2015 — 12 May: Tuesday
While I'm prepared to concede to having forgotten — until climbing the stairs to Bedfordshire late yesterday evening — to unload my washing machine... I am nonetheless aglow1 with the inner satisfaction that comes from my having remembered to put out my crate of six months worth of "reduced sugar" orange marmalade jars. They should nicely fill up all the gaps between the wine bottles of my neighbours.
Despite being...
... well over 100 pages into that SF novel from yesterday I am still wondering where on Mars it's going.
At some point...
... between when I bought it (for £1-50 in June 1971) and after I last printed out a complete catalogue of my books (in February 1994) my copy of "Hitchcock" by François Truffaut managed to get itself culled. I regret this, but the house is of only finite capacity. Mind you, I'd sort-of replaced it by Donald Spoto's scurrilous biography "The Dark Side of Genius" (picked up in Florida in 1984 when there was some question about whether or not it would ever be published in the UK), not to mention Paul Duncan's excellent "Hitchcock: The complete films" from Taschen in 2003, followed most recently (December 2006) by Charlotte Chandler's "It's only a movie".
According to the story here, Truffaut's interviews from 1962 (that formed the basis of the original book in 1966) are now featured in a film, interspersed with clips to illustrate just how warped was the mind of the "Master of Suspense". Should be interesting.
Is this satire?
It's written by a fan of "The Smiths", after all. (Link.)
I have a lunch date, and a pressing need to refill some of the gaps in my food storage, too.
I've never understood...
... quite why the hatred Tories feel towards unions is so deeply embedded in their (for want of a better word) fundament.
Is it simply that they feel they are "born to rule" and nobody should ever disagree? Are they that stupid?
I now know...
... the noise made by my spiffy new BlackBeast Mk III when it's over-worked. (I jest.) From time to time (that is, if and when I remember) I fire up the Recoll search program and tell it to update its search indexes. Yesterday, I became aware of a faint sort-of hum coming, as far as I could tell, from the vicinity of the CPU cooler. Which felt slightly warm to the touch. So I fired up Task Manager and, sure enough, the CPU was beavering away at 13% while the progress of the indexing seemed to be at a standstill. So I terminated the Recoll process. No change. Then I tried killing it. Down it went, taking two associated Python processes with it, and CPU use immediately dropped to (essentially) zero%. The noise? What noise?
I investigated what the online help had to say about this. Turns out I did exactly the right thing. And simply restarting the program and telling it to update its indexes took all of 20 seconds to complete and stop in a well-behaved way. Transient cosmic rays, perhaps?
Judging by...
... the, erm, quality and themes of today's little trickle of spam a number of Wordpress systems (in Canada, it seems) have been persuaded over to the Dark Side. But if people are willing to click on hypertext links that clearly don't actually go where they purport to, to reset their financial access details, how on Mars do you stop them? As my friend Carol remarked in an email earlier today:
I have lost all desire to understand the innards of these systems/apps/etc. I suspect in many cases said innards very ugly indeed. I just want them to work well at the basic stuff and not let bad guys into my bank account. Easy for me to say! Very hard, apparently, for them to do.
Sorry, Mr Rajaniemi, but I'm giving up2 on your "Quantum Thief". Life is too short to pursue such wilful obscurity any further without some pleasure along the way. Human Psychology 101, I suspect.
I've moved on...
... to another of yesterday's acquisitions: the amazing Henry Marsh with his beautifully-recounted memories in "Do no harm". I'd been eagerly awaiting the paperback. It's a real nerve shredder (literally).
I cannot recommend the film about him, nor his book, too highly.