2015 — 28 August: Friday
The universe will get you every time.1 Having only yesterday responded to a review request to comment on my Synology units... today finds the earlier of the two units reporting all is well (but only if logged into and examined via its web interface):
As far as Linux Mint 17.2 is concerned, the box contains its array of six top-level folders, but with no data in any of them.
Not what one wants to see in one's NAS of a morning. Perhaps yesterday's feathered serpent is on the wing?
Dig deep enough...
... and you find a neat paragraph. Source and snippet:
The difference between the natural sciences and the humanities is the difference between motion and motive. Laws of motion can explain the trajectories of asteroids and atoms. The trajectories of human beings, like those of any animals with some degree of sentience, are explained by motives. Asteroids and atoms go where they have to go. Human beings go where they want to go.
So much for pet rocks, I guess.
If all goes...
... according to plan, I've just agreed to a visit this weekend that will see my Toyota Yaris "leaving the building" at the end of it. Let's hope I can persuade Peter to take with him the stuff I had to displace from the garage before I could squeeze the Mazda2 into it. It's all his, after all.
If all goes...
... according to plan, I've just finalised, and delivered to my solicitor, a mere 16 or so months late, the changes I want to make to my Will. During that time, she's managed to become impregnated and has thus left the office on maternity leave, which helped reduce my (mild) embarrassment at my, erm, tardiness. One can't rush headlong/headstrong into these things.
Data update
A guru assured me "Almost certainly a mount failure for some reason — what you are seeing is the mount points which are part of the local filesystem on BlackBeast. He suggested I try navigating to one of the six mount points, opening up a terminal there, and using:
df .
to try to see what was going on. Like me, he was sure that the Synology boxes were fine, but something is obviously going awry (from time to time) with BlackBeast's view of NAS #1 as presented via the GUI. Nothing seemed amiss, so I followed it with:
sudo mount -a
and back came the GUI view of all the data. Something is not the same between NAS #1 and NAS #2 but I currently am baffled. I'm going to extract all the data on NAS #1 and then set it up again from scratch, step by step.
Having become...
... very accustomed over the past couple of years to the need to check the final slice or two of my fancy Italian bread each time — looking for signs of the mould that almost always gains a foothold before I've had time to munch my way through all five slices — I am also used to seeing patches of grey, or bluish-green, growths. Today's pale pink patch, therefore, was quite a novelty. Of course, I may just have scraped off into oblivion the world's newest potential antibiotic...
A spy tells me he's just had his replacement nVIDIA SHIELD Android Tablet PC delivered. Since he was about two hours ahead of me in the "recall" queue I now live in some hope of getting my hands on my own replacement unit quite soon. Meanwhile, one of today's arrivals gets an interesting review here.
"Bull Durham" is an old favourite. "Clouds" looks enticing. "Prendimi l'Anima" (Soul Catcher) covers much the same ground, and characters, as Cronenberg's "A dangerous method" did (quite well, I thought) a decade later.
I didn't watch...
... Jon Stewart's "Daily Show", but I smiled my way through this rough transcript of some of his parting shots. Source and snippet:
One, making bad things sound like good things. "Organic, all-natural cupcakes" ... because factory made sugar oatmeal balls doesn't sell. "Patriot Act" ... because "Are You Scared Enough to Let Me Look at All Your
Phone Records Act" doesn't sell.
Number two, the second way, hiding the bad things under mountains of bullshit. Complexity...
And finally ... the Bullshit of infinite possibility. These bullshitters cover their unwillingness to act under the guise of unending inquiry. We can't do anything because we don't yet know everything. We cannot
take action on climate change until everyone in the world agrees gay marriage vaccines won't cause our children to marry goats who are going to come for our guns. Until then, I say teach the controversy.