2014 — 20 June: Friday

One occasionally ponders the evolutionary 'purpose'1 served by developing an allergy to airborne floral reproductive proteins. I mean, there my many-times-great uncle Ug would have been on his way back to our family's cave with supper, scratching his itchy fur coat while cowering behind a brightly-flowering bush trying to dodge the attentions of a sabre-tooth tiger when (a) his streaming eyes stop him seeing the thing, and (b) his streaming nose dashes off a quick series of sneezes giving plentiful audible evidence of his location.

Bang goes supper. Rinse and repeat, and I end up not being here because a distant ancestor starved to death instead of inventing anti-histamines. How do I make it into the 21st century through that scenario? Yet here I sit, with my steaming cuppa. Odd.

Meanwhile, President Obama is sending 300 "military advisors" to Iraq. Has that sort of thing ever ended well?

Having read...

... in Len's latest issue of "Custom PC" magazine about the various pixel-scaling improvements carried out "under the covers" in the latest Win8.1 Update 1 to prepare for the arrival of 4K screens I actually tried (for the first time ever) applying an overall scaling factor to the size of my desktop icons and text. I needn't have bothered, as I simply ended up reverting to their default "smallest" setting even on the newly-expanded screen real estate. There's not much point in filling a larger screen with larger icons than needed. One advantage of myopia, I suppose.

What I hadn't realised — and what I don't understand (and certainly can't be bothered2 to research) — is that raising the scaling factor lowers the pixel count (for example, down to 2048 from 2560) of the whole screen rather than "simply" increasing the actual size of each icon on a screen of unchanged pixel count. No wonder things went blurry. If this constitutes an improvement, I'd hate to see what a degradation looks like.

Speaking of degradation...

... I can't help noticing that the cars that tend to go roaring past my house these days (driven, I assume, by many of my neighbours — most of whom now vary from somewhat, to far, younger than me and are deemed by our guvmint to be still "economically active") are far larger, and newer, than my little Toyota flivver. Oh well; never mind.

The lady from the Indian subcontinent who just rang me to (try to) tell me all about "an accident report that someone from this address has submitted" got fairly terse shrift but at least I was thus prompted to glance at a clock and realise that it's way past time for lunch.

I bought...

... my first two volumes of Reed Waller and Kate Worley's wonderful saga of "Omaha — the cat dancer" ...

Omaha the cat dancer

... on 25 October 1989 while on one of the first of many "half term" trips I took Peter on to various London bookshops and computer games shops (I got the books [13, on this occasion, including my first by Clifford Harper, whose elegant ink sketches went on to be used by the Grauniad as headings to their "Country Diary" columns]...

Bookshop haul

... and he got the games, though he did move fairly quickly on to a higher ratio of books on subsequent trips). Christa was in hospital at the time, and I was distracting both me and him in one smart move (as it were). I mention this just to set in context the following snippet from the Introduction (by Waller) to Volume 1 when it was finally published:

With some trepidation, I took the first few chapters to local printers. One blanched when he saw the material.
   "I don't know if I can do this," he said grimly.
   "What is it, all the sex?"
   "No," he answered, "all the black."

Date: 1987


I've generally found printers to be extremely helpful over the years.

Thanks, Mr Postie...

... for sorting out a chunk of viewing for the weekend. Though, to stop the plot twists from damaging my head, I shall precede it by a repeat viewing of last week's delivery of Season #1:

HoC Season 2 BDs

Right! Time to nip over for a cuppa and a Friday afternoon biccie with Roger & Eileen. TTFN.

[Quite longish pause]

As I head for bed, I can report that pollen levels appear to have fallen a long way, thank goodness. And I'm four episodes into my re-examination of HoC Season #1. Great stuff.

  

Footnotes

1  Now there's a word that looks odd.
2  Actually, there's an informative discussion here. I am left, as ever, no wiser but considerably better-informed.