2014 — 23 September: Tuesday
The next piece of autumnalistic evidence — leaving to one side my current fashionable lateness (no doubt caused by my strong hibernational tendencies at this time of year) — is the omnipresent colloid visible out 'there' when I fling open my curtains to admit the non-existent morning sunshine. Still, I have both a fresh cuppa and the makings of breakfast before Mother Hubbard's cupboard is entirely bare and I have to go out hunter-gathering, which is a Good Thing.
I stand by...
... yesterday's description of the fantastical tosh that is Season #2 of "Scandal" as it winds towards whatever unimaginable climax1 the writers have decided it will reach.
For some reason...
... I find this easy to believe. After all, bits are bits, are they not?
Who? Me? Cynical? (I once had an interesting discussion with a sales chap in [now defunct] Comet over the 'justification' for the outrageous hdmi cable prices being charged by an outfit called Monster Cable. But then I've had similar discussions with, inter alia, double glazing sales chaps, too. Recall Vladimir Peniakoff's favourite saying "BS baffles brains".)
While I know...
... you can never go back, today's doorstep dropping (left while I was out on the first of my two minor-league morning adventures) is a film I first saw as part of a double-bill with "Jungle Book". That dates me. Is it just me, or did Suzanne Pleshette look a lot (then) like Jennifer Lawrence does (now)?
By the end...
... of my third adventure it was undeniably well past comfortable lunching time, so I've just stopped for long enough to munch a chicken salad. Adventure #3 was to deliver my first Android device, the 2011 Asus Transformer Tablet PC, over to what's likely to be its next home (on condition that the Setlist App runs on it OK in support of Brian's ukulele endeavours). Fingers crossed.
Here's the third...
... of my recent trio of Kindle books, followed by a tiny snippet from its Preface.
Among the most spirit-sapping indignities of modern life is the relentless battering of workers' ears by the strangled vocabulary of office jargon. It might even seem to some innocent souls as though all you need to do to acquire a high-level job is to learn its stultifying vocabulary, GOING FORWARD. Office-speak is a maddeningly viral kind of Unspeak engineered to deflect blame, complicate simple ideas, obscure problems, and perpetuate power relations. Fluency in the idiom is a kind of cheap competence (or COMPETENCY) that often masks a lack of competence in anything that matters.
Delicious. Mind you (or perhaps I mean "sadly"?) it's not the first such book of its kind I've ever read. That was over 30 years ago... so it's clearly time to bring myself up to date!
I realise...
... I'm terribly old-fashioned. For example, I don't like paying any fees for my bank's current account (pushing aside the thought that any money2 I put into it actually legally belongs to the bank once it's on their books). My current bank is proud to have been awarded "Moneynet Best Packaged Current Account award 2014" (whatever the hell that is, or means, if anything). However, they obviously don't feel they're making enough money out of me. Why else would they keep offering me an "upgrade" to a "better" current account...
Reading the small print suggests they will pay me 2.4% net interest on the first £2,500 credit balance in my (their!) current account (and nothing on any greater balance). I make that £60/year flowing my way. This would be a Good Thing. But the fee for this upgraded account is £120/year flowing their way. This would be a Doubleplusungood Thing. (Needless to say, I have no interest in, or need for, the various "5 Star Rated" insurance offers by which they seek to sweeten the deal.) Scanning Poole's list of Office Jargon fails to provide me with a suitable term to describe this jolly wheeze.
Having put...
... Raxco Software's "Perfect Disk" optimiser on my system shortly after going entirely SSD-based, I find their constant flood of FUD-based marketing emails irritating. Tonight's is the most blatant so far. It tells me that I have only a 20% optimised system and fail four of the five items on their PC performance checklist "based" (if you please) "on the information we have from your customer profile". The accurate translation of that phrase is actually "based on your only having bought one of our five products". Thanks, but no thanks.
My various system drivers are not outdated, I don't have to make my PC 50 times faster by performing activities on a RAM disk, I've no intention of letting their tools loose on the System Registry (and, being on an SSD its asserted dreadful fragmentation and compaction scarcely need worry me), and I take regular System Restore points and images, thanks all the same.
Move along. Nothing to see here. Besides, I've just found an unopened bag of giant Dairy Milk chocolate buttons that were "best before" last month, so I have higher priority tasks to attend to.