2014 — 16 September: Tuesday

A shockingly-late start this morning1 after full repayment of my recent sleep debt. Right; what's next? Perhaps that little 64GB microSD card will show up?

Actually...

... a new level of beta firmware for my Oppo Blu-ray player has just popped out of hyperspace. It brings some Android-related improvements and a couple of bug fixes so I shall be taking it out for a spin. What fun. Now, where did I put the scrap of paper on which I wrote down all the current settings? Or (for that matter) the USB stick on which I saved them? Or perhaps I should opt for breakfast first? [Pause] Well, that all went on smoothly. Now for breakfast.

Receiving...

... yet another in the almost daily sequence of identical irritating cold calls reprimanding me for not yet having taken up the guvmint offer of a fully-funded central heating boiler replacement I tried something new: I pressed "2" to talk to an advisor, was immediately connected, and suggested I would be very pleased to stop receiving these calls as I actually have a new boiler. Could they, I asked, arrange this? Answer came there none. "Click."

I call to mind a story I read years ago about a chap who invented a whistle which, when blown into the phone, killed the person at the other end...

Meanwhile, I've just...

... finished the saddening, maddening, book about IBM by Pete Greulich that I mentioned yesterday. It won't mean much to non-IBMers. Nor, I suspect, to the top execs still raking it in... [Pause] John Lanchester has written another book ("How to speak money") in the wake of his earlier (excellent) "Whoops!".

Sandwiched between enjoyably baggy state-of-the-global-economy essays that take in everything from the (successful and underreported) pursuit of Millennium Development Goals to the digital contraction of the newspaper and publishing industries, he offers a compulsive gloss on an A-Z of financial terms, with a paragraph or three in explanation of each. Everything from "mortgage" ("Literally 'dead pledge', and if it were called that maybe more people would think twice about getting one...") to more arcane terms like the "Laffer Curve" and the "Vix Index", is subjected to his Johnsonian attention and wit.

Tim Adams in Observer


Amazon...

... teased me by delivering a DVD...

Longest Week DVD

... in what looked plausibly like the sort of parcel that a missing microSD card could have shown up in (but still hasn't).

Not enough blood

A phrase I mentioned (a while ago) in the context of the old joke about God giving Man both a penis and a brain, but not enough blood to use both of them at the same time. But step with me back to a 2003 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience:

Journal of Neuroscience

Talk about losing sight of the forest for the trees... Now, where do I keep my heroin these days?

  

Footnote

1  If there's anything shocking about it being 10:00 already.