2014 — 1 October: Wednesday — rabbits!
If October comes, can Xmas be far behind?1 Probably not. But at least I have a birthday before then.
Meanwhile, I've been...
... reading about what little is known, so far, about what will now be called Windows 10. Not that you get 10 by adding together 7 and 8.1 of course. Perish the thought. My SHIELD Tablet PC is still on Android 4.4.2 and seems otherwise little changed by the presumably fairly major Upgrade 2 that went on a few hours ago. I suppose I can expect a somewhat greater upheaval from Microsoft in due course. El Reg tells me there are 1.5 billion Windows PCs out in the wild. I wonder how many Android devices there are. Even I have two, which is one more than the number of Windows devices here in Technology Towers.
Assuming both the Sat Nav and the Kindle run some form of embedded Linux, with my laptop PC running Mint 17 and the Raspberry Pi running a derivative of Debian I arrive at four Linux devices. I wouldn't be surprised if the Oppo BD player is a fifth, too. Then there's the Humax Freesat PVR, as well.
The last pair...
... of lads who've been digging up bits of the road in association with some form of phone cable related work appear to be on slo-mo tidying up detail this morning. But a pair of 'clancydocra' vans were snooping around further down the hill yesterday. Possibly more drains-related, this time? To describe the original builders as competent in that area (or many others, for that matter) 33 years ago would be over-generous.
Over 10 years...
... have elapsed since Gore Vidal's "Perpetual war for perpetual peace" with its echoes of Orwell's '1984' and "War is Peace". Now we have George Monbiot's reductio ad absurdum suggesting simply "Bomb Everyone" — stirring up a bit of a hornets' nest of comment from Grauniad readers not fully equipped to appreciate irony (it seems)...
I shall get me some breakfast and focus on other things. The sun, for example, is shining nicely.
'Twas on this...
... very day — albeit 2,567 days ago — that Christa shrugged off her final dose of radiation 'therapy' and then dragged me off to the M&S in Hedge End to stock up (I belatedly realise) on clothes that I would be needing in years to come, but that she knew she would no longer be around to buy for me. I've just repeated the trip, and am shocked to see how much four simple white cotton T-shirts and two polo shirts add up to. £71! Call me old-fashioned, but that strikes me as pretty outrageous. Still, the last lot only started falling apart a couple of years ago...
And now the inner man is clamouring for some input, too. [Pause] As is my current energy supplier, who's just pinged me with news of a new fixed tariff cheaper than my current one. How very different from the unlamented days of the Southern Electricity Board whose chairman I had to keep copying on my letters of complaint during the rewiring of the house in Old Windsor. (The foreman of the group of [I hesitate to use the word 'workers'] people given the job of fixing up the appalling mess they had made kept asking me to stop doing that but, as I pointed out, it did seem to produce results.) I also withheld payment of the full fee, but the gang of splendid folk in the Midland Bank went ahead and paid it any way, which rather annoyed me.
It's been gently bugging me...
... that I couldn't remember where I first saw the actor (Rory McCann) who plays "The Hound" in that wonderful tosh "Game of Thrones". Turns out he played the wheelchair-bound ex-climber in Annie Griffin's well-observed comedy "The Book Group" back in 2002. Phew! Glad that's sorted out (and without resorting to IMDB, by the way). Now it really is about time for a late lunch.
Hello Mr Postie. What'cha got there?
I figured the scars from my (transient) I.T. support days have all faded by now, and I long ago gave up reading the BOFH column. Why not try a TV comedy that had entirely passed me by, therefore? Actually, I heard Richard Ayoade chatting on last Saturday's "Loose Ends". He sounded both self-deprecating and amusing...
The new issue...
... of David Langford's reliably entertaining Ansible contains a link to a piece on "Slate" (regarding "The Dystopian City and Urban Policy") written by the lady I mentioned hearing (on NPR) back in June. She's quite sensibly suggesting SF could and perhaps should be used as an inspiration for municipal guvmints.
My amusement derives from the footnote confessing a slight correction to the original wording of the piece. She (or a sub-editor) thought "Zanzibar" was the name of some distant planet.
Those four cheap Blu-rays I painstakingly winkled out of Mr Bezos on Sunday have also all turned up:
