2015 — 8 May: Friday
It would have been Dad's 98th birthday today.1 In more commonplace news, I gather the Boy Dave's Nasty Party has done what generally nasty parties manage to do in elections — persuade enough people to vote for them so they can claw back into power with a cloak of legitimacy once again. Well, I did what I could with my little vote to stem the tide. That's democracy for you. Everybody gets what nobody wants. (They just don't seem to realise it yet.)
Time for a cuppa! Busy day ahead. Oh, wait, I'm retired.
In a rare triumph...
... of legal commonsense on the other side of the Pond, the NSA's propensity for mass phone surveillance has been declared illegal. Not that we would ever have known it was going on had young Mr Snowden2 not blown his whistle. How odd that a modern state never seems to be able to bring itself to trust its citizens, and yet insists on having them vote from time to time to confirm the legitimacy of whatever the state chooses to do. Secret or otherwise. (Link.)
Supplies...
... gathered in ahead of the hordes, my next task will be to send off those four pieces of recorded delivery snailmail. [Pause] Happy 70th birthday, Keith Jarrett! [Pause] Post posted. More tea, vicar?
30 miles...
... or so later, there's a new WD MyBook Studio USB3 4TB drive helping out a chum's fractious data-churning temporarily for the next week or so while he does some much-needed RAID-array rebuilding. Plus I've picked up another new Linux magazine, and a couple of DVDs in Asda, and borrowed a copy of "Custom PC" after I'd been browsing it there (but was too much of a cheapskate to buy my own copy). And now it's already mid-afternoon, too. Some nice Prokoviev on the radio, however. Always good.
I think it's fair to say...
... that the Lib Dems' greed for power-sharing with the Nasty Party for the last five years in the recent coalition has been their undoing:
It won't change my dyed-in-the-wool views, but it won't get me an MP any time soon... evidently. Meanwhile, that splendid chap Nigel Farage (late of UKIP — the one who told me 29,000,000 Bulgarians and Romanians were massing at the borders of Eastleigh just waiting to pour in, steal my job, and fill my local hospital) fails to retain his own seat despite somehow convincing 3.8 million idiots to vote for his smelly party of insular bigots.
Democracy in the UK :-)
The clever graphic...
... that you can find lurking here (if you look hard enough) clearly stuck in my head, judging by those two DVDs today:
So, there I am...
... BBC Radio 3's "In Tune" programme with Sean Rafferty and his guests tinkling gently away in the background, just coming to the end of a delightful read through the 114 pages of "Custom PC" — an innocent-enough pastime, I'm sure you'll agree — when... bang! I run smack dab, face-first, into this brick wall of an asserted opinion:
However, 4K and 5K monitors have severe shortcomings. Their major problem is that they suffer from horrendous tearing and lag, mainly due to the way the DisplayPort bus has to split and then recombine the data output from the graphics card into multiple streams.
He goes on to suggest 2,560x1,440 resolution monitors as being optimal. I have a pair of those sitting upstairs in the form of two Asus 27" screens:
I hate to admit it but I've noticed precisely this "tearing" phenomenon when playing video material on my lovely little Philips 40" 4K screen. But, for probably 99% of the time, all I do with the 4K monitor is display vast amounts of simple, 2D real estate in the form of static material that's not subject to tearing or lag.
So I suspect I can live with it :-)