2014 — 7 September: Sunday
I'm clearly a forgiving sort of chap. I've just filled in a very positive feedback form about my new Android SHIELD Tablet PC1 — even before my morning cuppa. But then, if the asteroid later today actually clobbers NZ — rather than skimming 25,000 miles above it as NASA apparently predicts — my forgiving and benevolent attitude to the Universe may yet change.
It's not quite...
... warm enough outside to keep my sliding patio door wide open, despite my preference for fresh air. At this rate, I expect the central heating will be lurching into its post-summer break life any day now. Assuming it remembers how.
Schrödinger's asshole
Defined (here) as "a person who says something offensive, then waits to see the reaction it gets before deciding whether to claim it was a joke." Which led me to a particularly fowl shaggy duck story. (Link.)
Impulsive fool...
... that I am, I've just splashed out £8-96 on an American Blu-ray of "Absence of Malice". Christa (who had a soft spot for Paul Newman) would doubtless approve. It will replace an ancient DVD+R that I recorded off-air. That would have been burned on my very first DVD recorder, a Philips DVDR80 PVR that worked perfectly for nearly the whole of 2004, and then... just didn't. Perhaps it didn't like co-existing with a Tivo and a couple of S-VHS machines?
From the sound...
... of her latest email, one of my chums is on the point of making up her mind about her next PC. I've advised a somewhat over-powered "All-in-One" PC from HP that will neatly fit her restricted space, avoid trailing cables everywhere, and easily cope with all the computing needs she's admitted to. Fingers crossed, therefore.
I couldn't...
... afford the three volumes in hardback when I was an impoverished student. But that doesn't mean I didn't covet them. Here's the Great Man on First principles of quantum mechanics:
One might still like to ask: "How does it work? What is the machinery behind the law?" No one has found any machinery behind the law. No one can "explain" any more than we have just "explained." No one will give you any deeper representation of the situation. We have no ideas about a more basic mechanism from which these results can be deduced.
(Link.)
Now that's what I call intellectual honesty.
It's fair to say...
... I'd managed to lose track of Radiohead's more recent work. A failing just rectified by my downloads of "In Rainbows" (from late 2007) and "The King of Limbs" (from early 2011) mere minutes ago — once I'd convinced the latest set of Firefox safeguards to allow me to see and accept the pop-up that fires up the old-style Amazon MP3 downloader. It's all Tom Robinson's fault, of course.
Well, I've finished Lev Grossman's "The Magicians" and enjoyed it. Not to be confused, of course, with Sol Stein's "The Magician" from 1971 — a wholly different kettle of fish.