2015 — 11 June: Thursday

Another delightfully sunny morning, another lunch date and chance for some quality chatter, another month accumulated along this weird (and not always wonderful) path as a widower.1

But at least...

... in my opinion — the only one I generally listen to — my shiny new kitchen sink and my gleaming new white garage door both look very nice. Who gnu? I asked the lads yesterday for any maintenance hints and the combined essence of their wisdom boiled down to "WD40 every six months". I should be able to manage that. Though whether I can find any of the stuff presently in the house is another matter.

I would ask Christa, but you know how it is :-)

Social media?

Another bias (or do I mean ignorant suspicion?) of mine confirmed. I always enjoy that:

It's vital to their business models that we feel free, so that we give up as much personal data as possible. The survival of the social Web is predicated on ad sales organized around compiled user information, not on witty commentary. Twitter is an interesting place to talk about the news and receive rape threats between sponsored Gap ads, but it's also a private place: It is only accountable to us insofar as we are its customers, and it doesn't want (too many of) us to leave.

Susie Cagle in PS mag


It's always a bit...

... of a shock when a long-established web site you visit every day suddenly changes its appearance. Today's example (unless my web browser has gone mad) is the Arts&Letters Daily site, which has decided to give Zen minimalism a whole new meaning. Maybe I should try that...

Herman Zapf...

... is the chap who designed the font I've used for the letter "M" of 'molehole' as a site icon in the browser address bar (not that Firefox displays it there, though it is still visible in the tab marker). He has just died. (Link.)

Molehole icon

Any guesses as to the font? He also designed Optima (which I like) and Palatino (which I have a hard time with). Optima was (another) of the earliest fonts I paid good money for back in my Acorn DTP days. It reminds me of one of my earliest 'serious' books on typography from that now distant era — "Anatomy of a Typeface" by Alexander Lawson...

To the layman, all printing types look the same. But for typographers, graphic artists, and others who believe that the letters we look at daily (and take entirely for granted) are of profound importance, the question of how letters are formed, what shape they assume, and how they have evolved remains one of passionate concern.

Date: 1990


A glorious read. [Pause] I bought most of my fonts from the Electronic Font Foundry. I could wish naming conventions didn't vary quite so much.

A new venue...

... for our lunch: the White Horse in Otterbourne. Tasty, and not too far beyond the reach of ex-IBM pensioners. It's turned into a pleasantly warm (27C) sunny afternoon; feels quite hot in direct sunlight. The new "Yellow Pages" I found roasting gently on my doorstep has just replaced last year's unopened edition. "Economically quiescent", that's me.

Roy Harper...

... is spinning madly on my CD player. This is the live concert CD I picked up a couple of weeks ago. His voice is not quite what it was, but then, whose is? [Pause, of 78 minutes or so.] He ended the set, (recorded in April 2011 at the Metropolis Studios in London) beautifully, with "When an old cricketer leaves the crease". I suspect that was an inevitable choice.

The music formed a pleasant backdrop while I've been reading Djerassi's final volume of autobiography — a book imbued with beauty, melancholy, and some entirely justified rancour. (Stanford does not come out at all well.) He was a complex and many-faceted man. A too-tall poppy, in Antipodean terms, I suppose.

Tonight's film?

The excellent "A Royal Affair". The youngster who plays the youngest sibling of George III — married off to a mad2 Danish monarch Christian VII (source of that intelligence) — is the remarkable lady more recently seen as a walking, talking Strong AI in "Ex Machina".

And after that?

I'm feeding some NAS folders of MP3s into Banshee to have another go with it. It can't be any worse than iTunes, now, can it? Apart from the fact that it had to be pointed explicitly in the direction of my (supposedly audio system default) Creative X-Fi sound card. Again. And it leaves an active task running in the all-too-often-futile pursuit of cover art.

  

Footnotes

1  Well, I still find it pretty weird, but it is what it is. Penelope Lively nailed it: "A thoroughly commonplace experience — everywhere, always — so get on with it and don't behave as though you are uniquely afflicted." Ain't that the truth.
2  Is it the inbreeding, do you suppose?