2016 — 6 August: Saturday
Hello, pension!1 See yesterday re state of tea and dunkability of ginger nut. Again, a quiet motorway. For a change, a small and very dead rat by the garden gate, conveniently near my bin. Thanks, cat (I'm guessing). In the midst of life, and all that...
From what I've seen...
... so far, "Linux Mint 18" remains the distro to beat. I've shown my appreciation in the usual way. And note the decline in the exchange rate. Stupid Brexit decision. It's a heck of a self-inflicted wound in the short-term, no matter what the end result. And people can hardly claim not to have been warned.
On that front...
... I note my local Borough Council is now complaining about county-level plans and consultation afoot to sweep them away and centralise all the deciding and controlling from Winchester. Mr Borough tells me this in an expensive, snail-mailed, colour printed leaflet that leaves it unclear what, if anything, I'm expected to "do" about this. Nor does it give any facts pro or con. What recent campaign does that remind me of?
Not that Mr County has been in touch :-)
I'm not inclined to think well of Winchester and its plans simply because I remember shenanigans from over 30 years ago. I share the late George Carlin's ability to nurse grudges and prejudices. No matter how ill-informed.
Apparently...
... I'm a freak. But I endorse the final couple of paragraphs of this simplistic analysis. Source and snippet:
But it is possible for people to go from upper middle class suburbs to selective schools to big-city bohemias or campuses with only the vaguest idea of how the 70 percent of their fellow citizens whose education ends with high school actually live.
Universal national service would be a bad idea; the working class majority is hard-pressed enough without being required to perform unpaid labor. But it might not hurt if every professor, opinion journalist, and foundation expert, as a condition of career advancement, had
to spend a year or two working in a shopping mall, hotel, hospital, or warehouse.
Freak literature
Shades of Pohl and Kornbluth's "The Space Merchants" which has been knocking around on my shelves for half a century. And its striking Penguin cover art introduced me to Viktor Vasarely:
It was (I gather) revised in 2011. My limited edition copy #305 of his memoir predates that snippet of Wikipedian "fact" by 38 years, but mentions Pohl's "entire shelf" of various editions. I recall dear Mama reading, with absolute horror, the dust jacket synopsis of the library copy I'd borrowed of "A Plague of Pythons" — not his finest work, I admit. Victor Gollancz SF had bright yellow covers... hard to conceal from an eagle-eyed parental professional disapprover!
While I was...
... delighted to discover that Mary-Louise Parker is also a writer, I was a bit miffed to have to order the BBC's "Orphan Black" Season #4 from across the Pond, since (a) it was intercepted by our Border Force...
... and thus (b) I had to pay both £4.48 VAT and a handling fee of £8.00 to break it out of the Royal Mail's jail. That rather changes my business model.
I was browsing...
... part of an essay by a gadfly I rather like:
I picked up a slim volume with the less-than-enthralling title, Making Sense of the NHS Complaints and Disciplinary Procedures... Inside was a slip of paper from the Small Practices Association, asking for a review for its professional journal.
The reviewer asked was Dr Harold Shipman, and his review was due six months before he was arrested for having murdered many patients. I know from the greying of the edges of such a book when it has been read from cover to cover, and this book had been read
in such a fashion.
There's plenty more Dalrymple. On our youngsters, for example:
But a great deal of the responsibility lies with those who not only have persistently and wilfully failed to notice that an education costing £50,000 per head has equipped these young people with no useful attainments, not even the ability to read, write or reckon... but have also persuaded the objects of their social experimentation that they are endowed by their governments with certain inalienable rights, among these being a level of consumption equal to those who work hard, save money, display determination and have learnt difficult skills.
Having managed...
... to recover the use of my spiffy m2 SSD by re-partitioning it as a single, large, data space for use on Skylark I have just stumbled over something that means calling in the weekend emergency Linux system recovery guru. I suspect my attempt to put the m2 SSD details into /etc/fstab was a step too far. The subsequent re-boot unkindly stalled, and is now sitting there welcoming me to some form of recovery mode I've not previously seen.
Meanwhile, my second copy of that "Heathrow in photographs" book turned up, and I remembered to stop myself ripping open the packaging. That way, I can just slap a new address label on it, pay a small fortune, and send it on its way down to NZ.
Skylark...
... is restored to full health. I've updated my notes here.