2016 — 5 May: Thursday
With the sun safely shining — albeit quite chilly still — and my cuppa at hand, the diabolical Max Reinhardt is just about to send me off in search of a new (to me) female vocalist. Well, not quite new. I already knew how to spell her name — Kathryn Williams — thanks to the one track1 I currently have by her in my little collection.
So "Crown Electric" is now playing on my virtual turntable; I was particularly caught by the lyrics to her song "Gave it away", including this profoundly simple truth in the final two lines:
Everyone dies, there's no escape What's left behind becomes a new shape.
If you'd heard that while looking out at Christa's back garden you, too, might very well have succumbed :-)
Meanwhile...
... I'm delighted to have a lunch date to look forward to — I'm predicting some amount of UEFI- and Linux-related griping — and, before that, quite probably some breakfast on the morning's agenda. What else? Who can say what evil lurks in the Mind of a Mole?
You might well...
... say that; I couldn't possibly comment:
As a child, books were my escape from mundane, endless summer holidays, or school bullies, and I never forgot how they were always there for me. But now my attention span has dwindled to a degree that would make a gnat look like a scholar and, to my huge regret, the act of sitting on the sofa and curling up with a book feels like it would be a chore.
I prefer my armchair, not the sofa. That was more Christa's terrain! And my most recently ascended word-mountain remains those nine Kage Baker "Company" novels from last month. Perhaps I'll check to see how the TOR guy's re-reading is getting on.
"Word processing" is...
... an odd description of writing, should one ever stop to think about it. I rarely do, to be honest. My first few books in ICL were all "word processed" between my ears, handwritten by pen, and then "keyboarded" for me by others2 before being cut'n'pasted up — at some risk to finger-tips from slipping scalpel blades — (aah, those cow gum fumes!) into the camera-ready copy that went off to the plate-making process that immediately preceded printing. We even latterly started using an IBM composer/typewriter which had a golfball head and (gasp!) could be persuaded to produce proportionally-spaced text (with much laborious effort).
When I switched from ICL to IBM in mid-1981 there was a whole new level of (mainframe-based) technology. I had to start by learning how to use a mark-up language (much like HTML, actually) with which to wrapper my peerless prose. Attempts were also made to turn me into a touch typist. They failed. I need the thinking time between characters.
This tickled me:
Amy Tan founded a support group for Kaypro users called Bad Sector, named after her first computer — itself named for the error message it spat up so often
(Link.)
Since nobody...
... could be bothered to point out the typo I've been hosting on a ¬blog page for the last 3,288 days I have quietly deleted the superfluous character. Ironic to find it on a page with a section called "Corrected correction department". I like to kid myself I spoil my readers.
This quite hefty...
... tome showed up just as I was setting off for my lunchdate after a second round of food shelf replenishment (picking up bulkier stuff I hadn't had room for in yesterday's "Quick Checkout" bag):
Although the cover might suggest we're all a flock of disparate bird-brains, I'd started reading it in Soton last Thursday (you may recall my mentioning "resisting temptation") and found the only thing to dislike was paying Waterstone's price.
I've just learned...
... that a mere seven strawberries between them constitute one of my "five a day". I treated myself to a punnet (except that it was a plastic pack, but let's not quibble). Yummy. Besides, it's pension day tomorrow. And the rest of my evening meal is the remainder of yesterday's Pistachio Chicken with the rice that's my own addition to the mix. Also yummy. With a honey sandwich. That's living!
Much later
I believe I've done all I can to prep Skylark for surgery. Its CMOS RAM should be clear, it has only the 250GB SSD, and I've pre-partitioned that sensibly into space for the OS, my /home and a swap space. I've removed both the graphics card and the sound card. I shall be using my 27" Asus screen to avoid any issues with the 34" Dell screen. I have Brian's PS/2 keyboard and a spare USB mouse ready to join the party, but won't now start on it tonight. It's just gone midnight, and I'm too tired.
The game plan is simply to repeat the process, if possible, of booting from the USB stick with the Ubuntu 16.04 MATE build on it, and then installing it. Of course, the plan relies on getting into the BIOS setup to specify the boot device...