2014 — 25 September: Thursday

"Past mistakes must not be an excuse for inaction" says our boy Dave.1 What is it about launching air-strikes that's so appealing, I wonder? Just askin'. Closer to home, however, and in light of tomorrow's dates with Dr Fang and for lunch with the returned global trotter, I'd better get my supplies skates on. After breakfast, of course. Mustn't go rushing around at my age. It's not as if I'm Prime Minister.

Having finished...

... Season #2 of "Scandal" last night I think I'll turn my attention to lighter things for a while. There's a writer called Jane Austen I've been neglecting of late. She'll make a nice change from Douglas Adams, come to that. Alas, "Hitch-hiker's Guide" didn't strike me as quite as funny as the first time I encountered it (whisper it quietly) 36 years ago.

The trouble...

... with reading pieces called "The trouble with writing" — even well-written ones adapted from the keynote address at "Writing Workshops LA: the Conference" (shudder) — is how little they generally accord with my own opinions and experiences as a chap paid to write for, basically, all his working life (not counting the truncated engineering apprenticeship, of course). Wonder why that is? Perhaps because I only ever attended one2 such conference in my working life. And was thoroughly bored during it, too, despite its Tarpon Springs resort location in September 1984 and the fact that IBM was paying me to attend "as a reward". It was full of IBMers, of course, many of whom did little or no writing but all of whom were supposedly in that line of trade. (Link.)

The only writing-related thing I consciously recall wasn't even actually from that event, but from the papers that were to have been presented at the (cancelled3) 2nd ID Technical Symposium — to which I had not been invited — a year or so later. It was from a paper on the use of metaphor in technical writing:

Consider ... a hurrying caterpillar. Little waves (transverse or compressional, depending on the species) ripple along its back from tail to head. These waves progress at phase velocity, while the caterpillar himself travels at group velocity.

Date: 1986


I do recall one thing from the event I actually attended: handing over my unused expenses to a manager who had drunk his beer allowance but was still thirsty. It occurs to me that both witnesses to that transaction are now dead. Stories? I got a million :-)

Back from the...

... supplies trail, I can now check on the progress (or lack thereof) in reformatting a spare 3TB external drive for a distressed fellow-traveller who's been having a spot of bother with one of his RAID5 arrays. My services aren't cheap; it's going to cost him lunch tomorrow (tee hee). Meanwhile the nasty noises from the gentlemen who have been toiling mightily4 almost right outside Technology Towers this morning fade into insignificance in light of email news of the pending arrival of two favourite unguilty pleasures on (cheap) Blu-ray:

Time for a celebratory cuppa, methinks. It is 'lemonses', after all.

Memories!

This was my synopsis for that talk, back in November 1996 at Beaumont, Old Windsor (yes, precisely where I had first worked at ICL in February 1974):


Communicating into 2000... or paddling furiously into a Webbed World


The World Wide Web is here. Java technology animates it. So a Hursley team is porting Sun's 
Java to a variety of IBM operating systems while I run along frantically in their wake, 
sweeping up the bits and publishing them via the Web. 

In my 45 minutes or so, I'll cover our attempts to integrate multi-site development while 
presenting seamless information to the outside world. (Yes, it's been done before, but this 
quickly? Under such intense scrutiny? Via such technology? Not by me!) 

I shall touch on:

   o  The pleasures and pitfalls of the WebMaster
   o  Corporate standards, contracts, and other aesthetic challenges
   o  That modern maelstrom, the unmoderated mailing list
   o  Coping with 500+ complaints on a wet Monday morning
   o  Lessons and conclusions (subject to debate)
   o  Demonstrations (subject to available technology)

The talk went very well, but my shoes (literally) fell apart. Recall that mystery object photo?

Finally, a chance...

... to note my next batch of incoming video pixels:

Futurama DVDs and Jarmusch BD

It's over 10 years since I watched the first four series of Matt Groening's "Futurama" and even longer ago that Christa and I first watched that superb Jarmusch film "Ghost Dog: way of the Samurai", which we saw originally in the Harbour Lights cinema (inevitably). We neither of us thought quite as highly of his more recent "Broken Flowers". But where's the day gone? That's what I'd like to know.

Gotta love...

... the postmark on today's postcard from my globe-trotting friend:

Posted in Hell

Meanwhile, Big Bro is sending me quotes that originated (if that's the right word) in that (shudder) reputable organ the Daily Mail.

  

Footnotes

1  Bellicose little blighter, ain't he.
2  Strictly speaking, I attended two. But I was giving a talk at the second, and only hung around long enough for that, and lunch.
3  By then, the increasing global pressure to cut expenses within IBM was steadily eroding all such frivolities.
4  And wielding large power tools (in aid of gawd knows what as — once again — bits of my road are dug up).