2016 — 4 February: Thursday
A cheery overnight email from Israel assures me that the silent, Mint-capable, PC will, in due course, be available in the UK from Amazon, and other outlets. This is doubleplusgood. I was taken only slightly aback (while researching the less familiar of the two graphics cards — the nVidia Quadro M4000 that offers simultaneous support of four 4K displays,1 and is fitted to the "workstation" variant) to see that on its launch last year that card was nearly as much as my starting salary in ICL on this date in 1974!
Great Cthulhu's wrangler...
... is lunching with me today. Should be an interesting chat.
Part of yesterday evening's...
... entertainment2 was to re-try, and this time complete...
Its themes of grief, depression, and suicide may not be of wide appeal, and may explain it remaining unrated by those crazy arbiters of good taste and decorum, the fatuous MPAA. But I found it to be an interesting tale, well-told, with some nice "thought-experiment" speculations about the moral and ethical consequences of selfishly tinkering with the past (if that exists) to modify the present (I'm pretty sure that exists). Multiverses will get you in the end, that way, every, erm, time. The music was good, too.
Consequently, I've just ordered the same director's 2007 film "Amal", a much more down-to-earth fantasy of an eccentric bequest. I successfully dodged the Polish-only language variant and (taking advice from a previous buyer) opted for the bi-lingual English/Hindi version available from Canada. For a tenner total. I can stretch to that, even though the pension doesn't arrive until next Monday.
The Israeli pilot-production run...
... details have just been emailed to me. I am clearly not the sort of business customer they seek. Still, they are refreshingly up-front about exactly what early adopters get, including nothing to bring such early-build machines up to full-spec after purchase. I shall have to look elsewhere. [Pause] That forthcoming Intel NUC is still looking rather tasty:
Lunch at...
... the "Bridge" in Shawford was very pleasant. Parking there has been much enhanced by making it a pay&display area (with a "cost of first three hours" refund in the pub) to deter all-day blockage by rail3 passengers. And I must say the fully-assembled Great Cthulhu is quite a beast. Easily room atop its cooling fans for two large cats...
Will watching...
... "The Brain" give me any insight into the content-associative behaviour of the moist electrochemical jelly holding my ears apart? Today's mnemonic cascade began when I read about the rather nifty chip to convert a DisplayPort input to the more desirable HDMI 2.0a output.
In the summer of 1972 (during the assortment of odd jobs within Hawker Siddeley Aviation deemed appropriate for an aeronautical engineer) I recall trying to interest a colleague in my lunchtime reading about a DIY project in "Wireless World". The project was a four-function calculator mashed together from about 115 discrete (but cheap) logic chips. I had earlier that year been shown the new pride and joy acquired by an Uncle who ran a couple of garages in Dorset — a calculator embedded, quite usefully, in a ruler, but costing a staggering £200 or so. I was itching to acquire4 such a spectacularly-useful thing.
I couldn't get the chap to accept "logic" as an appropriate term (let alone convey the idea of a "chip" containing "logic gates"). That was an eye-opener. It reminded me of the rather sad end-game I'd read in 1963 in Fred Hoyle's "The Black Cloud". Just tell me where and how that gets encoded in the brain! And retrieved later.