2015 — 28 March: Saturday
A day of promised wind and rain has kicked off in my neck of the woods as merely dull grey. I shall content myself with remembering yesterday's sunshine. And the Sonny Rollins version of "Alfie" from a recent "Late Junction". And tea, of course. There's always tea.
I received...
... a kindly-meant suggestion last night after my "end of an era" remark.1 It brings to mind a delicious cartoon I spotted quite a while ago. I mentioned it to Carol as I knew it would be perfect in light of one of her projects at the time:
Today is the first day of my 6th year with IBM!! Halfway to my 10-year clock already.
There's a gorgeous cartoon in a trade rag today. It may be a Charles Addams original, but with a new caption. The scene is a graveyard on a wet day. The widow and her two kids are staring somewhat dolefully at a fresh, open grave. At their side, in a smart coat (and, doubtless, equally smart dark suit) is a typical DP management type who is saying "I know this may be an awkward time, but do you recall him ever mentioning source code?"
I don't now recall the name of the library management software, but it will be a cold day in Hell before I forget that perfect caption!
Well, isn't that neat? Not!
I just minimised the application window of the decibel music player, with the intention of making room on its virtual deskspace for a folder of images — I'd intended to look out another cartoon — and now, though the music plays on, not only is the decibel window no longer to be found anywhere, but I also seem to have mislaid the 'system monitor' tool with which I could at least kill its process. I suspect there are better ways of killing off a running application than invoking the nuclear option of system shutdown but, until I discover them, that was the only method that prompted Mint to resurrect the window for me to kill it on its way out the door (as it were).
Poking and prodding around at random next time I had a System Panel, I found that if you right click on the tiny separator between the "Hide all windows" icon at the extreme left next to "Menu" and the first of my 'parked' application icons there's a ray of hope to be found shining from this...
Selecting "Show windows from all workspaces" at least stopped greying out the "Restoring Minimised Windows" bit. But, alas, no joy. To my mild (but growing) exasperation, minimising the window of a running application still currently consigns it to Pluto's Dark Realm. Shucks! It really does sometimes seem almost as if the fine folk who write bits of Linux truly have little or no interest in making it any easier for the novice than they have to.
Recall that injunction from the list of the attributes of "real" programmers? If it was hard to write, it must therefore be made hard to use. I confess I knew one or two programmers in IBM Hursley who thought like that. One of them was one of my 22 (or so) first-line managers during my 25 years there. He was a "real" jerk, in my opinion. Quite senior, too.
Fresh food? Shopped.
More tea? Why not?
Breakfast? In a bit. Don't rush me.
I could more easily...
... accept Charlie Boy telling me to switch off my lights for an hour if I didn't know he had his own "private" trains and planes to transport him from 'A' (preferably far away from me) to 'B' (preferably further away from me). Bad enough that he purportedly has his very own toothpaste-tube squeezer. Unless that's a euphemism :-)
Listening to Josephine Public...
... calling the BBC's 'Money Box' with some unbelievably simple-minded pensions questions (now that one's "pension pot" can be drawn down in full) is another grim reminder that the UK Financial Services "Industry" and the surreal world of pensions providers exists to make its living in, shall we say, a parasitical manner. Our guvmint sums up matters perfectly rationally:
You think? [Pause] Does anyone actually still believe the ever more desperate political promises made in the run-up to a general election?
I mentioned...
... mother's modest "wodge" of BP shares last Sunday. Now that I've imposed a relative degree of order on the chaos, and sifted through the actual share certificates (filtering out all the various notifications of re-investment purchases and dividends retained for that purpose, notices of tax paid, and on and on) I've actually unearthed 27% more shares than the BP share register currently seems to think she has. Given that you can't actually trade the things without physically handing them over to the Registrar I find this puzzling. But it's still a nicer situation to be in than actually being able to lay my hands on (say) 27% fewer shares than BP seem to think she has. I predict a degree of correspondence, of a doubtless tedious and quite possibly prolonged nature, with the BP share Registrar in my fairly near future.
That's quite enough "work" for one dull afternoon...