2015 — 12 October: Monday
One of the huge number of things that still puzzles me in these glorious retirement days is how, after a delicious (and more than adequate) meal mere hours ago, I now wake up starving hungry the next morning and have to scurry around to feed myself all over again. Not the most intelligently-designed of Intelligent Design systems, is it? Let's be honest. What's wrong with nice, simple, photo-synthesis? Works for Ents. Lux Eterna, and all that.
Meanwhile...
... Big Bro worries (quite unnecessarily) that his birthday card to me may not arrive on time. What's one more birthday between elderly siblings, heh? Besides, I have today's lunch date with my more local birthday twin and his good lady to drive off to. Those are always fun, and they'll get a "go" in my new car, too. I've even remembered to top up the level of its go-juice. But will I be able to find either or both the card I bought and a clean shirt?
Or, failing that, one with a suitably low value1 of ¬clean, at least...
As a Luddite...
... I'm always tickled when things slowly lurch back around to a state I've always advocated. Let's just not examine too closely whether this is laziness, ignorance, or genius on my part:
AMP is based on an important insight: that almost all of that evil ad technology is written in JavaScript. If you create a new standard for mobile pages that essentially strips out all JavaScript, or at least banishes it to the bottom of the priority stack, then suddenly people will be able to read the web pages they want to read on their phones, on the go, without waiting first to be identified and tracked and sold off to the highest bidder.
It strips the web back to something very basic: text loads first, then images, and there is very little freedom for publishers to do anything particularly clever or interactive. But that's what readers want.
All neatly tied up...
... aka stringing things along, as best we can. Bring back good, old-fashioned, reality:
What's happened in the past 20 years is that there's a split between string theory, which has gone off into a world of its own, and everything else. The division between string theory and the rest of physics is now wider than the split between string theory and mathematics.
(Link.)
Actually, I just love the idea of unobservable bits and pieces of "string" vibrating themselves in and out of existence in some weird 11-dimensional physical "space" far, far smaller than the smallest of sub-atomic particles. In fact, I let the concept guide my every action in daily life.
I am reduced...
... once again to ownership of a single car. The Toyota Yaris has been set free! (Mind you, Peter now needs to look into its airbag recall. But at least that's free.)
Eight hours later...
... I can sup a cuppa while allowing my over-stressed brain to cool down after a birthday quiz and delightedly contemplating a birthday present bounty, an amusing card, and both the issue of what shall constitute the next (small) batch of calories to ingest. Plus the new DVD I was handed (via a tap on my car window) as I was backing out of the garage eight hours ago:
I know nothing about this film beyond the fact that I've enjoyed previous films featuring both these 'leads'. Fingers crossed.
I've also been tipped off about a Thai restaurant called "The Greyhound" in Broughton, run by the same folk who did such a tasty job a few miles further north at the "Fox Inn" this afternoon. Always good to know.