2015 — 13 March: Friday
I've always said (or, to be brutally honest, told other people [including the stream of bright-eyed {and sometimes quite bright} youngsters passing through my tender care in my last decade at IBM]) "One should without fail or exception RTFM."1 After all, I've written enough of the damn' things, over the years. Hence, today's initial morning cuppa has been supped while straining my eyes not at a Braille edition of "The Times of London" (Max Carrados reference, anyone?) but at the "Mysteries of the Organism" that is my GIGABYTE GA-Z97X-SLI (such a catchy title, don't you agree?) User's Manual.
Rivetting, it ain't, but it tells me, for example, that I can disable the onboard audio, which may just be the trick needed to persuade Linux from constantly trying to spurn my Creative X-Fi soundcard. After all, if the BIOS tells the OS "Stop arguing, chuck, and use the card on the PCI bus" what could possibly go wrong? We shall hear...
I've been retrieving...
... all that fine Pythonic DB wrangling and SHTML generation code that Brian cooked up for my "Books" database ASCII file that so offended him. This came from what — in a surprisingly brief former lifetime — was the 240 GB SSD previously hosting my initial tentative paddles in the shallow end of the pool of Linux Mint 17.1 on BlackBeast Mark II. Now, of course, I'm a battle-hardened veteran of multiple installations (which are, I like to think, getting better2 with each fresh incarnation).
Now, how about some breakfast...
Losing interest...
... bit(e)-by-bit(e). My online bank is cutting its "Loyalty Saver Issue 4" (such a catchy title, don't you agree?) rate to 1.00% gross next month. Typical! Pick on poor ol' pensioners :-)
Apparently...
... there's a density3 that shapes our bottoms ends rough, hue them as we will. A long chat with Brian educates me further on the extent to which his analytical neural wiring is orthogonal to mine. And on the wisdom of installing new hardware and drivers for Linux in a proper order, not to mention fashion. The principle applies out in my back jungle, too. I've just spent 30 minutes at the side of my house clearing both my head and a path to Shed #1 (in which I hope to cram the astonishing variety of "Boxes, cardboard; hardware for the use of" that's somehow accumulated recently).
Of course, before I could get to Shed #1, I first needed a path to Shed #2 in which (I was fairly sure) I might find an implement or two to permit me to wield mass destruction on the undergrowth blocking my intended route to Shed #1. Guess what I also found in Shed #2, Christa? That's right, the bucket you'd placed there to catch the drips from its leaky roof. It was very nearly full, too. So I'm now taking a cuppa break before I actually crack open the door to Shed #1. I don't think I could face the discovery that it's already full of earlier generations of "Boxes, cardboard; hardware for the use of" that I've long since forgotten.
Thus is Life in Technology Towers. One long struggle against entropy. Floral, and cybernetic. Tea helps :-)
A positive profusion of planty stuff has been placed on a potential pyre. It's now time to kick back with lunch and what remains of the Kermode and Mayo film programme. Turned out to be 5 minutes.
Now that we're approaching...
... sundown, and I've finished dashing around like a blue-arsed fly cleaning everything that wasn't already at least "boy clean" (as Peter's ladyfriend terms it), I can re-heat my neglected cuppa of an hour or so ago. And then invite you to the public opening of a display of the visible fruits of recent Python wrangling, from here. You4 will find there two lists of my books SQLite DB, bang up-to-date, sorted within genre by Authors and Titles. I've re-used a CSS style I was playing around with a couple, well several, years ago for my (even larger) lists of individual MP3 files before I got bored with working (admittedly pointlessly) on lists that could just as easily be churned out of the XML DB that WinAmp used. (Of course, being a Windows-free zone now, I can no longer use WinAmp. But who, but me, is interested in the MP3 files I've ripped from my own CDs?)
Which reminds me: I'd better pop at least one of my optical drives back into BlackBeast Mark III before I forget. And remember to change the boot order, again, to stop the futile hammering noise the Blu-Ray drive made while searching for a non-existent file on a non-existent disk.
If my server logs speak the truth, lists of my books are mostly what people view on 'molehole'. I have a theory about that.
Meanwhile...
... look what I've just found in the Mint 17.1 Release Notes:
I've just upgraded my Laptop PC from 17 to 17.1 while supping the neglected cuppa. All is OK. It took less than five minutes.
Technically...
... it's now tomorrow, but I can hardly retire before my visitors turn up, can I?