatever they call it these days). If nothing else, the clock in my Yaris will then be nearly accurate for the next six months. Actually, looking out across the back garden (no longer a jungle) and seeing no large, dying trees out there any more is also oddly pleasing. Though there remains a fair amount of ground clearing still to be done, dagnabbit.
We lunched, very enjoyably, at The Wheatsheaf, burning up the final discount voucher our visits there had earned us. And skirting some mighty large puddles but no actual floods.
I'm all a'quiver...
... having just finished the equally entertaining Season #2 of "Game of Thrones". From the look of the stars visible this evening, I'd say it's going to be a chilly one. I'm driving a few miles north tomorrow to share a lunch and try to help out (don't laugh!) with some Win 8.1 issues. And Peter and Peter's g/f will be taking me out for Sunday lunch somewhere, probably, erm, on Sunday. That leaves me Saturday to tidy and clean up a little around here. Or not.
Knowing me, I'd go with "not". Probably.