2014 — 13 September: Saturday
No more than a 'normal' amount of luck should see me at some point today trying to find the tiny slot labelled microSD — in really tiny print — on the top edge of my SHIELD Tablet PC so I can slip in the due-for-delivery-today microSD. (Though one of my gurus took the precaution of formatting his card to be HPFS — a task that took several hours, I gather — before inserting it.) The SHIELD documentation's advice is to use NTFS though my card (being 64GB) is likely to have been formatted exFAT (which Android doesn't support) on arrival.
I assume I can first pop the card into its accompanying SD adapter, then pop that1 into the not so far ever used SD slot on my card reader. And thus use my Win8.1 system to invoke the necessary reformat spell. Of course, I already know "some apps do not support microSD card storage" though I sincerely hope none of those pre-installed on the SHIELD fall into that inferior category.
I have the...
... sliding patio door wide open to allow in a spot of pre-breakfast free fresh air (and lots of free motorway noise). It's a mite autumnal out there.
For yesterday's...
... second blast of pixels, by the way, having first tried a little (that proved to be more than enough) of "Molly's Girl" I discarded it and moved on to the "sinner from Pinner". (Jane March, if you have to ask, though quite why a portrayal of active female sexuality merits that tabloid sobriquet remains a mystery to me.) This was on a newly-delivered German Blu-ray of the 1992 Jean-Jacques Annaud film "L'Amant" based on the autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras of her "scandalous" romance with a Chinese man in French colonial Vietnam in 1929. Ravishing in two senses of the word.
Perhaps it's time to rewatch my first Annaud film "Quest for Fire" with its 'special language' by Anthony Burgess and 'body language' by Desmond Morris. I no longer have "The Bear" (having not bothered to replace my LaserDisc), but I did buy an American Blu-ray of "The Name of the Rose" three years ago, shortly before Mike passed along a surplus copy of "Seven Years in Tibet".
Having scraped...
... sliced and diced until my crockpot container is comfortably laden, this evening's nutritious meal is now under starter's orders. Meanwhile, it's evidently time for another of the fairly regular assessments in the Chronicle of the existential risks posed by AI. Perhaps it will mitigate the disappointing news that my microSD card won't arrive before Monday. Source and snippet:
"It's not like we're going to keep the superintelligence bottled up forever and hope that nobody else ever develops a free-roaming superintelligence," says Bostrom. The "motivation-selection problem" — how to program a computer to have common sense — must be solved before we reach the takeoff point. One approach is to make the machine's goals deliberately vague. Instead of asking it to "cure cancer," you tell it to "do something that benefits humanity," and let it spend a lot of time checking in with human beings to find out what everyone actually wants.
Good luck with that.
Another pair...
... of those tempting "Two Blu-rays for £10" showed up this week:
Listening to the BBC radio news at noon, I'm once again completely baffled2 by the UK's attitude to "mind-altering" drugs. And why legislate against "potentially life-threatening legal highs" while leaving those proven killers alcohol and tobacco ring-fenced? This is the sort of clear-minded guvmint thinking you see when you simply sack (or sideline) experts who choose to speak the truth as they see it, based on factual evidence of actual harm...
Mr Postie dropped off...
... a neat variation of that earlier "Two Blu-rays for £10" item. Today it was "Two films on one Blu-ray". I heartily approve of this form of data compression:
This replaces in one swell foop both the French DVD of "Color of Night" I picked up in Calais over a decade ago and a UK bargain basement 4:3 aspect ratio DVD of "Playing God" I think I found in "Poundland". And frees up a precious slot in my CaseLogic folder storage system :-)
Despite forgetting...
... to buy a cooking apple for my crockpot (and thereby, just possibly, feeling obliged to over-compensate with an extra splosh of cooking wine) the end result was actually very tasty. The surplus is now chilling down before going off to live in the fridge for the next two or three days. Yummy. The jazz on BBC Radio 3 has been equally enjoyable.