2015 — 2 April: Thursday
A good night's sleep makes even the most drizzly morning perfectly1 bearable.
Yet another...
... outing for Malcolm Arnold's "Padstow Lifeboat" march played by the Grimethorpe colliery band brings me neatly to breakfast.
I'm charmed...
... to learn that a "Dunning-Kruger" effect not only exists, but that the Cornell experiments leading to it in 1999 were 'inspired' by a bank robber so monumentally stupid that he thought lemon juice smeared on his face (like invisible ink) would render him invisible to security cameras. Bertrand Russell reportedly said "One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision" ...
I too (too) often used to wonder about the morons who end up running things. To the point where I bought and read Robert Hochheiser's "How to work for a jerk" as I found myself working for one at the time. (Yes; even in IBM.) I passed it along to Peter as, what with being a retired chap, I no longer give a toss about workplace moronicityness. I can also highly recommend Norman Dixon's "Psychology of military incompetence" along similar lines. Mind you, Popski put it a lot more succinctly back in the days of his private army: "bullshit baffles brains".
... but, alas, I still prefer Vladimir Peniakoff's more succinct "encapsulation" — and I've known that for half a century. Without even attending Cornell.
Closer examination...
... of the back cover art of yesterday's Blu-ray suggests last night's "Interstellar" journey...2
... is not yet at the halfway point. Though my tolerance for a further three hours or more may well be.
I now know...
... why today's Mr Postie arrived in a car, and was travelling with an escort!
I'm pretty sure I also know exactly which neurotic faeces-filled canine local lump of unpleasantness is to blame, too. At a time when my snailmail volume is necessarily increased (today bringing a bereavement letter from one of Brenda's gang of tax collectors, for example) I can do without the need for a daily trek to the local Delivery Office. If this were my "pet", I would be hanging my head in shame. Now, where's my pitchfork, and what do I use for a flaming torch?
Following some post-lunch advice...
... I've proved I can restore my running applications across a Linux restart. Mint's "Startup Applications Preferences" has a tab labelled "Options" (though there's just one... a radio button that claims it will "Automatically remember running applications when logging out"). Three out of my four running programs at the time (Thunderbird email, Firefox web browsing, and Pluma text editing) were not only reloaded, but restored — including all four text files I was editing — into the virtual deskspaces they had been in. Neat. (I've yet to try this handy facility3 across a full power shutdown.)
The black sheep? That was FileZilla, my webserver SSH file-transfer application. This doesn't restart, let alone resume normal operation. But I can live with that. And launching just FileZilla on log in will be fine.
It occurs to me that the 'problem' Iris had yesterday was actually conceptually no different from the one I had in failing to notice this crucial useful little control tab. Her document pages were opening in LibreOffice Writer, but were being shown far too small for her to work on. (When I got there, I found they were scaled down to 24%.) She had failed to notice the little zoom "slider" tucked away at the bottom right hand corner. This quickly restored her pages to 100%. I can sympathise: I got out of the habit of prodding random things in Windows programs for the reasons mentioned here. Laziness, basically.
My growing hunger...
... suggests I should stop test-driving Bodhi 3.0.0 Linux (off the 'live' ISO on my USB stick) and do something more in the foody line for a while. Soon. But before I dive into the kitchen, I shall just predict that I will definitely be installing Bodhi soon. Alongside Mint 17 to begin with, of course. Baby steps, David. It found the screen in full 4K, loaded up a Midori web browser (new to me) and lobbed me into the QuickStart guide (which I'd already read, of course). The Enlightenment desktop is a Thing of Considerable Elegance...
I like albatrosses...
... though I couldn't eat a whole one. The photo here (taken on a beach on Midway Atoll) says pretty much all you need to know about what our cretinous species is doing to this planet.
Pinnacle of creation? I don't think so!