2014 — 16 May: Friday

I've not looked at the feather warcast1 and am dithering over whether or not to nip out on a supplies run. There are, after all, so many more entertainments than shopping for food, in my opinion... For example, finalising my choice of resting place for the two NAS boxes, casting aside the seven separate external hard drives they replace, unweaving the sadly-tangled web of cables and power supplies2 for all those, repositioning the printer, and possibly the scanner. I wonder if I can claim any of this to be Spring cleaning?

That should keep me pottering / tottering until my lunch date.

Never having given...

... much thought to the topic, I found this latest piece by David Barash oddly fascinating. I've kept occasional pets from time to time, after all. Who hasn't?

In a world older and more complete than ours, [animals] move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

Henry Beston, quoted by David Barash in Aeon


Yet another...

... enjoyable meal at the "Three Tuns", followed by a chatter and file exchange back at the ranch. The sun shines on. The weekend starts here.

The rising tide...

... of device entropy hereabouts has been beaten back, yet again, for the next few months. BlackBeast now has just its 1.6TB of internal SSDs, and network access to another 7TB of RAID1 storage split between the two Synology boxes. Then there's a 3TB external drive available for backup on a USB3 connection. That leaves four 1TB external USB3 hard drives and two 3TB external eSATA hard drives gently gathering dust temporarily. I expect I will be able to put all this storage space to productive use in due course.

I have been shifting bits, as it were, left, right, and centre. But, for now, it's jolly nearly time for my evening snack, dagnabbit. I've worked up an appetite.

  

Footnotes

1  But can see it's another sunny morning, with a high barometer, too. That I still manage to tap every day.
2  One chum, facing a similar tangle, attached a couple of dozen mains sockets to a neat wood panel that he mounted on the wall behind his "technology centre". But he had been faced with the trial of a couple of large, cable-pulling, cats so his was a more urgent problem.