2015 — 29 August: Saturday
Peter called1 yesterday evening to see if it was in fact too late for them to set off from the Smoke for their weekend visit. I suggested it was, but I'll book a lunch somewhere for them later this morning. He can drive us there in his "new" car :-)
An interesting piece...
... by a chap who's written more than a couple of books himself (though I've only ever read the memoir ["On writing"] he wrote about his life and writing itself). Source and snippet:
But I also understand that life is short, and that in the end, none of us is prolific. The creative spark dims, and then death puts it out. William Shakespeare, for instance, hasn't produced a new play for 400 years. That, my friends, is a long dry spell.
Nice to see the good Doctor Asimov given a name check. (Is 500 books too prolific?) [Pause] Then what about symphonies?
Consider, finally, the case of the British composer Robert Simpson (1921-1997), whose eleven symphonies, tensely wound in the Nielsen vein, are very seldom played. I got to know them through a complete cycle on the Hyperion label (a project partly funded by Phil Lesh, the erudite bassist of the Grateful Dead), but I have yet to hear a note of Simpson live.
The chap who wrote...
... a piece in "Wired" called "The Geek Syndrome" back in 2001 has written a new book, which has been reviewed here. (His earlier article is here.)
Given the various woes...
... that have cropped up recently among three NAS users (myself included) I'm now doing some more systematic backing up — not that I regard either of my NAS units as backups, per se — before formulating a 'better' way to use both boxes. This entails having one of them simply duplicate itself to the other at regular intervals regardless of what BlackBeast may be up to at the time. Which (I'm assured) would be a very Good Thing to have happen.
Sounds like a plan.
Odd...
... hearing Harry Shearer on BBC Radio 4's Archive Hour. But fascinating nonetheless.
The evening's entertainment?
The film of Heinlein's "... all you zombies..." — a short story from 1959 that can be found in the excellently unsettling collection "The unpleasant profession of Jonathan Hoag". Personally, I would have thought it was unfilmable...
... until I saw "Predestination" about four months ago. It went down pretty well.