2016 — 11 February: Thursday
I've been having some difficulty weaning myself off the idea of a newer, faster, larger PC.1 Much was clarified for me on yesterday's walk / chat. When I got home, I therefore dug up the round tuit I needed to actually run "Conky" on both a freshly-booted, and then — after the three minutes it took me to start up a very full subset of my "normal" applications — a reasonably fully-laden, BlackBeast Mk III to see, as it were, what goes on under the covers. Of course, all these applications promptly started sleeping while hanging around waiting for the indolent local human2 to require anything of them by way of response to so much as a mouse click or some keyboard input.
I joke that...
... I may be open to the mild accusation of having over-specified3 this series of mini-mainframes for the very little it is that I actually demand of them (Junior rather unkindly refers to what I do these days as "blowing bits of sand around" — but then we can't all be busy system programmers at the cutting edge of commercial pan-European systems enabling people to order unhealthy junk food to fuel their frenetic life-styles by running phone apps, can we?):
It doesn't seem to be a joke. The snapshot on the right is the "fully-laden" state... Bite me. Another childish dream shattered.
My lunchdate...
... is the next item on today's agenda. When I nipped out into the garage a few minutes ago on a meter-reading expotition (annoying, because I'd supplied readings just over one week ago) it was a mere 2C out there. The front of the house is not the sunny side until late in the day. Or, at this time of year, never. Brrr.
This was moderately...
... interesting. It's a review of a book "The Prose Factory" by DJ Taylor dealing with "Literary life in England since 1918". I'm always tickled when I see that word "literary" ever since the time IBM paid me a very welcome "Special Contribution Award" in which the accompanying letter (from my 1st-line manager at the time) cited (I quote carefully) "...your literacy ability...". Today's source and snippet:
Taylor's three sections on "Making a Living" provide real numbers about real people, so that the financial highs and lows of trying to subsist on literature can be vividly appreciated. Kingsley Amis spent £315 on taxis, £432 at the Garrick Club and £1,038 on drink in the month of February 1993 alone, while Julian Maclaren-Ross was "reduced to hawking vacuum cleaners door to door in Bognor Regis"...
The award was paid just a couple of months before Amis was paying his booze bill, but would have been £38 short of covering it :-)
I've decided on...
... my new PC. I warned my bank not to panic when "unusual transactions" pop up against my credit card. I'm using Amazon4. The bank's response wasn't entirely reassuring: "... we aren't able to confirm if a transaction will be authorised before you attempt to make the purchase.". Here's the bag of bits:
- Intel NUC6i5SYH - PC/workstation barebones (on its way from sunny Slough as I type)
- Samsung 950 Pro NVMe 512GB SSD
- 16 GB 2133 MHz DDR4 Memory
- Mini DisplayPort Cable
I shall put Linux Mint 17.3 on it. My public thanks to Len and Brian for much good advice, patiently proffered in the face of idiotic questions and daft assumptions.
I'm listening...
... to a 'special' BBC Radio 4 "Inside Science" programme (with far too many silly sound effects) trying to explain to the UK population what gravity waves are all about, while scanning just one frame from "Saga, volume 3" — one of five volumes that arrived yesterday — and wondering what...
... on this day, precisely 99 months since Christa died, dear Mama would have had to say about such a profoundly simple statement of a Hard Truth. In a science fiction "comic".