2016 — 24 March: Thursday
Further email exchanges1 have confirmed (among other, lesser, matters) that the trans-substantiation of the body of 'molehole' into static HTML is satisfactorily and seamlessly complete.
The stage is now set...
... for its coming Easter weekend resurrection in its next incarnation, and its next Cloud-based home — somewhere in the heavenly haven of an AWS data bucket not too near the Right Hand of Bezos. I await Junior's arrival, since while his g/f cuts a swathe through the local jungle for me, he will be acting as my spiritual advisor. I need his wisdom to help me establish a reliable line of control and non-prayer-based communication for me with Norman Greenbaum's Spirit in the Sky Koestler's Ghost in the Machine.
Enough with the idiotic religious metaphors, Mounce! Go make yourself another cuppa. And eat that half a grapefruit while you're out there... before the spores do.
The NUC...
... has an odd foible. Shutting it down each evening (to let its silicon memory cool off after spending all day squirting music at me) it will only re-awaken next morning after its power plug is first physically removed and re-inserted. Yet the blue LED that seems to show its charging USB port is open for business brightly glows at me. I could try simply leaving it 'running' overnight, but that raises "loss of display screen" issues and undesirable side effects on the "size" of the "screen" I can then get on the 34" Dell courtesy of NoMachine. Len and I are both going slightly nuts working around aspects of this behaviour.
Meanwhile, my workable morning switch-on routine is currently:
- Kettle
- BlackBeast Mk III and/or Skylark
- Kuro plasma screen (the end of the HDCP chain)
- Rotel pre-amp (set to Video Input #2 — the Humax PVR's HDMI output) and power amp
- Humax satellite PVR (for on-tap BBC radio)
- Confirm BBC Radio 3 is working, displaying, playing...
- Now select Video Input #6 — the NUC's HDMI output
- Finally, power on the NUC
Then it's time to login to BlackBeast, fire up NoMachine, use it to login to the NUC, click on the NUC's "view" of the NAS (which will by now have spun up in response to BlackBeast stirring into life), select a choice of music, start playback, adjust volume, power off the Kuro as it's no longer needed, finish making the tea, enjoy same.
Simple pleasures, but mine own. (Of course, I admit it was a non-digital bit easier in the good ol' days of Analogue.) When I can no longer cope (!) I will know it's time to check into dear Mama's care-home...
On returning from...
... a somewhat speculative2 foodie-shopping top-up run — the pleasantly uncrowded "swings" nature of the aisles being more than counter-balanced by the unpleasantly bumper-to-bumper "roundabouts" nature of my return journey a little before 09:00 — I dispersed the goodies here and there (there probably being where I will find them only after the next kitchen episode of Attack of the Spores), and then casually resumed some music playback. I also had a plan (fairly soon) to "do something" about breakfast. On came a track from the New Jazz Orchestra's lovely "Dejeuner sur l'herbe" album. "Haven't played that for a while", thinks I. "Let's winkle out the whole album from its MP3 cave."
Seasoned readers will know what's coming.
Phase 1: the quest
- Reheat the cuppa that cooled during failure to find this album among my "well-organised library" of MP3 files. Find it in my "comprehensive music database"3 but note a data field contains "CD" where I expected to see "MP3". The horror! A CD sneaked past my in-house ripping process? Impossible!
- Shove aside the once-again laden dining-room table, and winkle out the actual CD for BlackBeast to rip using "Asunder"
- Asunder says it's "Unknown", so use a combination of Amazon's Digital Music store and Wikipedia's discography info to associate titles to tracks on the basis of reported running times. Key in the details.
- Rip the CD, and squirrel away the MP3 files
- Decide to bring down a CD player to put alongside the A/V stack as a nice solid platform on which to pop the NUC and its 4TB external disk drive
- Interrupted by a call on my mobile while, (a) passing it, and (b) the varying field strength hereabouts permits me to answer it, for once
- Launch into normal diatribe against unwanted cold-callers [pause] the terribly nice young chap (in the O2 shop in Eastleigh) says all he wants is to put me on a cheaper tariff
- Stunned, I fail to answer security questions, but receive and verbally confirm a security code in a text message
- End the call £6 per month richer
Phase 2: the transient pleasure
- Reheat the (same) cuppa that has (again) cooled during my interrupted search for a power lead, an optical fibre, and the instructions for associating a given optical audio input on the Rotel when it has no associated video input. Then discover some idiot programmed in an analogue input labelled "Radio" from his Humax on the same-numbered input I'd just plugged the optical fibre into
- Start playing the actual CD on the relocated player. Sounds glorious (which is, at this stage, a Good Thing)
- While congratulating myself on having shopped before the rain, receive and read email from son regarding possible non-appearance this weekend as his g/f hasn't been well
- Idly ponder potential food wastage, not to mention failure of jungle clearance plans. Ditto possible delay in migration of 'molehole' files to the AWS cloud
Phase 3: the aftermath
- Reheat (again), but this time drink, the now rather elderly cuppa while documenting my adventures, and noticing the odd behaviour of spacing after my HTML "end of list" tags. Ascribe that to my CSS, and listlessly let sleeping lists lie
Make, and eat, lunch preceded by a delicious fresh fruit salad of my own devising — half a cooking apple, a kiwi, and some "luxury summer berry compote". "It's a Good life!" if you recall the Jerome Bixby story.
I did not return...
... completely empty-handed from my little trip to the metrollops on Tuesday. After paying-in dear Mama's last-ever prize from Uncle ERNIE before it timed out, I wandered past a bookshop or two:
Sayle's memoir is already commanding a ridiculously high price on Amazon. And I've been reading the Potter while playing some glorious music by Purcell4. Since I've long believed that not even the most stoic of philosophers can long withstand toothache, here's a snippet:
Or perhaps consciousness is a category error, like "ascribing nutritional value to prime numbers". The philosopher Daniel Dennett says consciousness is merely a linguistic confusion. The neuroscientist Christof Koch says, try telling someone suffering great pain that what they are feeling is a linguistic confusion; that their pain is of no greater significance than any of the unconscious workings of their body.
Quite so. Had anyone dared tell Christa she was feeling "linguistic confusion" as that foul cancer ripped through her body I would have visited a spot of such confusion upon them myself. With a hammer.
Progress...
... of a sort, Jim, but Not As We Know It. I now have both an account and a userid for my AWS Management console, plus an ugly 38-character password I've just cooked up since Junior doesn't want any Black Hats to make off with his credit card. Fair enough, I suppose. I will know more after he and she arrive tomorrow morning (perhaps with an Easter Egg — who knows?) to take me out to lunch before initiating me into the Inner Circle (Black Cloud?) of AWS. I last used AWS back in early 2008, and have yet to rotate my keys!
There's some interesting "first hand experience" reading here, and a potential command-line S3 publishing interface tool-set here.
Static web sites rock!