2015 — 27 March: Friday
I shall be travelling further afield1 to join my lunchtime companions at, erm, lunchtime today. So I'm pleased to see only traces of a mild frost this morning. We do now seem finally to be in March's "going out like a lamb" phase.
It will soon be...
... time for the clock in my little Yaris to be nearly right for half a year. Though I don't think it's quite right to refer to "summer" just yet. It is quite right for my first cuppa, however. Meanwhile, having decided my basic Linux system has finally been tinkered with enough, I shall now set my four main applications...
... to auto-start (at login) even though I haven't found a trick2 yet to assign each of them to a different virtual workspace. I can live without that, I suspect.
Maxwell's silver hammer
I find I can also live without an Android App to perform a 2D Finite Difference Time Domain calculation on my smartphone (or, better,3 on my SHIELD Tablet PC) to solve Maxwell's equation (on a Cartesian grid of a Technology Towers floor plan) to map Wi-Fi "not" spots. Even at 50p. I'm not saying I've already performed the necessary calculations for this simulation in my head. It's more that my wireless router lives vertically above me in Peter's room a mere seven feet (and one thin set of floorboards and joists) above said head.
It's amazing what I can live without these days. Parents, wives, whatever next? :-)
Back in January 1995...
... Carol mentioned she was off "for some sort of availability review (of a complex of aging and Rube Goldbergian systems that drive the CMOS lines)" in Burlington Virginia. I picked her up on the "Rube" reference (which I knew) and offered her "Heath Robinsonish" (which she didn't know) as our UK equivalent. Two decades later, I've just found a nice piece on Mr Goldberg. Source and tiny snippet:
Retirement was mentioned. The guest of honor bristled at the word. In an unpublished memoir, he wrote belligerently, "I would never let the muddy waters of retirement swallow up my old carcass while my mind was still functioning and my hands were free of the stiffness of
arthritis and inertia. I was only eighty years old. I had to keep busy."
He found a new avenue for his talents a week after the [80th] birthday party. In addition to length and width, he experimented with depth in an unaccustomed art form. Originally, he agreed with artist Ad Reinhardt, who defined sculpture as "something you bump into when
you back up to look at a painting." But in his golden years, Rube came to a different point of view...
I can recommend this book...
... though my personal preference is for the more whimsical approach taken by (William) Heath Robinson. [Pause] My personal preference is also to agree fully with these sentiments in the 'wake' of the re-burial of a bunch of old bones:
I can see the dilemma: you can't put even a bad king's bones on show in a museum when preservation of the idea of monarchy requires holy respect. It matters not that so many have been villains or half-wits. The one benefit of a supremely privileged family is to prove, once and for all, that talent and brains are randomly assigned. Forget a super-race, this royal selective breeding with the very best education and top university tutors has produced the least intellectually curious, least artistic, dullest bunch of polo-playing, hunting, shooting, fishing dullards you could hope not to meet. But then their adherents praise their very "ordinariness" as a quality.
Another gem...
... though it's maddening that this sort of battle is still so necessary. I find it hard to conceal my dislike of people who refuse to think for themselves and prefer to rely on holy texts:
We live in a nation where public acceptance of evolution is the second lowest of thirty-four developed countries, just ahead of Turkey. Roughly half of Americans reject some aspect of evolution, believe the earth is less than ten thousand years old, and that humans coexisted with dinosaurs. Where I live, many believe evolution to be synonymous with atheism, and there are those who strongly feel I am teaching heresy to thousands of students. A local pastor, whom I've never met, wrote an article in The University Christian complaining that, not only was I teaching evolution and ignoring creationism, I was teaching it as a non-Christian, alternative religion.
Is it any wonder that Cyril Kornbluth's 1951 story "The Marching Morons" remains so vividly in my memory?
Hah!
Just (re-)found where I can stop the irritating 'preview' of a sound file from happening if I hover over it. Good ol' Control Centre. And snailmail tells me mother's BP shareholding has increased again.
[Pause, of about six hours]
Every time I find myself...
... stuck in traffic heading slowly home down the A34 north of Winchester on a late Friday afternoon I end up asking myself why I choose the rush hour. I get no satisfactory answer, but then there's no satisfactory alternative route back from Gill and Chris so it's a bit moot. Lunch at "The Fox Inn" (now entirely dedicated to Thai cuisine) was very enjoyable, and I seem to have sorted out her new Samsung Galaxy 10" Android Tablet PC — to the point, at least, where she can access her NAS files, and knows where best to put them on the Tablet. A tasty device, by the way, though not slathered in a delicious soy sauce.
Meanwhile, sadly, I've only just heard of the death (yesterday) of John Renbourn.
The statute of limitations...
... or mother's death (pick one) means I can finally stop worrying about her predilection (as noted in an email to Carol) for happily chucking out my books whenever she got a chance:
I predict that this business of Mum's future housing is going to grow to a sizeable cloud on the horizon. She remarked to Christa, for example, that if only I didn't have that book-filled study she could happily move in there, couldn't she? Re-arrange the following words to form a well-known phrase or saying: body, over, dead, my...
Desmond Carrington has just played "My canary has circles under his eyes". So what? Well he played it a while back too, dagnabbit. Mind you, that was about when I seemed to stop tuning in to his amiable show.
End of an era
I've just unsubscribed to Xara's monthly newsletter. Not much point now that Technology Towers has sworn off Windows, is there? That particular era began in 1990 when I bought the original "Artworks" software for my much-missed RISC OS system to use alongside the incredibly powerful "Impression" DTP software. Artworks (though not Impression, which [I seem to recall] was written in ARM assembler) was eventually ported to Windows, soon snapped up by Corel, later bought back by what was still then "Computer Concepts", and ultimately ended up branded as "Xara" — the reason a certain model of French car had to rename it as a Xsara in the UK market, at least — and owned by Magix in Germany.