2014 — 30 August: Saturday
My new toy has prompted some quite thorough data file cleanup hereabouts. Indeed, I was so far into the groove of that exercise last night that I simply left BlackBeast powered up overnight as I had arranged a set of "working" windows and network shares open just the way I wanted them. "Battle" has resumed this morning, to the welcome accompaniment of the inevitable cuppa, and of Brian Matthew, so I'm guessing it's Saturday.
Meanwhile, I note...
... my subconscious clearly knows me better than I do. Why else would I have bought a neat little powered 7-port USB3 hub that can now step up to the plate and neatly connect, and power, both the 2011 Asus Transformer and the 2014 SHIELD newcomer within easy reach of the Parker Sintique armchair I've had since 1971 (re-upholstered about 15 years ago) and my PC desk?
I clearly recall...
... one of the last tasks I shared with Christa was the "simplification" of the contents1 of the kitchen. Mind you, I didn't deduce — until quite some time after her death — that one of the plastic carrier bags I lugged for her into the first charity shop I came to in Eastleigh must have held our original mechanical set of kitchen scales. It was to take me well over five years, searching on and (mostly) off, before I discovered that she had at some point replaced these scales with a neat little electronic set that she had tucked neatly away into a kitchen cupboard. (Host, also, [I discovered] to three old mobile phones and several sets of her reading glasses and sunglasses, among many other items that tended not to feature in my daily life.)
I've just fired up the scales, out of curiosity:
Asus Tablet: 495gm Asus keyboard: 497gm SHIELD Tablet: 278gm
Quite a difference. And much easier to hold while lying in bed late last night catching up on a few video files spooling (streaming, I suppose) off the NAS downstairs. I've also still got the dongle that plugs into the mini-HDMI output and has a full-size output socket should I ever wish to plumb it to the 60" Kuro plasma screen.
Back from a six-mile...
... ramble un-rained-upon and in good time to catch both the "Sound of Cinema" programme and an email from my dentist. Plus a patronising snailmail booklet on "Investments" from my latest bank. This piece of personally-targeted marketing fails to note whether my current investment needs are more aligned to:
- buying a new car and driving lessons (£5,559 in year one),
- having a baby (£11,025 in year one),
- raising a house deposit (£29,400 for a first-time buyer), or
- covering university fees (£55,320 over a three-year course)
But it does manage to remind me — four times in seven pages, in fact, if you squint hard enough at the greyed-out small print footnotes — using lots of cautious verbs in the "conditional" tense, that past performance is not a guide to future performance, and that what grows can also shrink. Good to know. Recall PJ O'Rourke:
You buy stock because you think other people will think this stock is worth more later than you think it's worth now. Economists call this — in a rare example of comprehensible economist terminology — the "Greater Fool Theory".
Recall, too, the Keynesian beauty contest. It ain't what you think, it's more what you think other people will think, or indeed what you think other people will think other people will think. Not my strong2 suit. And so down the rabbit hole we tumble.
Just don't waste your breath telling a "successful investor" that. They look at you as if you're an idiot :-)
I'm delighted...
... to report that the graphics performance of the new Tablet is amazing. I've just dumped all my DVD cover artwork (nearly 1.4GB) on to it (across a simple USB link) and the resulting slideshow (or even just the manual browsing) is delightfully responsive. I like the stylus, too.