2014 — 20 May: Tuesday
It seems Molehole's connection1 to Europe was disrupted by human error (other than mine) for some of yesterday. More here.
All seems...
... to be better this morning. Though it remains a dismal one from my point of view: Dad died on this day in 1975.
But I don't...
... want to live my webbed life on a smartphone:
... mobile browsers, including how tabs are navigated and managed, a new approach to browsing history and how they both will leverage use of the bottom edge as it's "easily accessible at any time and ergonomically friendly to the typical one-hand phone hold."
You still type the URL at the top, dagnabbit. Or is this why we evolved the opposable thumb, after all?
Shopping gathered in...
... but in my successful attempt to dodge the ankle-biting, mobile-absorbed, (and thus not looking where they stumble) crowd, I got there too early for my full range of fresh salads to have been put out on the shelves. Typical. Right; how about some breakfast while I await the next bat(c)h of heavy downpours?
It occurs to me...
... that some people have more interesting jobs than writing about software. Fact-checkers, perhaps?
Sometimes the metaphor is all wrong, and I'm left to triage. Once I was fact checking a line that went something like this: "If you were to scythe off a human head, the carotid arteries
would shoot blood five feet up." The first source I contacted, a doctor, said, "I don't know, I haven't tried that." The writer emailed me the calculation — blood pressure is 120
millimeters of mercury, equal to the pressure of 62 centimeters of water. I contacted a forensics expert, just to be sure. On paper, the pressure of that artery is enough to shoot blood
five feet up. But the body is not a freshman-year physics problem. Sever a neck, and the blood vessels collapse and the nervous system shuts down.
"Immediately?" I asked the expert. He sent me a link to some videos, all with one common search term: "beheading." Indeed, there was no shooting blood.
Too late for me, alas :-)
I'm pleased...
... that my retirement country walks over the last six-plus years have more or less dispelled the hayfever. But the freedom that, in turn, has given me to open my patio door now simply admits a lot of noise from the motorway. Swings and roundabouts. My addled brain, meanwhile, added a splash of milk to my Redbush tea (by habit) thus revealing how different it tastes from the 'normal' stuff.
You hafta admire...
... the glorious inconsistencies upon which Windows and its rather poxy (for my taste) File Explorer have been, erm, built. I have finally managed to delete the various 'hidden' system files2 that were malingering — much like a bad smell — in network subfolders long after the files they pertained to had been consigned to the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky. Until these subfolders are all "really" empty, Explorer whinges that it can't let the user (me) dispose of these files because they are open in an Explorer window. The logic at work in the programmer's mind at that point is not one I would ever wish to work by.
Solution (if that's le mot juste) was simplicity itself. Create a perfectly normal new subfolder on the desktop and simply move all the sh1t into that, reassuring the UAC popup(s) by insisting that "yes" I did know that "things" might stop working if these "system" files were moved or deleted. Then simply move that new subfolder straight to the Recycle Bin. And empty the bin before Windows realised what was going on. Why am I surprised it worked?
Just don't get me started on file permissions. I really shouldn't have to deal with all this. Little did we realise that by unleashing a tsunami of PCs back in 1981 or thereabouts we were necessitating the creation of a follow-on wave of system programmers and administrators. I feel quite sorry for Josephine Public on occasion. Productivity aids? Don't make me laugh. Recall Thomas Landauer?
I'm (mildly) curious...
... to know why my "out of the box" Chrome browser can play the BBC radio stream whereas my Firefox browser cannot. What have I done, or forbidden, I wonder? Pale Moon also has no difficulty with the HD audio feed from the BBC Radio 3 live concert. Most odd. I'm guessing it's either NoScript (even though I've allowed the page [temporarily] everything it wants) or some foible of the Firefox team developers.
I very much enjoyed...
... that concert. It concluded with Shostakovich's 5th Symphony. It turns out I still have an early (pre-Dolby B!) 1970s tape cassette recording (C006 for any trivia buffs) I made of his 15th Symphony when the BBC broadcast what I suspect was its premiere performance with the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by his son Maxim. But (rather to my surprise) that seems to be almost the only piece of Shostakovich in the whole of my little collection. I may just have to do something about that...