2016 — 5 January: Tuesday
A nice enough piece of choral music I've not heard before...
... but it's not exactly making for a lively start to the brand new day. (I note that, these days, although I'm usually awake with the dawn chorus — particularly easy when sunrise is so late during these winter months — there's actually very little going on by way of such a chorus. This is not a Good Thing.) There is, however, a walk afoot to disperse cobwebs.
No battle plan...
... ever written is supposed to have survived five minutes of contact with the enemy.1 Thus it is, too, with my simple-minded suggested solution #4 to my TV Show listing "problem".
Solution #5 will be (even) better :-)
Far from the madding...
... crowd(s) I found Waitrose pleasantly unbusy this morning (having procrastinated in my usual way yesterday). They, too, have simplified one of their processes: their self-checkout. Instead of making me first "swipe" Card 'A' and then immediately scan Card 'B' I now just "swipe" Card 'B' and save having to dig both cards out of my wallet. Progress, I suppose.
Some people carry out the act of alphabetisation to insane extremes. Though this (done, I assume, by someone [AVIDly?] practising their video editing techniques) may actually be a better way of watching "Of Oz The Wizard"! Personally, I've never got through more than the first 30 minutes of the non-alphabetised version before wanting to chuck a brick at the screen.
There are some...
... awesome bits of what Alan Parsons dubbed "psychobabble" in "The Rose". Here's an example:
"But tell me, Matt, where do our thoughts go after we think them? What is the extra-cranial fate of those feeble, intricate electric oscillations we pick up on the encephalograph? We know they can and do penetrate the skull, that they can pass through bone, like radio waves. Do they go on out into the universe forever?"
What a horrid thought! But then I barely know where my thoughts come from, let alone depart to...
This confirms...
... what I'd already discovered for myself when I retired, and began this ¬blog:
... writing as little as thirty minutes a day for four days in a row can ease anxiety and depression and help people recover from illness and trauma... putting emotions into words changes brain chemistry and brain architecture, which, in turn, affects the rest of the body. Writing rather than speaking or thinking those words seems to have a particularly profound influence on the brain.
Good to know. Don't miss the gorgeous illustration.
From time to time...
... I get a bit of an itch to "do something" about the slowly-growing disorder of the single CSS file that governs exactly how 'molehole' looks, feels, and behaves as a web site. This afternoon's scratching has taken me back to four books that have been generally sadly neglected for the past nine years:
Let's see what happens after I've blown the dust off them, shall we? Just don't hold your breath! Nor expect miracles. I still firmly believe in simplicity.
There have now been...
... a couple of new SSIs added, and another image map. But none of these should make any difference to the visual appearance or behaviour of "molehole". It's all been work in support of the Python-mediated generation of some of my tedious lists of book and video titles from a pair of SQLite DBs. (One living inside Kodi, the other not; I leave you to guess which is which.)
Uncle ERNIE...
... has totally ignored dear Mama this month, but has dropped a useful £50 into my lap instead. Cool!