2014 — 16 March: Sunday
"It has", as they say, "turned out nice again". This time, for today's planned walk around Horsebridge. And, it seems, I am not the only chap whose Crucial M500 SSDs don't report their S.M.A.R.T. status into the PerfectDisk optimiser, so that has knocked Win8.1 Pro1 off the list of prime suspects.
I must say...
... the gentle cascade of notes that is the second movement Larghetto from Chopin's Concerto for piano and orchestra No. 1 (Opus 11) in E minor is mighty fine listening to accompany the gentle cascade of drips that is Cuppa No. 1 (also Larghetto), but just when did 'Frederick' become 'Fryderyk', I wonder? The dog wants to know. Somehow I don't think I'll be wanting to change the spelling of Junior's middle name to align with it.
BTW, how can it be his birthday again this week? Didn't that just happen a couple of months ago?
I spent 33 years...
... in the I.T. industry. That was long enough for me to recognise the many harsh truths in this excellent essay. Source and snippet:
There is no way to weaken security in a way that makes it possible to spy on "bad guys" without making all of us vulnerable to bad guys, too. The goal of national security is totally
incompatible with the tactic of weakening the nation's information security.
"Virus" has been a term of art in the security world for decades, and with good reason. It's a term that resonates with people, even people with only a cursory grasp of technology. As we
strive to make the public and our elected representatives understand what's at stake, let's expand that pathogen/epidemiology metaphor. We'd never allow MI5 to suppress information on
curing typhus so they could attack terrorists by infecting them with it. We need to stop allowing the NSA and GCHQ to suppress information on fixing bugs in our computers, phones, cars,
houses, planes, and bodies.
Even more surreal, according to NSA boss James Clapper the verb "collect" has a different meaning to the one I thought I knew: "data acquired by electronic means is 'collected' only when it has been processed into intelligible form." As Bruce Schneier wittily points out, by analogy that means the 9,000 or so books I've currently "collected" haven't actually been collected until I've read them. Recall Pierre Bayard :-)
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if each monthly batch of "security fixes" is primarily intent on keeping back doors open (or, at least, unlockable). The problem was already well understood 2,000 years ago: "Who guards the guards?" Besides, humans, en masse, apparently can't even grasp the problems inherent in the exponential rate of increase in their consumption of finite planetary resources. I fear Agent Smith's characterisation of humans as a disease was accurate. But disease is merely one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, is it not?
Back to the relative sanity that was Ivor Cutler.
What?
You expect me to ignore this?
For £1-29? You've got to be joking! It's better than the Charles Ives I've just twitched the dial away from. (Not that there is a dial, these days.)
Back from...
... a little 7-mile ramble under a cloudless sky. The peace and quiet being only lightly disturbed by very low-frequency rumbles, probably from military exercises out on Salisbury Plain somewhere. The glorious weather brought out the grockles in force, too. But most of them were in and around pubs and pub gardens. The river Test is very high and rather fast-flowing.