2014 — 19 September: Friday
Season of autumn mists1 after further rain (though not on the Texan scale) overnight. Where's that cuppa?
Mutatis mutandis
I heard a newsbite exchange with a chap from the RAC yesterday. It was apparently costing the guvmint over £80,000,000 per year2 just to post out the renewal vehicle tax paper discs, and I had just about worked out a way of tucking the new one into Toyota's remarkably awkward holder on the inside corner of the windscreen. So that's another redundant skill that can now safely be discarded along Life's Highway.
Having finished...
... Cringely's book...
... I think I can also now safely stop reading any further analyses of what seem to have been a dreadful sequence of mis-steps3 that have occurred — and, indeed, are still occurring — within IBM's Galactic HQ boardroom in Armonk since I left that little Corporation nearly eight years ago. Thinks: I never did get to visit Armonk, whereas I not only visited the ICL equivalent in Putney, but had even had several of my books featured on the cover of one of the ICL Annual Reports while still in my mid-20s.
But who remembers ICL? Even if, at the time, it was still bigger in the UK than IBM [UK] was :-)
I've mentioned before...
... the sneaky regard I have for ants. I've just read the uniquely-well-informed views of Edward O Wilson on them, extracted from his latest book. Source and snippet:
Another question I hear a lot is, "What can we learn of moral value from the ants?" Here again I will answer definitively: nothing. Nothing at all can be learned from ants that our species should even consider imitating. For one thing, all working ants are female. Males are bred and appear in the nest only once a year, and then only briefly. They are pitiful creatures with wings, huge eyes, small brains and genitalia that make up a large portion of their rear body segment. They have only one function in life: to inseminate the virgin queens during the nuptial season. They are built to be robot flying sexual missiles. Upon mating or doing their best to mate, they are programmed to die within hours, usually as victims of predators.
For my post-breakfast reading, here's an interesting take on "Why I hope to die at 75". Well-reasoned, too. (Link.)
Sorry, Boris!
But spinning your overnight web directly across my patio door when it's my only exit route to the jungle...
... means you're inevitably going to have to get used to a degree of dislocation. (Recall Mr Prosser's philosophy as explained to Arthur Dent: "It's a bypass. You've got to build bypasses.")
In between...
... sorting out various tasks in prep for migrating a chum off her XP system, and painstakingly working through a set of data I should have kept updated a lot more carefully over a number of years, and assessing dear Mama's latest batch of snailmails, and supping my relaxing Friday afternoon tea over with Roger & Eileen — and noticing literally en passant that Len's cousin successfully reconnected with his car — it's somehow managed to become two meals and many hours later. How does that happen?