2015 — 17 April: Friday
I'm predicting a little expotition while the clouds are hanging on to their water content, and ahead1 of the weekend hordes.
My apologies...
... if you received an "Error 524" (timeout). It seems some process on my server (the one in Texas that I control in a purely titular sense — Junior funds it) was doing something that caused the web server portion to hang around too long for CloudFlare's liking. With my recent switch to Linux, I now understand even better this point of view that I read some time ago:
Nowadays, we value the hermetically sealed, perfectly operating piece of technology. Apple tells us over and over: 'It just works.' This is infantilising, especially since these gleaming gadgets still have their glitches. Why should we have to rely on a priestly class of experts
who are the sole inheritors of a permission to play?
The more we can play with a system, take it apart, tweak it, even make it fail, the more we are comfortable with a technology. We don't view it as something foreign or strange, as solely the domain of experts, who overcharge us to fix our stuff, under threat of a voided warranty.
We see how our machines work, creaky joints and all, and we can take a certain amount of intellectual ownership in them.
Not that it makes for an easier time, necessarily :-)
Aside to Christa
Your Japanese cherry tree is looking as gorgeous as usual.
Several hours later...
... I've returned from the End of the Hedge clutching a new (dead) mouse with, I hope, a better scroll-wheel and click action than my long-in-the-tooth Microsoft one. This new one is from HP, Boeblingen (though made in China). I only once was in Boeblingen, though it did yield the first bit of creative fiction I wrote in IBM come time to fill in my expense claim.
I drove back via West End, passing the hospice, but being too busy dodging lots of traffic to pay much heed to it. November 2007 now seems a very long time ago, Christa!
Swinging by Asda I picked up three new DVDs, only one of which ("Predestination") is based on a weird short story by Robert Heinlein:
And, waiting on my doorstep, were those confessions of that pencil-obsessed comma queen:
The front cover graphic reminds me of some typewriter 'art' that Dad's secretary in Manchester produced for me one, otherwise rather boring, Saturday morning in the very early 1960s.
Digging through...
... some long-neglected hard drives (it would be criminally negligent of me to describe them as "data backups") I was delighted to rediscover this little gem — from Verbatim, Vol. XXVII, No. 3, page 27 — contributed by John H. Felts, M.D. Winston-Salem, NC:
In The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, the philosopher observed that illegitimate children born in rural England in the early to mid-nineteenth century were often called Mistykes. In the pre-WWII south, a banker's child might be referred to as "interest on a small deposit."
I enjoyed...
... "Predestination" even though I knew (as it were) more or less what was coming :-)