2014 — 7 March: Friday
Oh, the excitement! There's a parcel due from Yodel that is currently sitting in Southampton...
and, annoyingly, will need to be signed for. But I also need to nip out, buy stamps, and send off those six, near-identical letters. Then there's the slicing and dicing required for my next stunning crockpot creation... I think I'd better sit down quietly with a pre-breakfast cuppa first. Still, I already have an afternoon slot booked at the Roger & Eileen Tea Rooms, too (with a hint of new biscuits tea from Fortnum and Mason; is that as good as Harrods?) so all is well.
Last night's...
... entertainment included my newly-delivered Blu-ray of "Roxanne" — a reliable 'feel good' film1 from earlier days. 1987, in fact. But (alas) I now have only three episodes left of "Californication" series #5. What's a chap to do?
Yuk! It's irritatingly drizzly out there, but I'm back by 09:30 and there's no sign of Mr Yodel's billet doux saying "Sorry we missed you", so my first task is done. The things I do for dear Mama, heh? I think I've now earned some breakfast. Meanwhile, a whole day of Ravel's music on BBC Radio 3? That may be a tad more than I wish to hear...
Mystical Others?
An interesting conversation, and I shall probably get her new book, having enjoyed "Nickel and Dimed". Source and snippet:
Harpers: There is great revulsion toward accepting the consciousness of other creatures.
Ehrenreich: It's more than revulsion. It's a fantastic amount of hubris. And this is very much tied to the rise of monotheism. Before that there were a lot of animal
gods, and female gods, and all sorts of things — the world was much more alive — and then they all get crushed. There can only be one deity who is perfect and who resembles
us. And what kind of megalomaniac egotism comes to that idea? The whole thing, invented for us. A mass, collective solipsism.
Having looked askance...
... at some art criticism yesterday, what am I to make of "neuro-aesthetics"? Although I was greatly tickled by the way Ramachandran found a neat method with mirrors to "trick" some amputees suffering from phantom limb pain to alleviate it, I am far less tickled by his attempt to "explain"2 art via neurological theories. As Roger Scruton's interesting essay points out, John Hyman "explored and exploded" what Scruton characterises as "the ensuing mishmash of abridged and misapplied theories". (Link.)
Among the innumerable...
... bad habits I picked up from dear Mama during my formative years is the one of crossing my legs when sitting. In 1962, I gained first-hand (foot?) experience of why this can be a Bad Thing when she fell base over apex when putting her weight on a foot that had "gone to sleep" and ended up on crutches for a few weeks.3 This afternoon, on getting up from an armchair at Roger and Eileen's house — intending to carry into their kitchen my almost-empty mug of tea — I, too, nearly went base over apex, and (to my shame) managed to stay upright but sprayed a few drops of cold tea on to their living room carpet.
I can only hope I continue to be invited!
The contents of...
... my parcel are now inside BlackBeast, turning it into an entirely-SSD machine and reducing both noise and heat to about the lowest level I could hope for — the only moving part now being the super-quiet Zalman CPU cooler. The pair of 3TB data drives that I have displaced have in turn displaced the original pair of 1TB drives in the 'Icy Box' eSATA external cases, tucked well out of the way acoustically and thermally. And I'm now sorting out a sensible data dispersal strategy spread across the 480GB System drive, the recent 240GB drive, and the new arrivals — another pair of 480GB drives.
A lot cooler than my delicious crockpot supper. As is my current choice of listening — Bryan Ferry's 1978 album "The Bride stripped bare".
Grrr!
Because Win8.1 Pro is only able to deduce? detect? two of the four drives as being SSDs I've had to disable the scheduled "Optimisation". (One doesn't want ever to defrag an SSD.) This is annoying, particularly as "Speccy" shows all four devices as SSD. So, on Len's advice, it's Raxco Software's "PerfectDisk" to the rescue. Or it will be if I'm still happy at the end of my just-started 30-day free trial of PD 13.0 — which so far shows no sign of wanting to treat any of the devices as anything but an SSD.