2015 — 18 April: Saturday
No more expotitions today, methinks. That's what cyberspace is for, of course. I really dislike the weekend hordes.
I re-read...
... Heinlein's "... all you zombies..." last night (after watching "Predestination" first, of course). I also now need to re-install SQLite Browser and fire it up to find out where a couple of Heinlein-related items may still be lurking. I trust I can still find the scrap of paper on which I noted details of its PPA to get the version I last used. And how to build and install it.1 The version currently in Mint's repository remains unhelpfully back-level. ("Unhelpfully" in this case meaning it will only browse, but not let me update, the data. Fair enough, for something with "browser" in its title, but not quite sufficient for my fowl porpoises.)
I can see...
... from this only-partly satirical piece that nothing has improved since Malcolm Bradbury's "Cuts" or David Lodge's "Brummidge" trilogy. Or Alan Plater's "Oliver's Travels" and Andrew Davies' "A Very Peculiar Practice" for that matter:
One result of this hot pursuit of the student purse is the growth of courses tailored to whatever is currently in fashion among 20-year-olds. In my own discipline of English, that means vampires rather than Victorians, sexuality rather than Shelley, fanzines rather than Foucault, the contemporary world rather than the medieval one. It is thus that deep-seated political and economic forces come to shape syllabuses. Any English department that focused its energies on Anglo-Saxon literature or the 18th century would be cutting its own throat.
My own truly frightening levels of unworldly ignorance and cultural blind spots at age 20 would have made a good research topic :-)
But this...
... sort of stuff reliably makes me cringe:
More recent work in philosophy includes various forms of realism about the world: the idea that reality is not the product of consciousness, or of human perceptual structures or languages or interpretive communities, but exists independently.
I somehow doubt I need the "work" of a philosopher to tell me what is real. But you try telling a philosopher that. It reminds me (of course) about the University bursar who was bemoaning the relative expense of the physics department (with its endless requests for hi-tech toys such as atom smashers) versus, say, the maths department ("All they ever request is pads of paper, pencils, and erasers") versus the philosophy dons ("Just like the maths guys, except they don't even ask for erasers!") There's more here. Reality is, of course, merely a crutch for those who can't handle drugs.
How can...
... the Oklahoma state governor reconcile the wearing of her crucifix with the use of nitrogen as an execution method? Just askin'. There's an irony, too, in the name (Mike Christian) of one of the authors. The state seems altogether too comfortable with the idea of killing people. (Link.)
Slow down your arthropods...
... by following the excellent guidance on spider-in-your-fruit wrangling:
Having first eaten...
... a delicious Pink Lady to sustain me, and then looked (in vain, naturally) for any of my notes,2 I ended up following the excellent instructions here (after downloading source.zip of the "DB Browser for SQLite" code). Of course, I didn't actually attempt to compile it...
$ mkdir build $ cd build $ cmake .. $ make $ sudo make install
... until I'd installed the build-essential, cmake, libqt4-dev and libsqlite3-dev packages that are part of the recipe for success. That would have been silly, wouldn't it? After a minor brief misunderstanding about what constituted the source directory I was able to enjoy my chicken salad while admiring...
... the results of a successful compilation and installation process. Though I'm a little puzzled by its claim to be showing records 1 to 7 when it's clearly only displaying six of my books in that view. I shall skip lightly over any questions about my "Books" database being called "David.db" and I suggest you do the same. (There is a long-term master plan. We're not quite there yet.)
Spurred by...
... a couple of old photos emailed to me recently by Big Bro (one here, for example) I've scanned three of mine (featuring him, and our father) in return for him. They've long been tucked away in this rather magnificent musical photo album...
... that I was given — for Xmas 1957 — by an uncle and aunt then on (military) assignment in Malaya. (Thinks: is it still called Malaya these days? Probably not.)
A bit later...
... and I think I've now caught up, as it were, with the 13 books I've bought since I last went near my fancy new SQLite books DB:
Though I've only read seven (and a bit) of these latest acquisitions, so far. 'Twas ever thus. Amusingly, I've also spotted a bug in the Python code and emailed Brian (who's currently in Hawaii) about it. He's busy "dodging lava flows and driving past tsunami evacuation areas", he tells me. (See why I prefer to stay at home?!)