2015 — 10 May: Sunday
I predicted1 that my mother's eventual death would be less likely to upset me than Christa's death did.2 All well and good, but you try telling that to my subconscious this morning. It's 03:09 and I've been wide awake for the last hour or so. I'm not upset in the traditional "bawling my eyes out" sense; just in the more usual (for me) mind and thoughts rattling around inside the hollow skull sense.
It seems sensible...
... therefore, now that sleep has clearly fled for the time being, to put on my dressing gown, shuffle downstairs, make a cuppa (or two), snack on a biccie, and search out some music and/or other light entertainment appropriate for the hour and my current mood. I don't discount the possibility that my subconscious is actually trying to tell me something else altogether — but I remain as clueless on how to interrogate it as the next chap. I can merely wait for something to percolate to the top of the stack (as it were) and make itself known to whoever's on duty and in charge at the time.
Meanwhile, there's always my newest Linux PC and a horde of digital data to be tidied up.
Here we go...
... again. Our lovely, fragrant new Home Secretary is either plain daft or ill-advised about the problems of false positives. Or, I suppose, she could be both :-(
We were prevented from bringing in that legislation into the last government because of the coalition with the Liberal Democrats and we are determined to bring that through, because we believe that is necessary to maintain the capabilities for our law enforcement agencies such that they can continue to do the excellent job, day in and day out, of keeping us safe and secure.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. Recall the orange peel that, thrown from a train, repels tigers from the Home Counties. Does it work? Of course it does! Do you see any tigers?
Crikey
Carol was both amused and astonished to find out about the fire at her local nuclear plant (on the banks of the Hudson) from me rather than from her upstate New York news sources.
If I watched...
... all of these (I don't — I know less than ten of them) I doubt I'd have time to do anything else. (Link.)
Some things...
... never change, do they? In the earliest days of IBM Java, I was on the hook to re-engineer a set of Sun manuals:
After nearly a week of uneasy co-existence on my desktop machine at work between IBM's OS/2 Warp and Microsoft's Windows 95 (I've had to make it "dual bootable" to give it the two distinct personalities) I've decided to wait until Monday before I try to transfer the Sun FrameMaker output RTF files across to the DTP
system I use under OS/2. I don't want my weekend spoiled by the knowledge that this tortuous transfer process doesn't work! I must reluctantly concede, however, that Microsoft is winning on "user-friendly" points, so far, though it is also managing to slow a very fast Pentium to barely a crawl at times.
Neither incarnation is up to the Risc PC I have at home, happily.
Recall my Slug?
There's a picture of it here if you don't. It lived in Peter's room, and was briefly the basis of my first (ad)venture in the whacky world of NAS. On his most recent visit Peter purloined it from a shelf in 'his' room where it had been gathering dust, unused for over seven years. I still have the two 320GB external hard drives, too.
Couldn't NASA...
... genetically re-engineer an electric eel? (Link.)
I can see...
... I'm now impossibly far behind the leading edge. And I shudder to think about the amount of "learning" deemed necessary in some quarters. I can, however, happily cope with retirement.
Priceless:
What would Professor Tufte say?
Tucked away...
... on minidisc #t013 is (among other things) a radio recording of a reading of "The Wild Party".3 I was reminded of this by reading this final section...
... of the Introduction (by Trina Robbins) to the second volume of The Collected "Omaha": the cat dancer. And I was reading "Omaha" to give myself a change of pace after the first episode of "Orphan Black" (which I found rather intense).