2014 — 19 July: Saturday
There's been a little of the promised rain1 overnight with more in the form of drizzle this morning. No current sign of the nasty hot shiny thing that lives in the sky, either. [Pause] Amazing how much crud builds up in the dust-filled cobweb line behind the plasma screen. Nearly one Dyson battery charge's worth, in fact.
I'm having...
... a day at home, for a change. Starting with Brian Matthew and his Sounds of the Sixties. But fairly swiftly moving along to NPR.
Clutching at straws?
Just because a particular server on the Internet is "foreign" (most of them are, by definition) and is "touched" as part of an email routing, web page request, or online search (many of them are, by design) strikes me as a particularly thin and specious line of reasoning. One that hardly seems to justify our guvmint's splendid senior security advisor's Farr-sighted stance. Namely, that it is kosher to scoop up its data into the seemingly-insatiable maw that our spooks (bless 'em) love to maintain and nurture so tenderly "on our behalf" and "for our security".
They obviously like to model themselves on the Stasi.
Apart from the local copy here on BlackBeast, any 'molehole' data visible outside the firewall actually lives in bits and pieces on a server in a rack somewhere in Texas so, by that reasoning, my guvmint presumably gives itself legal permission to have at it with gay abandon. Good luck with that. And my email (again, apart from the local copy here on BlackBeast) actually lives on a server somewhere in the Googleland cloud. Could be anywhere, I guess. I don't give it much thought as I prefer not to host and run my own email server any more. Too much like hard work without Junior on hand to keep it well-polished...
Actually, the spooks I fund (but clearly don't have the slightest chance of controlling) are warmly welcome to my mundane emails, but I do worry nonetheless. Can I trust them to be competent enough to keep all my boring "stuff" safely backed up for me on the kit my taxes pay for? I doubt it, somehow. (Link.)
Recall...
... John Baez and the interesting number 24? NPR's "This American Life" is telling me about his venerable (1998) Crackpot Index while discussing yet another confused (equating momentum and energy some ten times in his paper) amateur physicist firmly convinced that Einstein was wrong. (Conclusion: he probably wasn't.)
I enjoyed Baez's item on the Harmonograph. I bought a relatively cheap plastic one — adding lead shot to increase its momentum (or do I mean its energy?), funnily enough — for Peter (or was it for me?) when he was younger. Its main drawback (no pun intended) was the tendency of the pens either to dry out or to smear. And I also tried a Spirograph. I will draw a discreet veil over my youthful propensity to colour in squared and logarithmic graph paper.
Believe it...
... or not, but this is how "Princess Buttercup" (aka Robin Wright, who can do no wrong in my book) appears...
... in the animated half of a film version by Ari Folman of Stanislaw Lem's "The Futurological Congress". I'm intrigued to see that Max Richter worked on the music soundtrack. And the fair lady sings two songs!
The reason I know this...
... is that having just finished living on bread and cheese while clearing the financial damage incurred by two or three months of various PC-related expenses...
- a decent keyboard
- three further SSDs
- an oomphier passively-cooled graphics card
- a pair of 27" display screens
- a second Synology NAS with 4TB of WD Reds
... from my credit card I decided I could now gingerly allow myself to dip a gentle MP3 download toe (or three) back into the water. Hence, I'm currently listening to a Talking Heads concert ("Performance") recorded on 24 August 1979 at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. I was completely unaware of this album — damaging though that admission is to my nascent completeist credentials — and have no idea when it came out. But then, I only relatively recently bought "Talking Heads: 77" having somehow managed to survive for about 34 years without realising I didn't own my own copy.
I also got both the Max Richter soundtrack (I thought his reworking of Vivaldi was excellent), and a Doors album I've never previously owned: Weird Scenes inside the Gold Mine. I used to borrow that double album from my friend Ralph from time to time back when vinyl was the main audio game in town.
The CD I mentioned last Saturday was delivered earlier today:
I have no idea why either of these two albums didn't sell very well back in 1968. Again, I was completely unaware of them, but I liked 25 of the 26 tracks on this Australian re-issue.