2015 — 15 September: Tuesday
Spot the (I assume, not deliberate) nomenclaturic error here:
Hint? Well, as Glyn Moody1 remarks "Oddly, there doesn't seem to be a stretch goal to add two extra legs".
:-)
I'm not sure...
... which is more depressing: the "confessions" here of a chap who admits he was a teenage virus writer, or the comments his article has so far attracted. Either way, it supports the oft-expressed opinion of NPR's "Car Talk" brothers: "all teenagers are idiots". Nor does shovelling PCs into schools help much. (Link.)
As it's now four minutes past 10 I'm going to assume I missed the "Before ten, next working day" delivery slot for my new screen. I shall have to content myself with the book that Amazon now tells me is "out for delivery today".
I have a new goal...
... in my life: the search for the perfect tea cup. I'm fed up with endlessly scouring off tea-stains from my hotch-potch assortment of mugs and cups. I'm sure there was a brief vogue for glass cups in the 1950s and 1960s and I'm convinced glass is easier to clean. So one day soon, if I remember, I shall venture into some of the many bits of John Lewis I so rarely visit. (I've also just discovered that when you finally get around to cracking the seal on a pack of "large" latex household gloves a mere five years after buying them, they have perished.)
Almost as upsetting as the news that Sam Palmisano did indeed (shock, horror) line his pockets...
Everyone ... must understand how extreme the self-dealing of the IBM senior management has become. Palmisano, while considered personable, led a deft campaign against his own employees, and in the end exited with over 200 million dollars, including a 4 million/year nonqualified pension, corporate jet access for family members, etc. It boggles the mind how bad things have become. I had thought GE paying for fresh daily flowers for Jack Walsh was the end-all. Palmisano definitely outpaced Mr. Walsh.
Note to self
Next time you find yourself even remotely tempted to delete the stupidly tiny little widget barely visible here on the left hand portion of your system panel...
... No, not the blue thing. That tiny thing to its immediate right. Anyway, don't do it! It's actually the only evidence of the jolly useful "Window List" that shows your application thumbnails when you minimise them to the system panel along the foot of your screen, you idiot! And when you delete it your minimised applications thereafter disappear into cyberspace, never to be seen again until you remember Alt/Tab will cycle through your active applications. Or you add "Window List" back to your panel. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Blimey. It's already gone 14:15 so I make that lunch time.
The (mildly unpleasant) shock...
... of seeing Bettelheim's name (and not in a good light) among the cast of characters in the new book by Steve "The Geek Syndrome" Silberman that I first read about in the Observer last month...
... failed to put me off my sweet and sour chicken lunch. But then, I was hungry. It was Oliver Sacks' marvellous essay on Temple Grandin that set Mr Silberman on this particular path. [Pause] Not too much shocks me, these days. Pages 132 onward of "Neurotribes" did.
A blizzard of official paperwork from Berlin enhanced the aura of respectability around these programs... a panel of three medical experts in Berlin, who ticked a box on each form: a plus sign if the child was to die, a minus sign if the child was to be allowed to live, and a question mark for the handful of cases that required further consideration... Often what made the difference between a plus sign and a minus sign was nothing more than the score on an IQ test...
Jesus H Christ.
To cleanse my mental palate...
... after that, I retreated for a while to the safer haven2 of my Linux system. This is, after all, the very first time I've been able to enjoy the benefits of a properly-installed, well-behaved, proprietary graphics card video driver for six months, so I poked around the AMD Catalyst Control Center to see what it had to say for itself. I was delighted by what I found:
It seems to work, too!
Now that I've...
... re-learned the trick of not casting minimised desktop windows out into cyberspatial no-mans-land I no longer need to run any virtual deskspaces. And can stop avoiding the "minimise" control. I don't know where Linux "parks" the contents of each virtual deskspace, but I suspect running just one desktop will reduce some graphics processing load somewhere in the over-burdened system.
I'm sure anyone...
... who recognises more than a couple of these titles...
... will be happy to be pointed here. I know I was.