2016 — 7 April: Thursday
I can but hope1 that keeping a daily diary is somewhat healthier than the Stoic's advice to contemplate one's mortality every day. It's bad enough contemplating the mortality of various bits and pieces of Technology Towers.
The sun is shining...
... and the prospect of a lunchdate is a cheering one. Breakfast is probably a good idea, too. Furthermore, the NUC started up beautifully, though I can't say I'm quite as keen on Max's choices of "Late Junction" music as I am on Fiona's.
A diversion into Google territory
I propose to ignore today's Smartphone Googlebot complaints report. It's along precisely the same lines as yesterday's Desktop Googlebot whinge. Only the number of "404 - Page not found" items has increased.2 But I see it more as my glorious opportunity to "shake off unwanted Klingons" and ditto accumulated cruft. It's not as if I actually ask anyone to host links to 'molehole'. Just family and friends does me fine, thanks all the same.
If Google chooses to send out teams of robot agents crawling all over my little web, well, I can't stop them doing that. And 'molehole' may well be an incoherent and growing mess of broken links from their point of view — since that's the only way they can interpret a "404 - Page not found" error on another site when it links to a page on 'molehole'. But it's my incoherent mess. The only things "broken" or "missing" from my POV are precisely those links from the "public" bits of 'molehole' to the bits that are tucked away behind my firewall.
End of mini-rant :-)
Actually...
... in reviewing the Googlebot whinges I have to admit I also discovered an earlier (overlooked!) message from them about "Soft 404 errors" that made very interesting reading.
Of course, I don't have a Service Level Agreement with anyone except, possibly, the gang of people who seem to enjoy partying in my head. If other people wish to link here, I can merely suggest they link to my Home Page. (I try to make 'molehole' navigation simple and straightforward from there. And I offer a Site Map.) But I have no control over who chooses to link to what. That's entirely up to them.
I'm currently...
... listening to an item about this interesting chap. (Janek Schaefer.) Sonic serendipity indeed.
The NUC...
... got a good talking-to while perched next to the Great Cthulhu this afternoon, after lunch at "The Wheatsheaf" in Braishfield. We tweaked those bits of BIOS that might have been "slowing down" its sluggish boot routine (for example, don't bother looking for an optical drive because there isn't one), and also re-instituted its Grub menu display to let me get a better idea of what's going on. It's now somewhat less sluggish, but still takes almost a minute from power-on to desktop. Shockingly slow!
Mind you, the entire Interweb has felt a bit sluggish today. One of my "publish-AWS" commands to Amazon's Storage Bucket in the Sky actually timed out on me before completing.
Two more Ruth Artmonsky...
... titles arrived today, both on printing and printers:
They will give me a pleasant break from recalcitrant PCs. I would attempt to describe the latest failure mode, but my heart wouldn't be in it.
[Long pause]
Well, I hesitate to declare victory on the basis of just a couple of hours runtime this evening... but it's starting to look as if disabling the 34" Dell screen's "DDC/CI" capability (which Linux is apparently unable to make any use of in any case) may just have done the trick — the trick, in this case, being to stop Skylark's DisplayPort-connected screen going to sleep in a way from which it cannot subsequently be re-awakened. And with the NUC also back (more locally-attached via HDMI once again) that, too, has been behaving impeccably, and at full Dell resolution.
Could things be looking up?