2015 — 19 February: Thursday
Another piece1 fell into place (or do I mean bubbled up from my subconscious?) overnight. I'd moaned (on our walk yesterday) about all the brain-ache setting up my web server access details — to be precise, the file paths locally and to the remote files — anew each day and Brian mentioned the preferences tab of "FileZilla" (another silly name for a file transfer utility). So, after firing it up, but before actually invoking the Site Manager to select which web server to chat to, I dug out the scrap of paper on which I'd scribbled these file paths. Result? They're now safely plumbed into the default settings of each 'site' ready for use.
Meanwhile...
... those indefatigable Amazon elves have just told me they have a package "out for delivery" today. This is a shame as I too will be "out" (though for lunch, not for delivery).
I find this...
... both all-too-believable and extremely depressing:
Science appeals to our rational brain, but our beliefs are motivated largely by emotion, and the biggest motivation is remaining tight with our peers. "We're all in high school. We've never left high school," says Marcia McNutt. "People still have a need to fit in, and that need to fit in is so strong that local values and local opinions are always trumping science. And they will continue to trump science, especially when there is no clear downside to ignoring science."
Or, as Sarah Connor put it (in "Terminator 2") while watching her son and the 'Arnie' machine: "We're doomed, aren't we?"
Compare...
... and contrast:
Our improved ability to reason abstractly may also be the result of the spread of scientific thinking — reason, rationality, empiricism, skepticism. Thinking like a scientist means employing all our faculties to overcome our emotional, subjective, and instinctual brains to better understand the true nature of not only the physical and biological worlds, but the social world (politics and economics) and the moral world (abstracting how other people should be treated) as well.
Now ain't that the truth?
While awaiting...
... my telephonic summons out to the "White Horse" in Ampfield2 I've been improving the Shining Hour by installing Microsoft's set of core fonts and then downloading and installing Yet Another Editor. This one's called "Atomic" and recognises my SHTML out of the box. A Good Start.
[Pause]
Sadly, after toggling off its Menu Bar while poking around for a way to brighten up its appalling default HTML highlighting I'm now unable to persuade it to toggle it back on. Since this makes driving it about as easy as steering a car when you've just wrenched off the round thing that the driver clutches all the time, I fear poor ol' Atomic is already now on the "pending uninstall" heap. My bad, no doubt, but since I don't know what I did I'm in the dark on how to recover.
[Pause]
Nice lunch and chatter, but now it's cold and pouring with rain. Yuk. I (still, at 14:33) await the Amazon elf who probably called while I was out and will therefore have pushed me to the end of his 're-try' queue. Mr Postie, by contrast, dropped off the latest care-home invoice and a Norma Winstone CD "Distances" whose cover scanning will have to wait for the cunning wheeze whereby I physically swap scanners for a same make / different model known to "just work" under Linux Mint 17.1. And for that to happen, I first have to pinpoint the present hiding place for its power supply (which has one of the more esoteric DC leads used on Planet Earth for its output jack).
I rather hoped...
... that uninstalling and then reinstalling3 the Atomic editor might cause it to wake up from cryofreeze (as it were) with its original faculties intact. Or, failing that, with its Menu Bar once again visible. No such luck. Obviously what I mean by complete uninstall (remove package) and what Mint 17.1 understands by it are two different things. Oh well, I didn't want to use it anyway — crikey, this grape is sour. Meanwhile, I'm liking the Pluma editor more and more :-)
The answers (thank you Brian and Mrs Google) turn out to be the Alt key. And to delete all the 'hidden' Atomic configuration files that I will find if I go looking. But one of the questions is why does the programmer provide this facility? Another is why does the Menu Bar disappear again, and make the line I'm on jump up irritatingly when I start typing? And another is why is it assumed I want indented text between all my markup tags? I could also wonder why a program's configuration files are left on the system, hidden, if / when you ask for complete uninstallation. Shades of the stuff left behind in the Windows Registry, surely? And we all know how well that's turned out.
I shall revert to Pluma. Again.
And make...
... my next, overdue, cuppa while examining what the Amazon elf dropped off a few minutes ago. I would scan the covers, but that remains on hold until after the cunning scanner exchange wheeze has executed. And I won't be going out on a night like this. Traffic in Chandler's Ford is bad enough, even without the current shifting sets of road works. My own traffic calming measure is a lovely track called "hypno" on the album "Dubient" by Man Data Sound. My first, and so far only, CD directly imported from Greece quite a few years ago.
Best question...
... I've seen (so far) this year from a wannabe MP:
I'm guessing the Heat Death of the Universe? At which point, who cares if UKIP is in power?