2015 — 12 August: Wednesday
I await the lads who will be driving my Yaris away1 in an hour or so this slightly damp morning. Thus reducing my mobility, erm, not in the slightest given the spare vehicle I now have sitting in my garage :-)
Yesterday's fascinating story...
... of a long-standing code vulnerability in Intel Pentium Pro processors since 1995 rather tickled me. Aptly described as a "forgotten patch to a forgotten problem" at the kernel level it reminded me of an ICL 1500 Series memory map2 I drew in 1978 to help me keep track of exactly what assembler code I was placing exactly where for "What Hi-Fi?" magazine's Buyer's Guide section.
"Overlay programming"? People don't know what they were missing. The cost of a subsequent memory upgrade from 8K to 32K was a significant chunk of the cost of the entire original system but it enabled me to switch up from assembler to a somewhat higher-level data entry language (CDE) and thus massively improve my code productivity. I was even able to put in some help text for the hapless user (a lovely, and very smart, lady named Caroline). You had to be smart to use my code! Working directly with the system's actual day-to-day user as I developed the code was an early eye-opening experience, and a very valuable lesson.
Dagnabbit!
I've missed another noisome heap of smelly software patches, it seems. This comment...
... resonates more than somewhat. [Pause] I've just reverted to being a one-car "family". I'll get over it. Breakfast will help with that. And/or another cuppa, of course.
I have...
... never been to a nightclub:
My first drink in a nightclub — stinking, grotesque Camden Palace — was £7.25 years ago. If I'd invested the money instead, I could be living in eight-bedroomed splendour by now, and very far away from Camden... This is the first true triumph of nerd culture... It thrills me to my soul to think that generations will now grow up without being forced through this singularly unedifying rite of passage. The arc bends not just towards justice but towards introverts.
The meek3 shall inherit the earth — if that's OK with you :-)
Proust, anyone?
A tasty article. Source and snippet:
Britain in the 1970s and early '80s was a very different culinary world, populated by dried packet preparations, tinned vegetables and nutrient-stripped sliced white bread. Where now we might pour olive oil, wine vinegar or maple syrup, we then used mainly salt, pepper, malt vinegar, ketchup or generously sprinkled sugar. It now seems like both yesterday and a lifetime ago... Old mass-produced foods have changed their recipes: cereals contain less salt, the mysterious 'chocolate flavour coating' on Penguin biscuits has been replaced by the real McCoy.
Time to pick up another P-P-P-Penguin?
PC by another name?
I have to admit "vindictive protectiveness" is an entirely new concept for me to grapple with. (Link.)
Say 'hi' to my...
... latest trio of Blu-rays:
I find it very hard to believe that Hal Ashby's sublime "Harold and Maude" is 44 years old.
I've just discovered that "Z for Zachariah" — which scared the crap out of me in its original book format...
... and also made a pretty good BBC "Play for Today" in 1984 (though it disappeared without trace like lots of BBC material) is now a 'proper' film made by the chap who made the very creepy (in two senses of the word) "Compliance".
I also have a new "police procedural" to try:
And quite a large bill for my Yaris service and some repair work. (The things I do for my son, heh?)
When I bought...
... my copy of "Mansfield Park" — the book, that is, in December 2004 — I noted that it had been nicely filmed by Patricia Rozema in 1999. What I don't know is how her 1995 film "When night is falling" slipped through my viewing net.
I know I bought my DVD from Holland, in July 2011, but I only watched it this evening. There are still a few bugs in the system.