2015 — 21 January: Wednesday
Some people might (I said "might") find it shocking that it can take so long to produce an independent report into our recent military misadventure in the land of sand that its publication will not now occur until safely after the next general election. Being a trusting, uncynical, simple-minded citizen subject I am — of course — not in the "shocked" camp. Besides, I feel completely confident that the boy Dave's letter expressing his "frustration" at the yet further delay will get those printing presses rolling.
Let's be fair: if the current Prime Minister can't manage such a trick, it's very hard to imagine how a previous one managed to kick off1 a whole war. Oh, wait, he had the guidance of a Good Book to quell doubts.
Blair, 6 Feb 2003: "It's not the oil that is the issue, it is the weapons..." Blair, 12 Dec 2009: "The issue of the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction was actually irrelevant to my opinion and attitude back in 2003".
Good grief, is that the time? Better lurch into action.
I gather "cruft"...
... is the technical term for the junk that accumulates on a Windows PC over the course of time. I spent an hour or so "de-crufting" BlackBeast a couple of evenings ago. Items removed included the Trusteer Rapport "security guard" that was supposed to watch over my financial web transactions but whose weekly report, when it could even be bothered to make one, invariably revealed a TCP/IP address problem with an institution I don't even access. And who snailmail me every two or three years to threaten cancellation of one or other of their cards unless I start using them. Out, too, went the Secunia PSI software inspector that was supposed to keep all my installed software up to date but which always needed a kick to get it going (and always failed to find a random subset of the stuff in any case).
Also on my hit list was a popular Malware inspector that invariably removed one particular DLL, disabling one particular program that is completely blameless. A little bit of the irritation from that sort of thing goes a long way to piss me off, particularly when email exchanges with the author of the affected program revealed he'd now given up trying to get this false positive fixed.
Without wishing to exhibit too much 'confirmation bias' I now find BlackBeast seems to be a little more sprightly, though it's rare for me to push the CPU over 2% or 3% in the first place. I suspect I thus remain vulnerable to the suggestion that I might have over-specified the system. A little bit. Possibly. And I'm sure the all-SSD SATA III drives play their part.
Nobody's perfect
Not even Google Mail, as viewed through Thunderbird's eyes a few minutes ago:
AdWords fail me.
Words also fail...
... a BBC web page editor. Or, at least, I certainly hope so:
I could believe "have been reported under" but I'm not sure I can believe "have resulted from". Or is this just dumbing down? Perhaps the latter. Consider this snippet from BBC Arts news of the RSC production about Oppenheimer:
... the play has to teach its audience a lot about radical politics in 1930s America and about the race during World War Two to harness nuclear fusion.
Fusion, Fission, they both start with an "F" and end with "sion"... what more do you want? (Link.)
My water bill...
... tells me I've managed to trickle through exactly 12 m3 of the stuff in seven months:
In April 2008 (just before the water meter came, erm, on-stream) I was paying £62-49/month. My bill is now £13/month.
Mutatis mutandis
When I first commissioned BlackBeast I noted the 15 key applications I pinned to my taskbar. Fast forward just over four years to see the extent of my application inflation:
I've been pondering...
... long enough (since 19 May 2012, in fact) how to make better use2 of the £800 PMC centre loudspeaker that I removed from my living room system when I reverted to gloriously-simple stereo down there. I'd been considering popping the speaker on to the windowsill of my little reading room upstairs and then using the currently unused Denon tuner/amp set to "mono" to drive it. But now, of course, I have that lovely new little Marantz A/V receiver just crying out for me to connect up this neglected speaker and use it to enrich the somewhat thinner sounds I get from the Rock Solids.
Good idea.
- Find some speaker cable.
- Find the HDMI to DVI lead.
- Find a 'kettle' lead for the monitor.
- Temporarily reconnect a 24" Dell monitor so I can see, and have some chance of following, the setup3 instructions.
- While I'm at it, I may as well first look for any firmware updates, and let the Marantz do its downloady thing. Found one. Wait for the seven to eight minutes to download it and re-flash its memory.
- Now find, and use, the test tone to set the audio levels between the two Rock Solids and the PMC speaker.
Tune to the Simon Rattle Beethoven. Why's nothing coming out of the centre speaker? I got a test tone out of it mere moments ago. Ponder anew. Realise (only after some futile fiddling) that in "normal" use I'll need to reset from stereo mode to a Dolby Pro-Logic II mode to force the Marantz to derive a centre channel signal from the stereo input coming in from the digital radio.
Final result? Bliss. Or, as dear ol' Dad used to say, everything comes to he who waits. I need a cuppa.