2016 — 28 April: Thursday
Boggling though the thought is, we're now just about one-third through the year. How does that keep happening?
I'm predicting...
... a gently-therapeutic1 retail expotition in celebration of Spring, preferably before the predicted rain. (And snow further North!) Gotta keep all those economic engines racing. (It's amusing — to me, if no-one else — to hear teams of "economists" trotted out to deliver their completely confident, yet for some reason completely opposed, views of the dire/delicious consequences of "Brexit".)
Newspeak
I couldn't help recalling Winston Smith as I made a minor adjustment to an elderly ¬blog page to correct (by removing) a web link that had somehow mutated since April 2007 to point, not to a web designer, but to a firm of home designers. DoublePlusUngood. Still, it was nice to be reminded of "arsenious"! And it gave me a chance to repair the link about Tim Berners-Lee's first web browser, too. The host has moved (like me) from SHTML back to HTML.
I should add that I'm not in the habit of repairing "link rot" as I suspect that would be a fulltime job for several people (and I'm not one of them). But if I spot a broken link and I happen to be feeling virtuous...
Sadly, Jenni Diski...
... died this morning. I've just spent a bitter-sweet couple of hours browsing through the archive of her work that the London Review of Books has maintained, snaffling all the stuff I hadn't already read and/or downloaded previously. She was a superb writer with a marvellous eye for the offbeat details that make stuff more interesting. It seems others agree with me. (Link.)
No toy!
I'd been vaguely contemplating a 12" Samsung Galaxy Android Tablet until I discovered it has a fourth (sub-pixel) row of white cells per screen line that may indeed boost the perceived brightness of the display but does the square root of bugger all to increase the perceived sharpness over and above their 10" screen device.
My virtue (in resisting temptation) and buying, instead, my first-ever pack of decent cotton hankies as an adult — in contrast to receiving packs of the things in Xmases past — did not go entirely unrewarded, but I've yet to fire up my scanner. [Pause] I'm also wondering how safe it will be to gulp down the pack of defrosted raspberries that I found buried (under the ice) right at the back of my little freezer compartment last night when scraping out the worst of the build-up. It claims "Best before end May 2012"...
Not unlike me.
Delicious!
Linux Voice magazine...
... just keeps getting better. It's particularly Ubuntu-centric this month, for obvious reasons, and comes out strongly in favour of Ubuntu 16.04 MATE edition. [Pause] I've just been taking it out for a spin in VirtualBox. Nice.