2016 — 27 April: Wednesday
I regret to admit I quite enjoy watching grudges being settled in public... Source and snippet:
Mr. Senior Adviser for Innovation, I quickly discovered, didn't have much advice to dispatch and was himself busy recruiting informal advisers to generate talking points for [Hillary] Clinton. That wouldn't have been so bad if, at the same time, Ross weren't so keen on namedropping and signaling his status. It took him just a few minutes to mention that he was supposed to have a call with "Samantha Power at the White House" and that, despite his senior position, he had seen poverty up close in West Virginia (where he grew up) and in Baltimore (where he was living). A six-week-old copy of The Economist, featuring an African woman holding a mobile phone on its cover, occupied a strategic spot on his desk. Here was an important man reading important things and talking to important people.
Nice to see someone who hasn't yet forgotten the disgraceful part the US played in Chile in 1973.
The experiments with cybernetics in Allende's Chile come to mind, though they were crushed by none other than that evangelist of openness, the United States.
Actually, I'd never heard of this "Alec" Ross, though I've three times mentioned his near namesake "Alex" who writes amusingly about music and similar for the New Yorker. Not that I'm namedropping, you understand.
Meanwhile...
... I have a lunch date to anticipate1 with pleasure.
A set of beach photos...
... coming in overnight from Big Bro suggests NZ is enjoying other than our somewhat chilly stuff here at the moment. 'Twas ever thus. [Pause] Having just exiled my Danish Oil application cloth once again to the garage I can report it's only 1C and there's plentiful frost atop my neighbours' cars. Time for the second cup that warms, methinks.
Nine years ago...
... I see I was even then blaming Linux for what turned out to be a KVM problem:
"You never get nowhere if you're too 'asty!"
A couple of...
... rumbles of post-prandial thunder, not too far away, persuaded me to take my little gang of technical toys off the grid for a while once I was back at Technology Towers. No hardship, as there's plenty else to amuse myself with. I had, and quite enjoyed, my first-ever largely Mexican lunch. How's that for exiting my comfort zone, Big Bro?
You would think, would you not, that some idiot churning out fake despatch notifications purporting to be from Amazon would (a) address me by name, (b) try to make them look at least a bit authentic, and (c) not attach weird zip files to them? Too much like hard work, I suppose.
When these two...
... titles whispered "Buy me" recently, I thought, "OK, why not?"
They're making a complete change from the recently-completed2 Kage Baker time travel saga. As did Curtis Sittenfeld's "Eligible" (but that's an entirely different story!)