2014 — 11 October: Saturday
I could have done without the rumbles of thunder that woke me briefly just before 06:00. Meanwhile, in between gathering up and chucking out surplus empty Blu-ray cases and surplus empty plastic bags and surplus empty cardboard delivery cases1 I've also been gathering further evidence to support my current research hypothesis. It's a simple one:
When Microsoft uses the word "Never" (when supplied by the hapless "user" as the answer to "When should the PC switch off the display screen?") it actually means something more like "if you don't twitch the mouse2 for a while I shall feel free to blank both screens for you, since I know better than you do".
It's possible that the screens also have power-saving settings that I should explore lest I'm blaming Microsoft when I should be blaming Asus. Still, I remain grateful that BlackBeast (my PC, not that small corporation in Redmond) doesn't yet seem to have learned any way of spinning down all the SSDs in my all-SSD system :-)
My other...
... much longer-term research hypothesis is proving much easier to gather evidence for: the perversity of the Universe tends to a local maximum in Technology Towers.
Today's datum? Peter has just rung, sounding both sluggish and very croaky-voiced, to delay by a week their proposed visit (and also taking the opportunity to point out the silver lining — namely, that I have so far failed to identify a birthday gift wish). That wish is actually extremely simple. Nor has it changed significantly in the last 34 years or so: his continued health and happiness is all I need, frankly. Besides, let's face it, I simply have nowhere left to put anything else.
Oh, good grief!
I only ever tried lemon juice!
Oh, dear
Alas, I tuned away from the BBC's radio dramatisation of Robert Persig's "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" within 10 minutes. Some books are better left untouched (as it were). Actually, all too many books are better left untouched, but that's a different story. Still, at least it motivated me to dig out and re-read an interesting interview conducted by Christie Hefner with Persig that I'd clipped from "Oui" magazine in the late 1970s. Snippet:
PIRSIG: Technical writing is a good example, because it's the dullest, most boring kind of writing. Yet I found that within tech writing on digital-computer hardware — electronic circuits and the ways in which they're
arranged — the range for quality was enormous. The writing I did for those computer manuals was some of the most gratifying work I've ever done.
OUI: But still not as gratifying as writing Zen and coming up with a best seller, right?
PIRSIG: In both cases, the options for quality are infinite. In mathematics, however, there are orders of infinity: infinities that are infinities of infinities. So I preferred to write Zen, because of the higher order of
infinity. But in each case, you can have a good time. One technical manual that I wrote actually caused an engineer to break into tears when he read it. He'd designed this thing and felt it hadn't been appreciated properly. When he saw my
manual, he knew that I understood its worth, and it pleased him so much he burst into tears.
The interview's accompanying illustration went uncredited, sadly. I also still get a kick out of this much more recent Persig quotation:
It is not good to talk about Zen because Zen is nothingness ... If you talk about it you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it no one knows it is there... Science could not teach me how to understand girls sitting in my class, even... (Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?)
I found it in an interview with Tim Adams printed in the Observer.
Having worked...
... my way through my video title 'stock-checking' process as far as the foothills of the letter "F", I was amused to find the terrifying "Fail-Safe" (with Fonda and Matthau) adjacent to the somewhat lighter-hearted "Failure to Launch" with Matthew Mahogany. Although still separated by 42 years, of course. Time for my evening meal, clearly.