2015 — 29 July: Wednesday
Initially fooled by my bedside alarm clock's apparent normality1 I merely thought it was a little nippy for the time of year. Turns out whatever 'spike' hit my mains supply overnight was long enough to take out the central heating and the NAS drives, not to mention resetting the minidisc player in my little reading room. All — scuse the pun — currently seems OK. On with the kettle.
I'm a man on a mission, or a walk, at least. And the sun is shining.
Half-way through...
... my series #4 set of "Episodes" yesterday evening I have retained my high opinion of it.
Keeping calm...
... as they say, and carrying on:
A few weeks ago, in the country, far from the lights of the city, I saw the entire sky "powdered with stars" (in Milton's words); such a sky, I imagined, could be seen only on high, dry plateaus like that of Atacama
in Chile (where some of the world's most powerful telescopes are). It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens' beauty, of
eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience — and death.
I told my friends Kate and Allen, "I would like to see such a sky again when I am dying."
"We'll wheel you outside," they said.
I remember feeling much the same one winter's evening shortly after Christa's death, though I was merely wheeling out one of my waste bins at the time! And without the quote from Milton. I trust it was a witless NYT sub-editor who added his parenthetical asides.
There's another bit...
... from an interesting interview with Donald Knuth that makes me smile:
Similarly, when I prepare the third edition of Volume 3 I plan to rip out much of the material about how to sort on magnetic tapes. That stuff was once one of the hottest topics in the whole software field, but now it largely wastes paper when the book is printed.
Mostly because one of the more interesting self-teaching modules I found myself writing (and coding in PLAN, for assembler-level programmers working on ICL 1900 Series mainframes [over 40 years ago!]) was precisely about polyphase tape sorting and merging. My once-detailed knowledge of PLAN has largely evaporated during the four decades since I last used it.
I like what he quoted Jon Bentley as having said about literate programming, too:
... a small percentage of the world's population is good at programming, and a small percentage is good at writing; apparently I [Knuth] am asking everybody to be in both subsets.
My walk has left me in need of a bite of lunch. And I have a little mini-project lined up for a bit of the rest of my afternoon. It was perfect walking weather.
As a tiny spot of...
... late-afternoon rain began (and almost immediately stopped), I've just burned through 1.465 seconds of BlackBeast Mk III's multi-core CPU processing to churn out updated web views of my (now 9,158 titles) books DB. I'm still using the Python code Brian charmed for me soon after I'd made the leap to Linux Mint 17.1 from Win 8.1 Pro. He's now wrangling my simple ASCII 'video' and 'audio' data along similarly elegant lines. This is the first time I've tried re-spinning my books data lists since my upgrade to Linux Mint 17.2 — I'm delighted to see it all still works perfectly.
You can see two of my lists here (sorted by author), and here (sorted by title). Careful! They are rather large (1.9MB) by normal2 web standards. I notice both book lists generally popping up among the Top 10 items that people browse when stumbling into (and around) 'molehole'.
Today's unsolicited offer of...
... "death benefit" insurance is from a company that's registered the phrase "Every day matters". The envelope says:
If this has arrived at an inappropriate time, you may prefer not to open it.
Do they mean "if you've just died"? Shades of that puzzle about how best to word a sign at the exit from an Alpine road tunnel... "Are your lights on?" (Discussed in, and used as the title of, the 1982 book by Weinberg and Gause.)
Ho hum. "My evening bowl of rice awaits me."