2014 — 8 October: Wednesday
After re-watching1 "L.A. Story" I made the mistake of reading my email, which took me to a story on El Reg about that naughty Adobe reading (and — worse — reporting back to Galactic Central, in plain text) your PC's ebook contents and precisely what you've been reading.
All together now: "out-bloody-rageous!" (Gotta love that tmesis.)
This took me to Marcus Ranum's list of the six dumbest ideas in computer security, with an inevitable side branch (contained in dumb idea #3) off to read a piece by Feynman he hosts (a subset of the report on the Shuttle disaster) that I naturally promptly sent off to a couple of people who'd get a kick out of it (though they may well already be familiar).
And somehow, by a technical process known as "poking around" and idly trying various likely location addresses I ended up at a mildly satirical reworking of Sun Tzu's "Art of War" recast as a series of computer security teachings. Of which this made me smile :-)
The mainframe programmers of the 70s and 80s used to write of a practice called "Change Control" — in which production systems were managed with care and forethought. During the late 90s the last of the Change Control believers were taken out and shot, and their cubicles were given to the consultants who were there to mark everything up in XML in order to make everything better in some manner nobody understands yet.
Before I know it, it's 01:17 or so and I could have watched another film. But now I'm yawning.
Some hours later...
... I'm listening to Cerys as she chats to Rob Cowan. Great stuff. Better than the rain, though there are signs that a bright solar body is up there behind the clouds, roughly where it should be by this time of day. The sleep debt has been repaid, in full by the feel of it. Breakfast? Good idea.
God only knows
Despite this going out on every BBC channel (I assume simultaneously) yesterday evening I somehow still managed to miss it. I must have been busy with, or paying attention to, something else :-)
I have to wonder at the cost, to be honest. Though the two or three seconds of Brian May made me smile.
The dim view...
... my Thunderbird email client took of this piece of email from Google also made me smile:
Not least because it's actually Google email that I have beavering away behind the scenes at 'molehole' doing all the heavy lifting for me and feeding filtered stuff through to me via Thunderbird, of course. I have a sneaking suspicion that were I to view this same piece of email in Chrome as webmail it would not be flagged up as a potential scam...
Now why am I not surprised?
Still, firing up Chrome and then fighting my way through the dense (and remarkably unfriendly) thicket from its Admin console to my little section of actual email action at least lets me see that I've used 0.74GB (4%) of the 15GB allowance I currently have. And digging gently down to the well-hidden material that can eventually be seen (providing you first allow the viewing of "hidden" items) in the path...
AppData > Roaming > Thunderbird > Profiles > [filename] > ImapMail > imap.googlemail.com
... suggests I have 1.83GB of the stuff safely tucked away on BlackBeast, too. Being paranoid, I regularly (incrementally) download it all by invoking the "work offline" magic usually once a day. Ever since the great XP PC crash of 2008 — my first-ever Blue Screen of Death on what was then my primary XP system — I have been a bit more cautious. Bite me.
Not necessarily...
... where you might expect to find a snippet from Gary Larson, I admit:
But I'll settle for what I can find:
Transhuman mathematics
Yes, yes, I know that, Sidney ... everybody knows that! ... But look: Four wrongs squared, minus two wrongs to the fourth power, divided by this formula, do make a right.
The essay here...
... is both interesting and capable of destroying any lingering idea that I am in any way obsessive. Source and snippet:
I close my laptop and open a book to read, one of what Google estimates to be 129,864,880 individual books ever published in the world, which it aims to have digitized within ten years. If each book were 70,000 words long — about 150 pages — that would amount to around nine trillion searchable words. I begin to read some of those words but am distracted as I notice the person sitting at the next table send a 140-character tweet on Twitter, one of an average of 500 million such Tweets now being sent each day. At an average rate of 12 words per Tweet (or 6 billion words a day), I muse, doing the calculation on my phone, more words will be Tweeted within the next four years than can be found in all books ever published put together, and they will also be searchable.
I see that the Grauniad has kindly identified all the people in the BBC's video that I've never heard of.
Nice to see...
... three old favourites finally crawl out of their Mexican Blu-ray factory and make it safely across the Atlantic:
"A perfect murder" is a good remake of Hitchcock's excellent "Dial 'M' for murder", "Dave" rips-off the plot (itself by no means an original one, of course) of Heinlein's novel "Double Star", and "The American President" proved an excellent practice run for Aaron Sorkin's later superb TV series "The West Wing". But you knew that already, of course.
Having confirmed...
... by email two days ago that I've been successfully switched over to my (new) new Fixed Price one year v10 energy tariff a week or so before I was due to be switched over to the (previous) new Fixed Price one year (can't remember its silly code) energy tariff, as opposed to the other (new) (previous) Fixed Price one year v9 energy tariff (the one that was withdrawn within two days of it being offered to me about a week ago... do keep up) I'm now left wondering why tonight's email is now suggesting I seriously consider switching over to the same new Fixed Price one year v10 energy tariff they have already told me I have just been switched over to.
I hesitate to suggest this, but it's almost as if they have managed to confuse themselves with their own, over-complex, set of tariffs. And I don't doubt that if I switch again from v10 (which hasn't quite got off the ground yet) to v10 they will think I'm the one being, erm, stupid. "Dogs, lie, let, sleeping" is going to be my own new energy policy.
Now, back to "Dave". It's a great deal funnier than grappling with a confused energy supplier. (I blame all this on la Thatch, of course. Mutter, mutter.)
Laniakea
Just to get things in a better perspective. (Link.)