2016 — 7 June: Tuesday
Something is different. In what I take to be a good way.1 Not that absence of evidence is evidence of absence (as they say).
Meanwhile...
... the prospect of chaps clambering around up on my roof by, possibly, 08:30 has ensured my earlier preparation for the new day. Early enough, in fact, to put out my glass bottle recycling crate in time for once this month. Not that its nine jam-jars (one of those having held that strange jam called Marmite) will make much difference in? to? the Great Scheme of Things. Assuming such a Scheme even exists.
I've also been gently nibbling away for the past several weeks at the vast range of cardboard carton (and foam plastic packaging) that's been cluttering up the loft, bringing it down, chopping it up, and chucking it out. That journey still has a long way to go. But an emptier loft is strangely pleasing. It is, after all, a damn' silly place to keep stuff now that there's just me here to heft it up and down.
And stuff breeds. Particularly when it thinks I'm not looking. [Pause] Hark! The gentle tinkling sounds that tell me the Glassman Cometh. And his thundering great diesel lorry, of course.
As I bring...
... further applications "online" (as it were) this morning I've been checking each time to see if Mr Dump makes his unwelcome appearance. Not so far. I was reading last night about progress towards GA of Mint 18. There are also a few bits'n'bobs in the latest Ubuntu newsletter that look interesting. One about nVidia drivers, for example.
My current nVidia driver, on Mint 17.3 on BlackBeast:
... and (slight delay, while I first power Skylark up, logon, and then perform the equivalent Ubuntu 16.04 incantation, capture the window, convert2 it to a GIF, and leave it on the shared NAS drive to pickup on BlackBeast):
I had naïvely assumed I would have exactly the same driver on both PCs as I have exactly the same graphics card in both. Silly me. The kernel levels are vastly different. The latest "popular" driver level is 364.15, it seems. It has already clocked up over 37,000 downloads. I'm so behind the curve!
Blinkered? Moi?
All the time I've been using the Internet (well over two decades) I've been unaware that "the internet continues to reshape our lives emotionally, visually and culturally." That's if I can believe Nathan Smith, briefly reviewing a new book by Virginia Heffernan in the Smithsonian magazine. But then, I was equally unaware of a journalistic mantra you'll find in that review: comfort the disturbed, disturb the comfortable. I can see the soundbite appeal of such a mantra in a journalism class, I suppose. I grew up with "telling truth to power" which always struck me as a good idea providing you never forgot your flak jacket. (Link.)
Having watched the documentary extras on last night's excellent — but profoundly depressing — Blu-ray of "Spotlight" I now find myself wondering if that's what had motivated the real-life journalists at the Boston Globe.
Where will...
... the madness stop? An Open Source A.I. for everyone, running on a Raspberry Pi and larking about with the Internet of Things. What could possibly go wrong with that? Mycroft, heh? I'm sure I know that name.
I can't be bothered to comment on the idiocy of upgrading Trident. (Link.)
Crazy is as Akrasia does
Having got this far in my life without ever meeting the term, I've just read a snatch of Borg-related "Star Trek" dialogue in a review, by George Scialabba, of Thomas Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False". Such a catchy title. I recall reading a review in the NY Review of Books over three years ago, though that's now retreated behind an expensive paywall. Still, at least discovering that also led me to this. I'm looking forward to watching it.
Piers Anthony...
... remains amusingly opinionated. This is strangely reassuring. (Link.)
It's now six years...
... since the upheavals of my CH system replacement. The moral I learned then was "change your system more often than once every 29 years". I'm looking at the quotes for this next major round of roofing and brickwork maintenance. Not cheap, but there's a lot that needs doing. The repointing is going to be the largest, and certainly the most time-consuming, single component. (Peter's g/f has commented [unfavourably] on it every time she visits.) Such nettles have to be grasped sooner or later.
Why does this...
... remind me of more modern politicians, I wonder? It's from RW Johnson's "Look Back in Laughter":
In any case, just by keeping quiet I would be guilty of complicity. Ronnie, who was always very cavalier about the risks run by others, was utterly oblivious to all this. Even in later life when he became a minister in the post-apartheid government, Ronnie wore as his armour an air of cheerful — and almost unbelievable — naiveté.
Recall the phrase mala fide I gleaned from that fat volume on Trust Law.
[Pause]
Sorrentino's "The Grand Beauty" (the third of his films I've now watched) has its moments of grand beauty, interspersed — in my case — with moments of almost complete bafflement.