2014 — 17 April: Thursday
Close inspection of the most recent entry in last night's unexpected little surprise present from Microsoft...
... will probably be enough to explain the present direction of some of my thoughts this morning. This Update 1 is the gift that keeps on giving. Inspecting the "details" suggested...
... in a way not guaranteed to boost my confidence, that the update could be offered again even to systems that already had it installed. Still, this time it consisted of a mere 2.6MB and a reboot (as it were). The link offered to the "Windows Update client issue" is still broken, some eight hours after I first tried it.
I don't need it immediately1 but I note that Ubuntu 14.04 LTS has just today become available to download. I shall at least drive the proposition "this is not the operating system you seek" out into the desert sands of Tatooine and kick its tracks around a little. While no-one's looking, of course. Better to jump OS ship before being holed below the waterline, rather than after as my mad aunt Peg would undoubtedly have said.
When my main XP system...
... failed without warning in early 2008, at least I had both iMac and Ubuntu systems knocking around for me to fall back on, which gave me a crash course in their various foibles and shortcomings.
To be fair, there turned out to be just the one broken2 Windows system subdirectory. While "chkdisk" did all that was necessary, first getting the PC back to the point where "chkdisk" could actually be invoked was a whole different story. The transient hardware glitch also destroyed my confidence in that particular HP machine — the one so generously subsidised by IBM as part of my retirement 'gift' — and it's now enjoying a new lease of life with a different owner, a new personality, and a different system hard drive.
Time for some breakfast, methinks. It's a lovely sunny morning again, though was again cold overnight.
I suspect it's possible...
... to read far too much into far too little. The book review here strikes me as a perfect example. Source and snippet:
...the essay is exactly the genre you'd imagine would appeal most to psychoanalytic writers, both as source material and something to imitate or inhabit. Poems, plays and novels are routinely quoted by Freud and his followers — "often, of course, as evidence of the truth of psychoanalysis" — but the essay is typically ignored. And this is odd because the essay is in part an exercise in free association; it lives by surprising swerves of thought and description, proceeds as though digression could be canalized into the main stream, as if one thing always implied another, off to the side or underneath.
I have so far resisted the temptation to buy anything by Adam Phillips. Not even his "On kissing, tickling and being bored". Actually, I did think I'd got a copy of that, but (on searching my shelves) it turned out I was simply mis-remembering this...
... delightfully discursive piece of erudition that I had been led to, in turn, by Diana Eden's amusing review in "New Statesman". Snippet:
I have, however, serious and good cause to rejoice in Blue's mention of Yanomami habits. In the dread, dark days of the 1960s, when I knew no better, I used to cover my baby's willy with sickeningly besotted kisses. Nor did the marshmallow perfection of my daughter's bum escape similar attentions. It is only now, in this enlightened neo-Victorian age, that I have been re-educated to understand that mobs of social workers should, in fact, have descended in dawn raids and carried away my children into care and me away to pleasure Her Majesty. Phew! What a narrow squeak that was.
I expect Phillips would tell me that my subconscious could tell me why that is. He would be wrong. I wonder if he's tackled yawning?
I've just read...
... a perfectly clear (if slightly heavy-handed) statement of Win8.1 update policy after 13 May:
[people] who haven't installed the Windows 8.1 Update ... will only see the option to install the Windows 8.1 Update in Windows Update. No new updates will be visible to them until they install the Windows 8.1 Update.
"What's next, Mrs Landingham?"
Further (partial) victory...
... is mine. "Axa" has now registered me as dear Mama's attorney etc. etc. with concomitant change of her snail mail address. Three down, three to go. It made the salmon salad lunch that tiny bit tastier. I refrained from trying out my new little bottle of Pomegranate Molasses. I found that sitting next to the cooking wine as I braved the starving hordes of vultures in Waitrose. Anyone would think there's a long Bank holiday weekend coming up or something.
Having been pointed...
... to the supposedly faster and 64-bit optimised WaterFox web browser, I perversely ended up taking its rival Pale Moon out for a trial spin. Not bad at all. Better write-up, too.
Following...
... a welcome cuppa and chat over with Roger and Eileen, and a (delicious, if I say so myself) helping of my latest crockpot creation, I've downloaded and cut an ISO of the all-singing Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and have just let it loose on my laptop. I figured it was as easy to do that as it would have been to upgrade the Linux Mint 15 on it to Mint 16. Besides, I want to see how I get on with it. Who knows? I may yet put it on to BlackBeast. It does need to learn about Daylight Saving Time, however!
It is now — I hope — just about to re-boot "for real" with its latest brain transplant. What larks, Pip ol' chum. What larks! [Pause] Hah! I've just hit my first of the set of "known issues", namely 1297851. Pressing 'Enter' failed to reboot the new system and I had to take tougher measures.