2015 — 6 July: Monday
Having asked my friend Carol — who tells me she's coming over to Norway1 at the end of this month — if she's sure she can "affjord" the trip she replied: "NO. Norway is famously expensive, but I fjeel it's only money". That's the spirit.
It's still a bit early for my cuppa but my subconscious obviously felt it needed me back on the case as it's already shaping up into a busy week. Assuming Big Bro turns up as planned, of course.
Doesn't time fly?
Browsing the web for something other than the utterly banal eventually landed me at a book review touching (only peripherally) on HG Wells, but which told me something new:
Between The Time Machine's publication in serial instalments in 1894 and its taking book form, Wells revised the year2 upwards dramatically, from 12,203 to 802,701. It is a small point, but Hale suggests, plausibly enough, that the change signals a growing conviction on Wells's part that, without Lamarckian inheritance to speed things along, evolution goes far more slowly than it otherwise would.
Where's my breakfast?!
Is this not...
... quintessentially British legislation at its finest?
Rave on, Ms May.
Like me...
... but signally unlike my NZ sibling, his sister-in-law agrees with me on the wisdom (not to mention simple bloody courtesy) of keeping me updated on his travel and arrival plans. So having rousted the perisher out of his bed and verbally roasted him at least I now know when he intends to turn up. He would, of course, be the first to moan if on arrival he found an empty, locked house.
Meanwhile, this seems to suggest...
... that I successfully added the Recoll Ubuntu PPA to my "keep things more up to date than the Mint distro" heap, and updated the frightfully useful desktop search program.
Phew!
I'm finally relaxing before lunch, but after completing:
- a local fresh food supplies run
- a trip down to Soton, returning smelling less of roses than of my minor petrol spillage
- some unplanned laundry
- receipt of a cheque book for:
EXECUTOR OF BETTY MOUNCE DECEASED
Which of course begs the idle question: at what point do these tedious duties cease? When Big Bro departs these shores with his share, perhaps?
The neverending story...
... of my slow bachelor/slob's journey towards the distant foothills of the Mountain of Domestic Godhood has a new chapter. When washing clothes that stink of petrol, if you use the low-temperature 'economy' setting and just one miserly biological laundry tablet, the stink is lessened only in proportion to the extent that it is now evenly distributed across other stuff you had in the same load.
I suppose the next move could be to burn them... [Pause] I was wisely advised to ask Mrs Google. It turns out there are numerous methods, one of the simplest being to let the things bake in the sun for a week. Who gnu?
Big Bro has arrived...
... and we have laid plans for our first evening meal at a local watering hole. I am, it seems, to be enjoying the ineffable pleasure of his company for possibly as many as ten nights out of his remaining fortnight in the UK. That should suffice, I suspect.
Please, Mr Linux, may I...?
One of my gurus tells me my ongoing 'problem' with localhost (non)-webserving of SSIs via a fresh installation of lighttpd is "probably" a permissions3 issue. So I've inspected the corresponding set of permissions I can see on my little Raspberry Pi2 server upstairs. On that system, all the web files live precisely where lighttpd expects them to, namely in /var/www by default. On BlackBeast a symbolic link asserts the existence of precisely the same set of files in precisely the same logical location of the file system. That link (I can see) is owned by 'root' which is supposedly Not Good. But the odd thing is, the actual web files themselves (accessed via the same symbolic link) are served perfectly.
I'm now desperate enough to try changing the order of module loading. [Pause] Blimey, it works. I've updated my description here. It wasn't the ownership of the symbolic link after all. Linux, heh?