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:

  1. Kettle
  2. BlackBeast Mk III and/or Skylark
  3. Kuro plasma screen (the end of the HDCP chain)
  4. Rotel pre-amp (set to Video Input #2 — the Humax PVR's HDMI output) and power amp
  5. Humax satellite PVR (for on-tap BBC radio)
  6. Confirm BBC Radio 3 is working, displaying, playing...
  7. Now select Video Input #6 — the NUC's HDMI output
  8. 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

Phase 2: the transient pleasure

Phase 3: the aftermath

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 and Potter

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.

Date: 2014


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!

  

Footnotes

1  With the considerably further-flung of the two chaps who each share 50% of my genome.
2  The London-based fruit of my loins — despite sporting said 50% of my genome — having so far failed to give me a clue regarding arrival time, duration of stay, or likely nutritional needs.
3  My Python guru's characterisation of this ASCII flat file might differ from mine.
4  On a compilation CD I picked up in HMV after an entertaining chat about jazz and Philip Glass with Chris down in the basement there. Purcell nowadays, for some reason, gets his name pronounced on BBC Radio 3 exactly like the soap-powder "Persil" I recall from childhood.