2015 — 9 February: Monday
I've just agreed — I'm clearly mad — to host not only Big Bro but also Big Sis for a not clearly-specified period at the end of June or the start of July. That will, it only now occurs to me, give me barely enough time to evict my mistresses, find the Dyson, and break the habit of wandering around less than fully clad. Muttering aloud. Still, the exercise will doubtless be one I can ultimately look fondly back on after the scars have faded.
Sleep was...
... induced surprisingly quickly — just after midnight — by, of all things, Richard Fortey's unimaginatively-titled, and rather floridly-written, book on trilobites:
At least I didn't dream about them. Meanwhile, I'm sure it's not the correct interpretation1 but I've decided (if that's the right verb with which to characterise my ratiocination) that there won't be too much pension-saving going on in these here parts this month. And why not? One needs a treat or two after paying a large household bill. After all, you're only old once.
Besides, it's a short month :-)
Nothing quite as big...
... as my new monitor screen — which struck me, in any case, as being very reasonably priced2 — but there will be several CDs and digital downloads, and a small but well-chosen pile of books to be added to one of the elegant tottering heaps. Assuming I can find a stable-looking elegant tottering heap to add them to. I'm predicting few if any DVDs or Blu-rays, however. Partly because my recent (and fairly ruthless) cull showed me the extent to which I can still, even at my advanced age, be suckered by skilful trailers. Mostly because very little in the constant flood of meretricious stuff3 has caught my ever-roving eye so far.
Besides, there's a bit of a multimedia backlog. See above, re "tottering heaps". [Pause] Onward to breakfast.
Brian tells me...
... "my" Raspberry Pi2 with its 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 and 1GB of RAM awaits only its 16GB micro-SD card (aka brain transplant) for it to start the process of being turned into my next (internal) 'molehole' webserver. Cute, isn't it?
It occurs to me that I paid rather a lot more (in October 1996) for the 203MHz StrongARM replacement processor card that utterly transformed the performance of my already-fast Acorn RISC-PC 700. Which reminds me of an amusing (in retrospect) newsgroup incident I relayed to Carol back in that first year of Java in IBM:
There was a follow-on a month later :-)
I performed...
... my first-ever firmware upgrade to Intel hardware a while ago. That was on my unlamented iMac. Despicable machine. (Just broke off there to field a call and supply the necessary bits of info [password and IP address] for the new webserver.) That was the day I first discovered Scrivener (which I note Charles Stross is now using, but that's an aside). My second-ever firmware upgrade to Intel hardware was yesterday evening, as I talked Iris telephonically through the procedure on her spiffy HP All-in-One PC.
It's a lot less scary when somebody else is doing this on somebody else's PC... Since there have been no anguished screams of pain I'm guessing it worked OK.
A (very) late lunch...
... calmly munched in the knowledge that, when Brian has chewed through whatever Linux permissions issue is stopping "my" Raspberry Pi2 from munching on its own lunch of "my" files — presented to it, not on a silver platter, but on a much more mundane USB memory stick — my internal 'molehole' web will spring back into life with, erm, renewed vigour in its new home. And I can then replant it here in Technology Towers. That's the theory, anyway.
Meanwhile, as ever, there's a spot of fresh food supplies shopping to be done now that my winged messenger Mr Hermes has delivered his box of Amazon goodies and I'm again free to nip out.
Significant pause
I realise the successfully-concluded upgrade of my internal webserver (from the 256MB 300MHz RPi of the last two years to the 1GB 900Mhz RPi2 of the last 10 minutes) is completely invisible to people browsing 'molehole' out among the sharks and unwashed spivs on the Greater Web. But the webmaster who's stuck with the significantly larger set of internal pages on the Lesser Web here in the living room of Technology Towers is (a), gobsmacked by the plug-compatibility of the new box, and (b), delighted by the sprightlier fashion in which 'molehole' pages are now being displayed.
Each time I revisit...
... this diary entry — a trip down Memory Lane (why's it called that? I forget) my minor-league OCD helps ensure I make annually — I'm reminded anew of my idiocy in the cables-on-the-floor across-the-top-of-the-stairs incident. I also smile to see, and make an assiduous mental note to scan, the covers of two related books.4 I promptly forget all about it and do something else for the next 365 days. Such as listen to one of today's deliveries: a 2xCD set of the sublime piano of Igor Levit as he weaves his magical way through six Bach partitas. (That may well also be why I'm only just now finishing my evening meal at 20:25 or so.)
Click the pic to see the second title.
I amaze myself...
... with the sheer quantity of stuff I don't know about. Source and snippet:
As Pitts began his work at MIT, he realized that although genetics must encode for gross neural features, there was no way our genes could pre-determine the trillions of synaptic connections in the brain — the amount of information it would require was untenable. It must be the case, he figured, that we all start out with essentially random neural networks — highly probable states containing negligible information (a thesis that continues to be debated to the present day). He suspected that by altering the thresholds of neurons over time, randomness could give way to order and information could emerge. He set out to model the process using statistical mechanics. Wiener excitedly cheered him on, because he knew if such a model were embodied in a machine, that machine could learn.