2014 — 22 May: Thursday

One of yesterday's walkers1 sent me the sort of link, this morning, designed to make any small-scale, amateur, website producer / maintainer run, screaming, for the hills or his mother (whichever is the more comforting). It purports to show, in an interactive infographic (shudder) the evolution of the web.

Don't leave home without your Javascript lest you miss seeing "the many powerful web apps that we2 use daily" :-)

It helps to have good colour3 vision and a large display screen. And no reverence for Tufte.

In other...

... equally pre-breakfast news, the new level of official firmware for my Oppo Blu-ray player seems to have settled in nicely, and the Region 4 DVDs from Australia play perfectly (as I rather thought they would). I still haven't decided whether to vote and, if I do, which lousy party gets my little "X" this time around. There really needs to be a "None of the above" option with which I can register my disdain while simultaneously demonstrating my whole-hearted commitment to the democratic process...

People can...

... simply read too much into a sentence sometimes:

On a saxophone solo by John Coltrane: "It's pretty and then dangerous as he reaches so high the sky blues into the darkness of space before reentering, everything burning up around him."

Note the word blues, pulling three times its weight — noun, adjective, verb, so much pivoting around it that all the referents go briefly haywire and it seems like the solo is still rising and what's falling is the sky. And note, too, how the sentence itself is pretty and then dangerous: dangerous because it starts out too pretty ("pretty" is a pretty word; "so high the sky" is Hallmark stuff); beautiful because it ends in so much danger.

Kathryn Schulz on Geoff Dyer in Vulture


In my opinion, of course :-)

I suspect...

... all the very best hacks are inside jobs. This eBay one sounds like a doozy.

Being a sucker...

... for stories involving time travel, I noted this list (though I've only read 8 of the 10 items). Have I enough time to list the omissions?

Having mentioned "50 Shades"...

... just yesterday, I was (somewhat) amused to find this piece of screeching today. I hafta smile whenever I find High Art spokespeople (if that's what they are) telling one another what's wrong with some (at least) of the reading I do.

Lunch...

... out at Braishfield was accompanied by thunder, hail, and a heavy downpour while driving back. Now, of course, the sun is shining from a blue sky. And the car is squeaky clean.

[Pause]

One might think (might one not?) that renaming the two NAS "drives" more sensibly might be something that a simple little OS like Win8.1Pro would be able to take in its stride. After all, I'd assume unchanged network and MAC addresses would have been a great deal more germane to successful continued access than a human-friendly name.

NAS boxes

Pah! Three re-boots later — one each for the NAS boxes and one for BlackBeast — and a minor-league spot of network drive mapping, and Robert is finally the sibling of your parent. But then Foobar2000 had to learn where everything was, all over again, by scanning and rebuilding its music library. Its smaller cousin Boom! has no such difficulty.

Returning...

... to yesterday's literary musing, this was a fascinating read. Source and snippet:

But surely it's not necessary to point out that the rarefied world of American literary fiction is brimming with dull, predictable and zero-ly engaging books. Most "literary" novels, in fact, take not one single risk, offend no taboo, and leave every sacred cow grazing undisturbed in the placid fields of their conventionality. Which is the riskier, edgier, more involving story? The lit-fic novel du jour — some lukewarm retread of Desperate Characters, probably — or The Sheik (1919), E.M. Hull's febrile, terrifying account of the abduction, rape and eventual "taming" of a tomboy Englishwoman by handsome, cruel tough guy Sheikh Ahmed Ben Hassan? The recent reading of which made me realize that we only think we don't have taboos.
This brutal, vulgar and wildly popular book was later made into a film starring Rudolph Valentino, who became a superstar as the result. But no way could The Sheik ever be made into a film today. It is far too depraved. I keep thinking it must be to do with the war.

Maria Bustillos in The AWL


I've been listening to the soundtrack music to "Bladerunner". Marvellous stuff.

  

Footnotes

1  Who ought to know better by now.
2  Not me, your honour. I prefer to remain stuck in the Lascaux cave-painting era of web evolution. It suits my temperament better.
3  I shall be sticking to my new "Orange is the new Black" which, on last night's initial viewing of Episode #1 (and its prompt repeat, to hear Jenji Kohan's witty commentary) looked very promising indeed.