2015 — 16 September: Wednesday
Well, Mr "Before 10, Next Working Day" now has less than 138 minutes1 before I can legitimately label him a liar. He's probably going to cost me one of my weekly walks, too, as his delivery isn't the only item to be squished on to my relatively crowded agenda. To compensate, I've flung wide the sliding patio door letting in all the cold air, letting out the ghastly BBC Radio 3 music, and I even remembered to turn down the house thermostat accordingly. Brrr.
It's 19.7C in here, but that's what the extra-large mug of hot tea is designed to combat.
Today's...
... risible slice of spam — purportedly from "digestible@jockcock.net" — offers me:
Just what I've always lusted after: more "recogniton"! It wasn't even addressed to Christa, dagnabbit. [Pause] 19.4C, 120 minutes and counting... I need more tea.
Say what?
Films about philosophers? What could go wrong?
Love in the Post (2014) embraces Derrida's formal and thematic eclecticism: around the central relationship of a fictional literary scholar and his enigmatic wife orbits critical commentary on Derrida from
leading academics, and [director] Callaghan's reflections on filming the unfilmable. The film is disconcerting and enchanting; its elusive quality summons the expansiveness of Derrida's thought.
But it is not exactly a film that one watches for the plot...
Now consider Frank Cioffi's pithy opinion... (Link.)
"Which courses?" he said indifferently. "I'm meant to be reading Foucault, but I want to do a course on Derrida." "Man" he replied "that's like going from horseshit to bullshit."
19.1C, 90 minutes and counting...
Mr FedEx has just (09:10) been and gone and done his delivery thing. Better have some breakfast while the toy acclimatises for a bit. It's quite a whopper though not, of course, quite as big as its unillustrious predecessor. The email from the supplier telling me how to track the parcel's progress arrived about 15 minutes after Mr FedEx had driven off across the village to deliver an identical box to Len, whose original monitor suddenly developed a blue line right down the screen less than a week after he first switched the thing on...
Arrogantly confident...
... I knew what I was doing, I unpacked all the bits, found the CD with a PDF of the User Manual, loaded it up, and started reading. I have failed the first test:
Thoroughly disgusted, I nipped out to get enough supplies in for a hungry weekend niece, whizzed a couple of surplus DVDs over to the Bung (I know Mrs Bung will appreciate them more than I do) and am now wondering what, if anything, I have enough time to try before my scheduled noon argument2 with my solicitor.
Like shooting fish in a barrel. (The solicitor, I mean).
Meanwhile, having first...
... fortified myself with another cuppa and a Daddy biscuit, and acting on very timely advice received from Len about fitting the DisplayPort cable, the USB3 uplink cable, and power lead all through the "cable tidy" hole in the stand before even fitting it to the screen, I'm now up and running in glorious 3,440 pixel widescreen with little or no further effort:
I expected to have to set the DisplayPort input to 1.2 to be able to get the 60Hz refresh rate since the Dell claims to have 1.1 set by default. Not so, it seems.
In lieu of...
... our walk — the weather saw to that — I was able to demonstrate the new screen to my other Linux guru while he regaled me with horrible tales of Windows 10-related installations. Another bullet dodged, if you ask me. Now, for my next trick, dare I attempt to daisy-chain the 27" Asus from the Dell's handy DisplayPort output? I'd have to rotate it through 90° to fit on the desk. But what would I do with a display that was 2,560 pixels tall?
Linux Mint has some fabulous desktop backgrounds. Here's an example (reduced to 25% of its full glory) to demonstrate the new aspect ratio:
My earlier 4K desktop here was captured 36 hours before the ingloriously total collapse of my Win8.1 system.
I still find it...
... truly shocking to see just how quickly Time continues to fly steadily past. It's now eight years, for example, since my last weekly letter to dear Mama... (Just think how much postage I've saved!)