2015 — 30 December: Wednesday
The early bird may well catch the worm1 but an early arrival at an uncrowded Waitrose means I missed out on both the salads and the reduced sugar orange marmalade. How will I cope?
My ignorance...
... is both profound, and expanding faster than the observable Universe. For more than 30 years I've been certain that "tmesis" means, well, erm, "tmesis". Absobloodylutely certain, in fact. No. I'm wrong. It's "infix". I'm shocked, I tell you. Absobloodylutely shocked. (Silly link.)
dear Mama...
... received a card today from her younger sister — my one surviving (octogenarian) aunt from that branch of my family — expressing the kindly wish that she was "keeping well"... So we've just had a nice long chat during which I gently apologised for having failed to tell her about her sister's death nearer the time it occurred. My fault.
Not that anything very meaningful remains to be said about the death of a 98-year-old woman from whose head the last vestiges of rational thought — and any recognition of her one surviving sibling (let alone her sons) — had by then long since left the building. Much like Elvis.
A wealth...
... of interesting reading here should my Austen ever grow stale. Not to mention an amusing FAQ entry:
The simple-but-dangerous approach is to add --ignore-errors to your rsync_long_opts line in your rsnapshot configuration file. The tedious-and-fragile-but-probably-safer approach is to find out where the I/O errors are occurring in the backup and exclude those files from the backup set. It seems that not all cwrsync and rsync versions handshake well on some Windows filenames, such as "Shortcut to 3½ Drive" (chokes on the ½ character), some URLs held in Internet Explorer's cache (chokes on length?), some entries in the Recycle Bin (chokes on the curly braces?).
Can't think of a compelling reason to backup anything in the trash, personally, but that's just me. Besides, I don't seem to have a Windows system any more. Wherever did it go? :-)
Give or take...
... whatever the memory footprint of Linux Mint's "screenshot" applet is (and I imagine it's pretty lightweight) the only difference between the two sets of figures here...
... is that the earlier set is a memory snapshot just after a System Reset (but before I do anything beyond let Mint check for system updates). The later set is after loading and running, simultaneously, the following useful subset of my day-to-day applications:
- Mozilla Thunderbird email
- Mozilla Firefox web browser
- FileZilla file transfer
- UltraEdit text and program editor
- GNU Image Editor
- Inkscape vector graphics program
- Caja file browser
- Thunar file manager
- Recoll desktop search program
- Kodi media player
- Leafpad file editor
- LibreOffice document editor
- Gedit text editor
Guess who's been reading Help! Linux ate my RAM! Fascinating, even if it gives me a nasty feeling I've just managed to prove that I have, indeed, rather over-specified my PC :-)
Having just been...
... steeping myself in, and enjoying, "Battlestar Galactica" which (spoiler alert) ends up on this planet 150,000 years ago, I re-read a depressing2 paper actually written 35 years ago by Frank J Tipler. It was given house room (and a certain amount of credence) in ...
... the book I picked up in February 1988, which marked the first publication of Tipler's complete text. Since the only other item I have by Tipler is this considerably heavier (in many senses) book he co-wrote with John Barrow...
... that I went on to pick up in April 1989, and since Tipler's original arguments re-appeared in chapter 9, I decided to dig around a bit to see what else I have lurking on my shelves. [Pause] Tipler gets a whole chapter to himself in this...
... which, I contend, is not a promising sign. In his defence, he wrote a graduate paper whose title gave Larry Niven a story idea ("Rotating cylinders..."). In March 2005 he produced a paper deducing which was the Star of Bethlehem without making any reference whatsoever to Arthur C Clarke's classic SF story. Enough! I shall look elsewhere for my next amusements.
Which turned out...
... to be the reliably enjoyable film "Kissing Jessica Stein" which I last saw nearly five years ago. Made on the proverbial shoestring budget, laugh out loud funny, and full of wry observations.