2015 — 19 March: Thursday — happy birthday, favourite son!
I've yet to find any IBM shares in a concealed compartment.1 But yesterday evening — working through a file in which I'd been slinging mother's snailmails for five years (unopened, if they looked too boring) — I was surprised to see how things can add up. Recall Heinlein? He observed: "$100 placed at 7% interest compounded quarterly for 200 years will increase to more than $100,000,000 — by which time it will be worth nothing." I hadn't delved until now. It was bad enough preparing annual summaries for her elderly accountant2 for three decades.
Money matters?
Big Bro and I aren't in Wellsian territory, but there should be enough to buy slightly less stale crusts of bread. Meanwhile the IBM pensions web site offers hope of a tiny annual uplift next month. It won't go very far to offset inflation. <Sigh>
Catch-22?
This, from a perfesser of filosophistry, made me smile:
The gullible rarely believe they are gullible and the closed-minded don't believe they are closed-minded. The only hope of overcoming self-ignorance in such cases is to accept that other people — your co-workers, your spouse, your friends — probably know your intellectual character better than you do. But even that won't necessarily help. After all, it might be that refusing to listen to what other people say about you is one of your intellectual character traits. Some defects are incurable.
Only some? :-)
Round...
... and round I go, it seems:
The (completely) dead-in-the-water Linux PC has at least taught me that a complete re-installation takes a basic 42 minutes, followed by the ATI proprietary driver install, followed by the 268 updates available as of a few minutes ago to a clean Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit system. (For all I know, it was one of the last ten of these from last night that did the dirty on me.) No data has been lost as I'm cautious ("paranoid" might be a better adjective) in keeping that PC's user data on an external 500GB USB hard drive.
A complete re-installation now takes less than 5 minutes, followed by... etc etc :-)
Is this...
... really a decent Christian thing to be doing? During a drought, too.
Just askin'. Though I bet the Arch Bish doesn't get a bucket of water thrown over him in bed once an hour. (Or perhaps he does; who knows, these days?)
Just time...
... before nipping out to my lunch date to report today's incoming trio of Blu-rays. Good job I got my scanner working:
I don't expect many people still read Lionel Davidson, these days.
Procrastination doesn't...
... work when you've got an official appointment with the Registrar of Dead People tomorrow morning. For which I need to gather and collate various bits of motherly-related info to keep the guvmint off my back in days, weeks, and possibly even months, to come. [Pause] I trust tomorrow morning's partial solar eclipse won't cast too much gloom over my mission. I have collected all the data. Even birth certificates of both parents! Quite what a modern Western state does with flimsy 98-year-old pieces of paper baffles me.
That's quite enough of that for one day.
For my future use
A note on pinpointing all occurrences of an unwanted character (for example, a currency symbol that breaks in different character sets) on 'molehole' web pages:
find -L ~/localwebfiles -name "*.html" "*.SHTML" -exec grep -l "£" {} \;
Explanation:
find -L #find files, follow symbolic links
~/localwebfiles #link to my local webserver from my home directory (~)
-name "*.html" "*.SHTML" #all shtml files, upper or lower case
-exec #for each match, perform the following command
grep -l #search file and report only the filename if there is a match
"£" #character string to match
{} #actual filename is substituted here
\; #terminates -exec command string
Pretty...
... though Cinnamon undoubtedly is, I've switched back to MATE again. It strikes me as more straightforward (and less bling-filled, of course). After spending a few days with it I realised all I was doing was slowly adjusting it to behave the same way I'd already trained MATE to behave.