2014 — 12 December: Friday

No further space-faring adventures lined up today. Instead, I shall be popping over to blag a cuppa and a biscuit from Roger and Eileen this afternoon. Actually, I did get up in good time to avoid any of the usual set of Friday shopping hordes hereabouts, but decided I didn't actually have any pressing grocery needs (aside from the inevitable cuppa) quite yet. So that's been made, and has been going in while I assess weather and routes for my weekend jaunt1 to the Midlands.

Although I've made...

... that journey many times in the last 33 years2 — and about a dozen times in my little blue Yaris — I still live in hope (rather like Heinlein's cat Petronius the Arbiter seeking "The Door into Summer") of discovering an interesting new route one day.

There's just no end...

... in this "best of all possible worlds", it seems, to the quantity (and low quality) of spam and junk mail. I'd just finished reading a fascinating essay (albeit one supported by a dubious sounding grant) on Leibniz ...

I cannot tell you how extraordinarily distracted and spread out I am. I am trying to find various things in the archives; I look at old papers and hunt up unpublished documents.... I receive and answer a huge number of letters. At the same time, I have so many mathematical results, philosophical thoughts, and other literary innovations that should not be left to disappear, that I often do not know where to begin.... Thanks to the help of a craftsman whom I have engaged, the calculator with which one can do multiplications up to twelve decimal places is finally ready. A year has gone by; I still have the craftsman with me in order to make more machines of this type, for they are in constant demand.

Marc E Bobro in New Atlantis


... when, to my 'shock, horror' I — technically, my email client's spam filter — got an email telling me "Hi Facebook" (sic) my Facebook password "was been reset" (sic) "due to suspicious activity of your account" (sic). As if to guarantee authenticity, it told me I run Opera on a BlackBerry Browser, too. Who gnu? I suppose, with more than half a billion users, the odd one or two million may fall down the rabbit hole.

Long ago...

... and very far away, I read Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead". Dreadful tosh — not least because of his awful euphemism for a commonly-used obscenity that jarred all too often. Oddly, in the intervening 45-plus years I've never felt much urge to read anything further by him, though I admit I have a couple of essays and an interview knocking around in collections of what was laughingly called "The New Journalism" (and similar) in the early 1970s. My self-imposed state of Maileresque deprivation will now necessarily include an edited selection of the 45,000 letters he wrote. What a fuggin' waste... (Link.)

Slightly less long ago...

... and rather closer to home, I for some reason 'survived' a number of employee-number reduction efforts at the IBM Hursley software Lab. I eventually left under my own steam (as it were) three months after joining the Quarter Century Club. Reading an essay about life in Microsoft3 brought a wry smile of recognition. Source and snippet:

I licked my wounds and proceeded on to far more dreary years on MSN Messenger Service, eventually getting buried so deeply in internal company politics that I was no longer able to do anything resembling useful work. The writing was on the wall when I heard one team manager scream, "I have the worst morale scores in the company and I don't give a shit, because they can only go up!"
Those were the years of Microsoft's long, slow decline, which continues to this day. The number of things wrong with the company was extraordinary, but they can be summed up by the word bureaucracy.

David Auerbach in N+1


As a child...

... I loved the idea of the little box with a toggle switch. When you flicked the switch "on", a little hatch opened, a hand popped out, switched the switch back "off", and returned to its lair, closing the hatch behind it. This YouTube video evokes much the same whimsical pleasure. (Link.)

An incoming batch...

... of festive Blu-ray entertainment to note...

Further BDs

... before I turn my attention to an evening meal. It's a chilly +4C out there so far this evening as I listen to the really quite sickening boss chap of the CIA talking on NPR, glibly referring chillingly to "EITs" rather than calling torture by, erm, its proper name. And for Dick Cheney to dismiss the report as a "piece of crap" speaks volumes about that splendid gentleman, too. In my opinion. I've not met him. Or Bush. And would not wish to.

But then, nor would I enjoy being flown on a "rendition" mission to a country where Enhanced Interrogation Techniques are legally employable. For the US to continue to claim any moral higher ground without criminal prosecutions in the wake of the report seems to be straining credibility pretty far. There comes a point when your actions and behaviour can render you indistinguishable from the Bad Guys. Then what?

I've just heard...

... an 'expert' from 'academia' somewhere in Aberdeen waffling on national steam radio about the (latest) Swanwick ATC failure with little hard data about which to speculate meaningfully. Memories, heh?

I actually took the Friday off to visit, with Christa, the new UK Air Traffic 'en route' Control Centre at Swanwick. It's just off the motorway, occupying 35 acres of a 135-acre site, the rest being a Nature Reserve. And it's also keeping a very low profile as their major fear is terrorism; though it doesn't go live until they've finished sorting out the software this October or so. (IBM has actually been slung off the job, not necessarily correctly, as I think they have yet to discover...) Brother John would have been very interested to see this (we got in courtesy of the local Chamber of Commerce, of which Christa is an active member, and were given a positively VIP tour) if only to compare it with that visit to Heathrow or West Drayton or wherever it was that Arnold Field smuggled us into about a quarter of a century ago.

It will make a marvellous workplace for Junior in six years or so, too. In fact, with the Oceanographic Centre, the University, and the expansion plans for both the Port and the local airport, he's going to be spoilt for choice: there's a lot in the way of relatively hi-tech employment opportunity all more or less on our doorstep down here. The Swanwick people, for example, are planning to be here for the next 40 years, during which they fully expect to get through five or six complete generations of computer and control systems. The Port, meanwhile, wants to double its container-handling capacity from what's already a high level. And the city is positively overrun with students: 10,000 at least. Plus, there's IBM just up the road, I suppose, if the worst comes to the worst!

Date: 23 March 1997 letter to dear Mama


  

Footnotes

1  Roll on teleportation.
2  Only as a passenger until December 2007, of course. Though that was (well) over 44,000 miles ago now...
3  Written by a chap who was born (I estimate) at some point during the 10 months that I spent in first-line management in ICL back in 1977/8.