2015 — 13 August: Thursday
The things I do for my Toyota Yaris. Despite sailing through its annual MOT yesterday, and its exhaust emissions test, and despite having spoiled it rotten with new disc brakes and pads, brake fluid, oil, pollen filter, and air-con juice, plus a thorough vacuum cleaning... it still needs a return bout to get its exhaust heat shield properly fixed. I shall drive it down there myself, this time, as I'm promised the job takes only 30 minutes. I'm also getting an estimate for the cost of the bumper1 repair. The cost of that, I suspect, will be out of all proportion to its benefit.
But I shall take...
... the Mazda when I drive up to the funeral of Big Bro's brother-in-law. I think I'm just about "ready" for such a long trip.
I do wish...
... Tony Bliar would stop trying to bad-mouth Labour leadership candidates of whom he disapproves. Why, it's almost as if he hates unions and left-wing policies. Or, perhaps, the loss of his place in the spotlight. Golly. I think he has thoroughly proved his own mendacious uselessness.
And although I drive around in a machine that consumes non-renewable resources and pollutes the environment, I'm not very keen on the idea that guvmint ministers should step in when local councils are felt to be delaying "fracking" decisions... what idiot thought that one up, I wonder? Our talent pool of intelligent, technically-proficient MPs is small enough in the first place, even before it gets drained and filtered into the shallow scum-covered puddle of ministers.
The trolley returns!
Interesting piece on the effects on moral decisions of language choice. Source and snippet:
Speaking in non-native languages can also free people from self-imposed moral limits. In 1986, Michael Bond and Tat-ming Lai found that Chinese-English bilinguals were more open to discussing embarrassing topics, such as intimate sexual information, when chatting in their non-native language. And in 2010, Jean-Marc Dewaele found that multilinguals from the United Kingdom preferred swearing in their second language, claiming that it allowed them to escape from cultural and social restrictions.
"No merde, Sherlock!"
Had to stop...
... what I was doing, to listen vaguely to an amazingly extended distant rumble of thunder, and to listen properly to Sarah Walker's chat with Rick Wakeman and his marvellous anecdote about his student days and a Thomas Goff harpsichord encounter.
Blimey!
Reading some comments on an El Reg piece led me to Tim Worstall's blog where (among much else) I noted this Torygraph obit:
Priceless!
Model M bliss!
My new PC keyboard has just been delivered and I'm using it as I type. Right; time for my lunch date, even though it's pouring with rain. TTFN.
After another excellent lunch...
... once again at the "Old House at Home" in Romsey — and getting my first chance to put the Mazda's "machine that goes beep" to real use in their very full car park — we adjourned for a cuppa and a chat before I headed back to Technology Towers ahead of what (I've just heard) is a severe weather warning of torrential rain still to come.
This latest keyboard — a throwback to the early 1980s — is an absolute delight though, if I'm honest, that wasn't always my opinion of it. The first time I managed to lay my hands on a Model M keyboard "at work" was in September 1984, at the start of my 18-month exile2 to Millbrook. Before then I'd been using a 3277 (green screen) 'dumb' terminal and, latterly, a 3279 colour terminal, talking to a variety of mainframes, and mostly using the time sharing option (TSO). I exchanged emails with Carol on the technology made available to peons like me:
Me: I'm now using a PC/XT with 256K and a 10Mb hard disk.
She: How do you like the PC as opposed to 327x for text work? Especially, how do you like the keyboard? When we finally get terminals here, we are to get PCs rather than 3270s, and my very limited
experience with them makes me question this decision. We have a single PC with a color display that is quite difficult to read (when doing text entry), a keyboard with almost nothing in common with the 3270, and a
dial-up, passthru connection to some far-flung PROFS system. It's pretty horrible, but of course not a fair test of the PC as a terminal. I'm sure one can get used to any keyboard arrangement with sufficient time
and patience, but the action on it seems slow and somewhat indistinct, like a piano with a bad "touch". We're not getting a choice, so anon I'll get to see for myself, I suppose.
Me: I hate the PC keyboard with an intensity matched only by the degree with which I hate its lousy Personal Editor...
Me: I've now got a PC/XT370 with 640Kb... It's done nothing to improve the lousy keyboard — in fact, the mapping of the keys is, if anything, even more bizarre. For example, using XT3277 to
ship stuff up and down the host link maps the ENTER key to the PC's CapsLock. The deity knows where PF keys above 10 are; I certainly don't!
My concern was never...
... with the feel or action of the keyboard, per se, only with its weird and deeply unwonderful mapping of character and function keys when the PC it was attached to was simply being used as a terminal emulator. And that was precisely the mode in which I and my colleagues had to use it for most of the time. In the prehistoric slave compound of a typical IBM development laboratory publications department in the 1980s — largely starved of investment, generally untouched by modern tools and techniques, let alone by the March of PC Progress — always busily churning out forests' worth of "documentation" for each new release of heavyweight systems such as CICS, IMS, and (of course) various lumpen masses of hardware — basically all our text processing tools, editors, printers, graphics handling, office systems, what have you, were mainframe-based.
Not exactly leading-edge stuff. Those were the days, heh? (Shudder.) At home, of course, I was using ever more sophisticated DTP, graphics, and WP systems, scanners, and printers on my RISC OS PCs. There was quite some cognitive dissonance between home and work, in fact. I used the daily bus rides like a decompression chamber for making the transition between two completely non-overlapping ways of getting texty stuff done.
I don't know...
... what to make of Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony. The one recording I have — a cassette I made of the performance the BBC broadcast in November 1984, live from the Royal Festival Hall, with Messiaen's second wife Jeanne Loriod doing the ondes martenot playing — tends to gather dust from one decade to the next. And simply because it uses such an odd electronic instrument more often heard in SF films is not really reason enough to hear it, is it?
It's being played at tonight's Prom, but I can't say I'm particularly enjoying the thing.