2016 — 11 January: Monday
Today I have a new temporary gig, as a taxi driver for Iris. Where I go will depend on the progress made by her garage in fixing her hi-tech Hybrid vehicle. They have yet to call her this morning with a progress report. My taxi fare? Quite reasonable: a favourite brand of chocolate-covered ginger biscuits.
This will be in between — among other things, of course — continued pondering of ways and means of efficiently turning the external 'molehole' web site into a completely static1 set of web pages for Junior's future hosting benefit as we leave Texas and relocate things into a "storage bucket" under AWS. Not counting that young gentleman's long-promised but as-yet-unwritten Script, I've now had two further offers of help with file-mangling utilities designed to munch their way through 'molehole', digest, and then excrete, well-formed HTML.
Changing my web-hosting technology...
... also gives me a chance to reconsider the basic structure of the site. I can change its visual appearance just by modifying my CSS file, but I need to make sure there are no bits of cruft lurking in long-neglected corners to derail any automated file-mangling. At least the external variant of 'molehole' is simpler to deal with. It's a subset of my complete web site, with only the tip of my little iceberg allowed to float beyond the firewall. I haven't yet decided whether to rework the whole thing.
I'm retired, you know! And there's still the increasingly-urgent matter of breakfast.
I had no idea...
... good ol' Herman Wouk was still with us (as it were). This is from his about-to-appear slim autobio at the age of 100!
When I passed my ninetieth milestone going hell-for-leather down the nonagenarian grade, I figured I had better cobble up what was left to write while I could. A short book called A Child's Garden of God waited its turn, a simple essay on faith and science, so I thought, and I took it on. Next thing I knew four years had whistled by, I had in hand two bank boxes crammed with thirty-odd journals, and a slim book of 40,000 words, The Language God Talks. That is a phrase Richard Feynman tossed off when we first met, urging me to learn calculus (which I never did)... I thought of calling the book God and Dick Feynman, for it does turn on those colloquies; but the great physicist was talking with me, after all, not God, so I dropped that notion.
I devoured...
... the Robert Graves books that were turned into a masterclass in thespian histrionics for the 1976 BBC series "I, Claudius". Somewhat more recently — while lunching last week, in fact — I browsed two volumes by T Rice Holmes that were gathering dust on the pub's shelf. I found both a telling description of the death of Cleopatra and a job title I'd previously been unaware of...
Octavian, supposing that she had perhaps only swooned, directed that Psylli (hereditary serpent-charmers and suckers of poison conveyed by serpents) should be summoned; but it was too late.
A brief flurry of web-assisted research took me to a bookseller in Brighton, and two of today's three incoming titles...
... a well-preserved (1928 and 1931) matching pair of Haywards Heath College ex-library hardbacks, complete with dust jackets, as I decided to push my knowledge of 'ancient' Rome back into more Augustan territory. He writes beautifully, and has a fine sense of dry, academic humour that is very much to my taste. (Plus, he likes footnotes!)
After re-uniting Iris...
... with her car, I came home via PCWorld, where I inspected the ever-larger range of large, flatscreen TVs. Why? I bought my present 60" Pioneer Kuro plasma in 2009. They were widely regarded as the bees' knees. But the manual warned me to expect a loss of as much as 50% in brightness with "typical" use over a five-year period.2 Knowing its 'working' life could be relatively short, I've taken great care in the last seven years to avoid over-use and screen burn.
Today's largest screen was a frankly stunning 78" Samsung (UHD 4K, of course, at just under £4,000) with "Nano crystal technology". That's cheaper than my Kuro but with a fabulous colour palette and perfect black level. I find myself mildly tempted. After all, the Oppo already upscales to 4K as, for that matter, does my little Marantz A/V box sitting unused upstairs...
Next, came Asda...
... and their discount shelves:
