2016 — 10 February: Wednesday
Since AMD has been kind enough to update the level of their graphics card "Catalyst Control Center" this morning1 I actually fired it up for a quick look/see before doing anything else. No tweaking as far as I could tell. There was also a 'Flash' update but I keep that in the "Don't activate unless I ask" penalty box. On with the cuppa.
I ran out of time...
... to report all "incoming" items yesterday; I was too busy enjoying some of them. Two Linux magazines, two books, and a trio of DVDs, two picked up in Asda, one ("Amal") arriving from Canada:
I picked up a signed copy of Posy Simmonds' "Gemma Bovery" as a one-day-late birthday treat in 2000 after I had been regularly clipping the weekly serialised extracts from the "Grauniad" beforehand. It's superb. But then Posy can do no wrong. I very much enjoyed the film version eventually made of her later "Tamara Drewe". I had bought that in January 2008 in Bournemouth as another treat on my traditional — but, sadly, first-ever solo — New Year trip there.
The film of "Tamara" features the same actress, so I shall keep my fingers crossed.
There's a crockpot...
... to be stuffed and a walk to be walked before the day is very much older, too, so I shall merely mention the title ("All the light we cannot see") of the other book. I don't know anything about its author, Anthony Doerr, but this book won him last year's Pulitzer for fiction, and looked interesting.
I first learned...
... of the existence2 of the (1999) "Dunning-Kruger" effect only last year when following a link by the "brain flapping" chap in the Grauniad about why people keep electing idiots in elections. Presumably inspired by the example of Donald Trump, its author is back for another round. This time I actually dug a little deeper, and was thus equally charmed to find this update in (2014) from Dunning himself:
I find it only somewhat amusing...
... that the splendid, gorgeously-suited, chap who chaired the UK's financial regulation business (such a good job they did during the meltdown, let alone the decade leading up to it) now has it in for peer-to-peer lending outfits. "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?" (Link.)
It belatedly struck me that you may have thought I was chasing a peerless pun; I honestly wasn't. For once.
Having first...
... checked the UK's current Statute of Limitations, I think the time is ripe for a little something else from one of my many to-and-from exchanges with Carol in New York over the (mostly IBM) years.
I had a meeting with my manager yesterday. [It] came hard on the heels of a 30-minute session wherein the newest unlevelled Assistant Lab Manager sought to shape my head in a one-on-one positively around the set of messages he and his equally senior cohorts are currently requesting my spare time (hah!) help with. I suspect the head-shaping was deemed necessary because my parting shot when asked, after I'd attended the first meeting of this ineffectual shower, was "Who do I have to sleep with to get off this team?"
[If] we've just got rid of the previous Assistant Lab Manager on a redundancy package, how come we've managed to replace him immediately with a person in the same office, working for the same secretary, with the same job title and responsibilities? Difficult one, that. Obviously why I'm not management material.