2014 — 17 August: Sunday
There is a right way — and a whole host of wrong ways — to persuade me to update an application. This struck me as pretty well perfect:
Not that I expect to be using my 23GB of Dropbox storage any more often than before. The regular floods of App update invitations I get on my smartphone (acquisition of which boosted my Dropbox 'score' by 20GB for two years) take care of it on that Androidal device.1 I've recently noticed a Google Cloud Print app appearing on it. Wonder where the printer is? And a Beta of something called Zoe. Wonder what she does? But then, I thought I was doing quite well to metamorphose my niece's mobile number (as revealed by our text messages regarding train arrivals) into her name in whatever they call the address book buried somewhere on the little blighter.
I've also noticed...
... a drop in the temperature this morning. I need more hot tea. [Pause] I'm no expert, but it occurs to me that if you arm your police and let them shoot dead a young black gentleman, and then you impose a curfew on your remaining (often armed) local citizens when they quite reasonably start remonstrating with you for the last week or more, you should not be surprised by further violent incidents.
When astrophysics collides...
... with typography in the way depicted here (on the cover of the current "Scientific American" magazine) my poor old brain nearly collapses...
... under the assaults of 3D kerning and odd leading (not to mention bizarre ligatures and text alignment) and barely has spare CPU capacity to contemplate what the question being posed actually means. If, that is, it means anything at all. Shades of Arisia and Eddore, if you ask me. I honestly prefer the idea of it being more simply "giant turtles all the way down".
I can picture...
... Christa chortling to herself on reading a report about her favourite magazine Der Spiegel telling tales of some German spying "by accident" on phone calls made by senior US officials.
Finally!
A gloriously-clear explanation (with pretty picture) of the "Double Irish Dutch Sandwich" (in a PDF file of the IMF's "Fiscal Monitor" report from last October) and proof — not that any is needed — that I am nowhere near clever twisted enough to ever become a successful (and, doubtless, highly-paid) tax-avoidance consultant for a multinational corporation. Skim forward to page 47 on which you will find:
The (one page) explanation concludes:
This clever arrangement combines several of the tricks of the trade: direct sales, contract production, treaty shopping, hybrid mismatch, and transfer pricing rules.
The unexamined life...
... isn't really worth living (I'm told). So, at some point each day I try to make time to look back in my little ¬blog to remind myself what I was up to, or thinking about, on the same day in earlier years. So it is that, about five times now, I've noted that I mentioned the Art Deco furniture we had in our bedroom in a rented flat in Old Windsor. Each time (of course) my mind working the way it doesn't, I've also made a mental note to dig out and scan a picture I have of some of this furniture in a book called "Essential Art Deco" that I found in October 2000:
So, finally, here's the original (I assume) of one of that pair of walnut bedside cabinets (late 1920s) attributed to Eric Bagge. There; that's another item off the non-existent "To Do" list.
Meanwhile, having...
... heard Simon Pegg on BBC 6Music, and thus watched the trailer for the film "Hector and the Search for Happiness", I forked out my 79p for a Kindle copy of the book by François Lelord and have been enjoying it... even though it's written by a psychiatrist.