2016 — 26 August: Friday
Having mentioned the Romans in Trier yesterday, it was apparently on this day1 that the Romans did their "Veni Vidi Vici" act over here in the not-then-united kingdom.
It will be on this day that I take my next walk. We are to be a trio for a change. Meanwhile, I have to ask myself, "do I want an upgrade to my UltraEdit Linux editor?" Having scanned the list of changes, I'm not terribly convinced. Besides, I still have one free installation "left".
Oh dear
Spats in academia? Harper's ran an essay by Tom Wolfe (perhaps to push his new book?) that has caused a few ripples.
It is a testimony to Chomsky's stature that there is a publisher of a mainstream magazine who concludes that even two national conventions featuring two of the most unpopular people ever to run for the presidency won't attract more eyeballs than yet another takedown of Noam Chomsky and Generative Grammar (GG).
Consensus seems to be that the essay is not unflawed. Radically un-chic, perhaps? Good 'Chronicle' essay here.
A very pleasant walk. Turned out it was hotter in the house than out in the fresh air.
This struck me...
... as a tad, erm, "precious" in Presto's description of a new "Goldberg" harpsichord CD by Mahan Esfahani:
While disdainful of the kind of quasi-Qabbalistic cryptographical navel-gazing that the Goldbergs have sometimes inspired in scholars...
Almost as good as Chomsky's "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously". I have no idea how one sets about performing quasi-Qabbalistic cryptographical navel-gazing. Nor what might result from it.
[Pause]
Following laundry, lunch, and a blagged cuppa across the village, I'm back in Technology Towers clutching my Lindy HDMI switch box that Brian found (and showed me) to be working perfectly. It seems not plugging in the IR receptor explains the lack of remote control functionality. (Though not the inability to switch inputs manually, which Brian also found to be working fine.) What explains the non-function of the i5 NUC's HDMI connection2 is yet another issue. So I may yet give it another whirl around the assault course of my 34" Dell. No rush, however, since last time I tried I ended up re-installing Linux on the NUC.
There's also the imminent prospect of a Raspberry Pi3 looming on my horizon, and quite possibly a change of internal web server technology from lighttpd to NGINX in due course, just for fun. The Open Source variant, not the one I have to pay for. I am but a poor pensioner, after all. Plus possibly a local "Cloud" data NAS solution and some scripted backups. What larks, Pip ol' chum. What larks!
Time, it seems...
... for yet another bi-annual eye test, too. My optician asserts "a massive 3.7 million" people choose contact lenses. I shall continue not to be one of them. Been there, tried that — even the so-called soft ones — back in the late 1970s. It didn't work at all well. And, when you see the crud to be cleaned off the surface of my glasses a couple of times a week, I see no reason to change my visual habits. He will doubtless mention laser surgery. If he does, I will again ask him would he have that himself. He will (if he runs true to form) reply "No". It's a well-rehearsed three-decade routine we go though.
Meteorwrong?
Hadn't seen this checklist before.
Look what you can do...
... with a simple Python function that's already baked into the language! Serve perfect 'molehole' pages locally by executing the function in a terminal opened in the top level of the directory tree that holds a local copy of my web site.
Seriously cool, and rather a neat trick.