2014 — 21 September: Sunday
The fresh air I'm allowing in at the moment is relatively cool, largely free of motorway sound waves, and definitely autumnal. Logical, Mr Spock, given the time of year at this point on the planet. The music is still coming from BBC Radio 3 at the moment, but I'm predicting that will change once Cerys turns up. In a little over two hours, I hope.
On a whim...
... I've begun re-reading "The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy". 35 years or so has eroded memory of some of the finer points of comic detail. It's one of those books I've bought, and given away to friends, several times. I'm pretty sure my most recent hardback (circa 1986) was at the 'trilogy in 4 parts' level, and I suspect Peter's g/f currently has that. I have no idea where1 its dustjacket is. Two other copies of that particular edition are / were in Germany and North America, and a third went down to North Harbour.
Mostly harmless, indeed.
I was sent...
... a link, last night, to a differing viewpoint of what ails the modern IBM. Coming from a typically "financial engineering" angle. There is a clear and continuing major disconnect between the rewards and behaviour in the Queen's boardroom at the top of the hive and the worker bees if the two books I've just read by Cringely and Greulich are as accurate as I suspect them to be. I have no idea whether "Todd Schoenberger" of CNBC did his time in the trenches there, but I put in my 25 years (and a bit) and I always kept an eye on what was going on. Still, his fatuous viewpoint — "I applaud IBM's retrain-or-be-fired memo" — appalled me no more than these things generally do, these days. I shall merely continue to live in selfish hope that I don't outlast the pension fund, to be honest. What else can a chap do, after all?
Time for...
... the latest annual assessment of Ig Nobel prize-winning research. I must remember to draw Len's attention to the Public Health Prize (whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat). (Link.)
Not that any human being has ever actually "owned" a cat. Perish the thought.
I would hesitate...
... to disagree with the notion that some of my DVDs can take a while to be catalogued by the dusty curator here in Technology Towers. For example, this one — "Confidential File", a US TV documentary exposing the "evils" of comic books and their effects on juvenile deliquency (first aired on 9 October 1955) — arrived...
... bound into the back of the splendid educational reference tome you can study at your leisure here.
The things I do...
... just to get a new DVD copy of "Her Alibi" (with the stunningly beautiful Paulina Porizkova, whom I'd somehow failed to note is married to Ric Ocasek) to replace the DVD-R I burned from my ancient NTSC LaserDisc include, this morning, buying a "4 Film Favorites" set from Amazon US, though I doubt the re-make of "The Goodbye Girl" will detain me for very long, and I already have a DVD of "Forget Paris". I don't know "Best Friends".
I was finding the documentary on shoes far too irritating to give my full attention to, so I got on with stewing my next batch of Shropshire prunes. I will find out the hard way if I managed to filter out all 42 stones.
Having been...
... reminded of just how fine the band Can was back in the day by a track ("Vitamin C") played by Guy Garvey — and, perhaps inevitably, downloaded the album with it on from over 40 years ago — I decided to spend a few minutes telling the BBC Trust what I thought of current musical output across the range of stations. Their current survey is running until the end of October. I thought I'd get my opinions in early this time, instead of waiting to learn that the sometimes-inept management is on the point of shutting down anything that I particularly enjoy. I didn't even bother to check what I'd had to say last time, when the misguided idiots were proposing to shut BBC 6Music.