2015 — 22 September: Tuesday
Having exercised my early-morning wit1 on an Antipodean email correspondent — who has the advantage over me of operating in daylight hours — I'm now debating whether to return to bed or simply power on through to sunrise. Actually, my two glass cups of (perfect) tea render my choice moot. I shall get dressed and face the onrushing day.
It occurs to me...
... that I may even be able to find the anti-limescale metal doofus I seek for my kettle in Robert Dyas. (I was quite surprised not to find one in our local hypermarket yesterday.) I've been hanging on to a dusty £25 cheque from Uncle ERNIE2 so I already have an excuse to visit Eastleigh. But it depends on whether the rain that woke me happens to stop. If it doesn't, I can always continue with "Big Bang Theory, season #8" which was making me laugh out loud yesterday evening. (I do like "Penny's" new haircut, too.)
No sh1t, Sherlock
I'm never quite sure what to make of things I find, and links I follow, from the Ubuntu weekly newsletter. I had long thought (since reading Ian Fleming's "Dr No" many years ago, in fact) that "guano" was bird poop. Not in Cuba. (Link.)
Getting madder every day
Glad it's not just me:
Now, having learned to adapt to unexpected or previously unknown pronouns, I am confronted by a new wrinkle in the language of identification. As one of the staff members at the college where I teach recently informed the faculty, "Some of the students will prefer to be referred to as 'they'."
I've been pondering...
... whether to bother to trundle along to my GP for the once-every-five-years "free NHS health check" I've recently been offered (by an automated email system with the telling userid "Patientchase"). There's a hint of a suggestion that it may not be money totally well-spent. Source and snippet:
The "mid-life MOTs" are a waste of time, widely ignored by patients and not based on sound evidence, and the money would be better spent encouraging people to eat more healthily to reduce their risk of falling seriously ill, they say... The checks have such a poor success rate that each of the 1,000 deaths avoided costs the NHS about £450,000 — far in excess of the £3,000 per quality-adjusted life-year of extra life that the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) claims. Nice's figure is "rather fanciful", they say.
Gotta love the idea of that "quality-adjusted life-year of extra life", but I can't help wondering how they measure that.
Let the (anti-limescale) Games begin!
I'd been on the point of conceding defeat, and asking at the till. Guess where they keep their anti-limescale "cadnits"? At the till, of course. Where else? Guess who's just learned yet another new word, too? I've popped two of the little blighters into my kettle and will be keeping an eye on them. And I got back in time to hear almost all of the Stravinsky.
I managed to expunge...
Mike McGrath's "PHP in easy steps" from my little library some while ago. (I bought it in October 2003 and went on to buy and read another four or five PHP-related lumps of turgid prose by other authors before shuddering, and renouncing PHP [and similar works of Satan] forever.) I rediscovered Mr McGrath six months ago, and decided today to see what he has to say about two newish areas. Little or no good may come of it:
"Didn't have no fancy HTML5 and CSS3 when I were a lad!"
I also decided...
... it was time to stop dithering and buy this title I've been browsing in bookshops on and off since first reading reviews of it some 18 months ago:
And for light relief?
Well, it's been a while since I last browsed a copy of this title:
And down comes the rain again.
Glass cup mediated...
... tea-stain related insight: tea with milk messes up the cup far more than black tea. Of course, not all tea is potable without milk.
[Long pause]
I liked this line from the most recent of the Chuck Lorre vanity cards ("Random Advice to Young Comedy Writers") flashed up at the end of my latest batch of "Big Bang" episodes:
People who write poisonous things about your work are using up precious moments of their life dwelling on yours. These are moments they will never get back. Let that be a comfort to you.
Tea, methinks.