2016 — 8 May: Sunday
I find myself wondering "How many people are there still alive today who remember my father?" Not many, actually.
This mortal life is a little thing, lived in a little corner of the earth; and little, too, is the longest fame to come — dependent as it is on a succession of fast-perishing little men who have no knowledge even of their own selves, much less of one dead and gone.
I dug that one up — it's by Marcus Aurelius, from his Meditations — on the day of Christa's funeral "celebration". (I wasn't feeling particularly celebratory!) And the trigger? Well, today (had he not died in 1975) dear ol' Dad would have been exactly 99 years old.1
Here endeth the (mortality) lesson.
What's next?
Well, let's see. There's breakfast to be dealt with, followed shortly thereafter by a minor-league supplies expotition. The supply of well-fired bread is running low.
Oh, good grief!
Those tricky differential equations can be big trouble:
Menzio for his part says he was "treated respectfully throughout," though he remains baffled and frustrated by a "broken system that does not collect information efficiently." He is troubled by the ignorance of his fellow passenger, as well as "A security protocol that is too rigid — in the sense that once the whistle is blown everything stops without checks — and relies on the input of people who may be completely clueless."
I wuz robbed!
My delicious well-fired loaf concealed a large hollow space (presumably where a bubble used to be earlier in its baking), dagnabbit. [Pause] No matter, I still managed to construct a tasty Ploughman's lunch (sort of) out of the bits. I'm reminded of that ancient joke:
Mum, there are holes in my cheese! Well, leave them on the side of your plate.
BBC 6Music...
... has just led me, indirectly, to the 40-track, nearly three-hour "soundtrack" album of "Peaky Blinders":
I tried, but did not stick with, the TV show when it first began, but there's nothing wrong with its music.
When I managed...
... to blow my Skylark PC out of the water (as it were) last week, it was a bit of a shock — after all, I certainly hadn't been expecting the Ubuntu installation to fail quite so fatally. But it wasn't by any means the end of the world. Once I had got back to a factory-default BIOS I knew eventual full recovery was then just a matter of following a step-by-step logical process. Skylark had no data of any importance in /home so its recovery to a working state was just a matter of re-installing Linux, and customising both my set of applications and the appearance of the desktop. Rinse and repeat. Trivial stuff.
I have a cunning plan
It starts with my putting Ubuntu 16.04 on to my Intel i5 Skylake NUC, which currently runs a Mint 17.3 Xfce system. Even if/when it all goes initially horribly wrong, not much is at stake since I'm only using the NUC to stream my music from the NAS. Installing Ubuntu — either alongside or instead of Mint — is not a complete act of madness. Ubuntu's kernel has some Skylake-related enhancements. It will be interesting to see what, if any, changes they bring to the table.
If I can also upgrade that kernel just a little further, who knows? It may fix the DisplayPort regression "issue" that has been making life with my gorgeous 34" Dell widescreen unnecessarily, erm, fraught over the past several months. Once that's fixed, I should be able to connect the NUC to the Dell via DisplayPort at both full resolution and 60Hz refresh. I can then switch Skylark back to the HDMI connection, also at 60Hz (where the NUC can only manage 50Hz).
No rush! After all, I do still have a few more interests rattling around.
For example, I've now finished...
... last Thursday's fat book on autism, but overall found it actually pretty disappointing. Time for another cuppa, methinks. The "Peaky Blinders" soundtrack album is excellent, by the way. Meanwhile, I think I shall be dipping a visual toe back into "House of Cards" Season #3 this evening. If I don't catch up with a bunch of CDs that arrived yesterday.
When I first set off...
... on my travels in Linuxland I found a set of "10 things to do first" in the Mint world. There's an Ubuntu 16.04 set I've just worked through. I was also interested to read about "Firejail".
My first Ubuntu bug?
Next time I powered on Skylark the desktop manager decided to throw away all my panel customisations. Flipping cheek. So I fired up MATE Tweak, reset to the default Ubuntu MATE appearance — which is entirely tolerable — saved it (quite possibly my mistake last time around, of course, in not having done so) and will now see what happens across the next power recycle...