2016 — 3 March: Thursday

I've soaked up my Recommended Daily Allowance1 and am now back on my soothing classical music diet. A nice sunny start to another day of mischief, one hopes. And I have a lunch date.

Browsing back through...

... items "salted away" in the archaeological layers of my haphazard collection of external drives kept me up surprisingly late yesterday evening. Mind you, there's plenty of even older stuff to be found "scattered around" on molehole. I was forcefully reminded of this while doing some of the preparatory investigations for the pending removal of all my SSIs and the reversion of the external version2 of the website to a purely static set of HTML pages.

Here's a paragraph from a letter to dear Mama some while ago. I'd mentioned IBM's financial results, since I knew it was a topic more likely than most for her to relate to:

Of course, that doesn't stop Uncle Lou (Gerstner) from telling us all to run harder than ever before, but then I don't think anything would. I haven't a clue what drives people like him, apart from giant ego, maybe, and in his case a severe case of partially-acknowledged sibling rivalry. Have no fear, I am completely devoid of that, having long ago decided that computers suit me a lot more congenially than aircraft ever would! After all, the worst that happens after a computer crash is you simply reboot the thing and, unless you're completely inept as a programmer, recovery is (relatively) simple. After an aircraft crash about all you can do is call in the fire department and (usually) the local priest/morgue...

Date: 23 January 2000


No reply, of course. But I was used to that.

Uncle ERNIE...

... has just handed dear Mama's estate his parting shot — a final £25 to swell her coffin coffers. That brings her posthumous prize total to a not terribly exciting £75 so I shall be topping-up Big Bro's little UK postage stamps fund by £37-50 as agreed. Meanwhile, ERNIE is flinging £100 in my direction, too, this month. That's very sweet of him.

[Pause, for lunch and a chat]

It's now confirmed that my little NUC cannot drive each of two different 34" Dell screens via its DisplayPort output. My next step will be to see if there's a BIOS upgrade available for its dinky little motherboard. Meanwhile, when I got back to Technology Towers there was a "warrant" on the door mat for me. It's from Uncle ERNIE, and is a repayment of dear Mama's Premium Bonds now that her "grace year" has elapsed. I must say, the last 12 months have simply whizzed by.

Remind me...

... not to do my more obscure-title DVD shopping in "flyover state" mail-order bookshops next time. The title is right:

Way off Broadway

But the version I actually wanted to get was this 2001 variant — the one with Morena Baccarin in. (For obvious reasons.) Not this 2002 Christ-filled musical nonsense!

  

Footnotes

1  Ten minutes (max.) of BBC Radio 4 national "news".
2  The external site being only (as it were) the visible tip of the iceberg. There's no rule that says the rest of my site has to go "static". The servers involved are thousands of miles apart, after all. And I can think of several reasons to keep using SSIs internally (mostly for my own convenience, of course).