2014 — 22 July: Tuesday
Call me Ishmael prejudiced1 but — having crossed some mysterious spending threshold I was unaware of — I've just spurned the opportunity to download a half-price copy of Norton 360. I shall pass. Many years ago a Norton "protection" product (some might well have characterised it as a resource hog; I couldn't possibly comment) caused me nearly a full day of tedious grief cleaning up the mess after first expunging it. Not even from my own PC, either. I swore a Mighty Oath at the time, and see no present need to unswear it. Thank you, but no thank you, Mr Bezos. Why not give me a discount on something useful / fun instead?
I regard...
... some aspects of the claims made by the IT security biz as little different from the FUD of a typical insurance company. What does Josephine Public make of it all, I wonder? When Christa and I visited a widowed uncle of mine a few years back2 I discovered he had been "helped" to go online by his son for a retirement hobby. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But I was appalled to discover the unsafe state of his PC and of his PC habits. "Anti-virus, you say? No, I don't touch that. What does it do? Should I use it?" Plenty wrong with that.
As I noted (on a very early solo trip post-Christa down to my local "PC World Superstore" [as it then styled itself]) "I remain only faintly amused at the thought of selling PCs on the basis of the stunning speed with which they tackle complex tasks such as video editing and, wait for it, virus scanning!"
Stick to safe hex, that's my motto.
I'm a lot more...
... ignorant than I like to admit. There are two words in the following sentence that I did not know the meaning of:
Probing revanchism and irredentism reveals the whole map of the world to be a holy mess of conquest, massacre, imperialism, and other nasty embarrassments to democracy and justice.
It's an interesting, and rather depressing, article.
Meanwhile...
... there's a nice piece in "The Baffler" — source and snippet:
But Processed World did much more than supply to depressed office proles a therapeutic outlet. The magazine also managed to diagnose some of the issues that still animate radicals today: housework, sex work, and other unacknowledged forms of labor; unionization and its limits; income inequality; the precarity of the typical worker; corporate power; the state of exception that comes with permanent warfare (embodied then by the Cold War and later by the first Gulf War); and the ways in which the computerization of society was changing work, often to the detriment of workers. In the writing — essays, poetry, reportage, fantastical short stories about rebellious paper-pushers taking over San Francisco's financial district, only to be brutally put down by government soldiers — one can also find the beginnings of today's revolt against Silicon Valley and its pernicious mix of libertarian economics, techno-utopianism, and the deracinated remains of the sixties counterculture.
Not only does it make me glad to be retired, but it even sent me scurrying off to my shelves to revisit an anthology...
... I'd equipped myself with back in June 1990 on one of my regular visits to "October Books" in Soton. Funny how certain books are just never to be found in WH Smith, isn't it?
Adam Gopnik...
... like, cheered me, um, you know, really right back up again. Don't miss his Jamesian translation of Kidspeak.
Classic Bertie!
From In praise of idleness ...
One of the commonest things to do with savings is to lend them to some Government. In view of the fact that the bulk of the public expenditure of most civilized Governments consists in payment for past wars or preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a Government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire murderers. The net result of the man's economical habits is to increase the armed forces of the State to which he lends his savings. Obviously it would be better if he spent the money, even if he spent it in drink or gambling.
Or even in doing what Bertie himself liked doing so much?
In between making...
... plenty to drink so I don't shrivel up into a dried-out husk in this blasted heat, enjoying an ever-changing choice of music, and doing some experimental "HandBraking" on some over-large video files (trying the effect of various parameters), I've also been alternating between the final Charles Stross "Laundry Files" novel (trying to make it last a bit longer) on my Kindle and precariously holding Asimov's third volume of memoirs (trying to stop it completely splitting its spine at the photos badly bound into the centre section). I've heard it said that I have a butterfly mind (which assertion couldn't bother me less) and also that "Karma is a bitch". I now have a new, improved, definition:
Karma is your vengeful bunny-boiler ex, lurking in your darkened front hallway wearing an ice-hockey mask and carrying a baseball bat inscribed with "Bet you didn't see this coming".
Asimov or Stross? You decide, while I fix another drink. And thank the stars that I've never had a vengeful bunny-boiler ex.
Re-visiting...
...revanchism and irredentism (see above) and the trifling matter of international borders, consider Planet Voronoi.
I'm no fan...
... of Richard Strauss, but (despite his having recently been dubbed the Pepsi of Austrian writing) I was however completely captivated by the interval reading I heard (during tonight's Strauss Prom, in case you wondered) of a segment from Stefan Zweig's "Beware of Pity". I now have another reason to look forward to watching Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel" — its concierge was based on Zweig. I have just ordered both that book, and the autobiography he completed a day before his suicide.
I always preferred Coke, by the way. Preferably with its taste masked by rum.