2015 — 4 October: Sunday

What does it say about a world where a senior Catholic in charge of "guarding" doctrine announces his sexual orientation, and promptly gets equal radio news air time with what (19 dead) was clearly a far-from-surgically-precise North American airstrike too near a hospital?¹ According to the BBC chap in Rome:

The sudden revelation by a Polish monsignore that he is gay, 
has a lover, and is apparently a member of a long-rumoured 
but never formally acknowledged "gay lobby" at the heart of 
the Catholic Church, risks skewing the smooth running of a 
long-anticipated event

Perhaps that should be "skewering"? Again, I find myself wondering if assimilation into human society is altogether a Good Thing. What was that show title? Stop the world, I want to get off... Why is there never a Vogon constructor fleet around when you need one?

Doubtless...

... the weather forecast (cloudy, strong winds, and heavy rain in the south west) will cheer me up. If the tea doesn't. Or the stream of tributes to Denis Healey. (I don't remember him being quite so popular when he was alive, but that's doubtless just me.)

"Soylent" will remain off my breakfast menu. Though I think they should at least dye it green. (Link.)

I find myself...

... trembling on the brink of a decision. It's nearly time to kick off the next "volume" of the email exchanges I've been enjoying with Carol over in New York. I've been swapping these notes (they were files before IBM got a decent email system in place) since our collaboration on the original edition of the IBM CICS Application Programming Primer. The decision? What to call Volume #7, of course:

Volume #1 — The early years of struggle... 1983 to 1988
Volume #2 — The next phase... 1989 to 1993
Volume #3 — Ever onward... 1993 to 1996
Volume #4 — Strength to strength... 1996 to 2002
Volume #5 — Still doing nicely... 2003 to 2007
Volume #6 — Life after Christa... 2008 to 2015

Here's a 30-year-old item about the CICS Primer from an IBM executive's short-lived ego-trip magazine in 1985:

A co-author of the CICS Primer

I was less than thrilled by the accompanying text (click the pic). But at least I didn't write it.

Just as Frank Dickens' downtrodden cartoon cleric Bristow worked in the Chester-Perry building on his magnum opus "Living Death in the Buying Office", you could consider these exchanges as instalments from "Life in an IBM software development laboratory". The titles above are from the original hard copy DTP volumes I initially produced and printed on my beloved Acorn² RISC machine.

Having found...

... the round tuit needed to sort out the parlous state of my non-classical music database — notice I'm not even going anywhere near the classical one — I'm predictably appalled, quite a few hours later, to see I have spent much of today unearthing "stuff" that had beamed aboard Technology Towers seemingly without, as it were, touching the sides. Having kept the email orders, I can hyperlink from these and re-download "stuff" from Amazon's cloud facility. It beats trying to second-guess where the idiot who lives in my head chose to put it.

I could blame missing files on extraneous events (like, say, the collapse of my Windows 8.1 system in mid-February). But I lost no data in that happy accident. So see above, re "idiot". "We have met the enemy!"

No prizes...

... for deducing which particular Arthur C Clarke 1957 "Tale" from the "White Hart" taught me the useful verb "defenestrate". As I was scoffing my delicious suppery treat — a minor-league lamb hotpot considerably enlivened by a garlic chicken breast — my eye was caught (while wandering over a clipping from the festive double issue of the "New Statesman") by their Dishonours List 1992, and this award in particular:

The Verwoerd Statuette, given in recognition of those who keep alive the tradition of dissident defenestration, goes to Boris Yeltsin. This year, a number of former communist officials died after "falling" from seventh-floor windows in their Moscow offices.

Date: 20 and 27 December 1991

Address any complaints to the author, Mat Coward.

I have recovered 81 sets of music files from oblivion. That will do for today, methinks.

Footnotes

¹ Let's assign "value=rhetorical" to that one, shall we?
² Which I was able to buy with the proceeds from the first edition of "CICS: a Light Hearted Chronicle" in 1989. And, yes, I've been agonising over the omission of that blasted hyphen not only since my colleague Jim Geraghty referred to the Chronicle in the bibliography in his 1994 "CICS concepts and uses", but even more so since the publication, in 1998, of Paul Ceruzzi's "A history of modern computing". Not to mention the publication, in 2003, of Martin Campbell-Kelly's "From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog". It reminds me of the time in 1979 or thereabouts when I wrote a book in ICL called Full XBM — A Child's Garden of ICL-C03 (a detailed explanation of a full duplex communications protocol). That title not only stuck, but ended up in some Proceedings papers. I had intended it satirically, and assumed it was only going to be used internally.