2016 — 7 September: Wednesday
The second mistake my Indian-accented chum "Ollie"1 made this morning was to flat out refuse to tell me my IP address, asserting in a gabble that "it didn't matter". His first, of course, was in accusing my "Windows computer" of sending out a string of error messages... Perhaps I should offer Conservapedia an article on the topic to assist them in shedding light further afield?
I have a lunch date, before which I ought probably to do a little bit of cupboard filling to help out Mother Hubbard. With the latest pension safely tucked away I can now branch out a little beyond last night's slightly-mouldy "Luxury Summer Berry Compote". But certainly not before breakfast. I also find I send out a string of error messages until at least the second cuppa...
I suspect...
... the writers here have a subtly-different understanding of "entropic" from mine. Source and snippet:
Today, so-called knowledge work is typically not undertaken while tucked in among cabinets jammed with gems and bronze figurines. Indeed the studiolo, with its hodgepodges and focus on contemplative individuality seems to represent the antithesis of the modern,
inspired workspace with its emphasis on worker interchangeability and buzzy, almost entropic collaboration...
The office as a cyberized version of Hotel California: You can clock-in anytime you like but you can never clock-out.
Still, it's good to know I have unwittingly turned my living room here in Technology Towers into a Renaissance studiolo. My latest 'sculpture' therein being something I've been on the lookout for ever since first reading about one in the back pages of (I rather suspect) a copy of "Superman's pal, Jimmy Olsen" in the very early 1960s!
Martin Raynsford's laser cutter enables him to offer a wonderful little wooden box — the Useless Machine 2.0:
When you switch it "On" the lid opens, and a probe pops out that flicks it straight back to "Off". It occurs to me that a failing PC manages an analogous modus operandi, I grant you, but with considerably less grace. And a great deal more angst.
Aside to Christa
What better use for a surplus bit of mains cable than to use it to replace the simple clothesline arrangement in the vicinity of Shed #1? (Which, notice, sports a nice new felt roof.)
Snaffling "my" weekend set of BBC radio Jazz and 6Music programmes seemed to be taking rather longer than usual. Turns out these get_iplayer.exe downloads are all now fetched as 320kbps files so they are rather chunkier than before. That's what endlessly-bigger hard drives are for, of course.
In my latter years...
... as a no-longer-quite-so-helpless widower, I've reached some form of accommodation with most of the household tasks2 that now fall to me. One can only bear one's son's g/f making faintly disparaging remarks about states of "boy cleanliness" a few times before taking the hint. Mind you, I still draw the line at ironing. Today — having noticed how very nearly opaque the back windscreen of the car was in some angles of sunlight on my drive back from lunch — I've been experimenting with the last dregs of my inherited squirty window cleaner stuff. It seemed to work. The paper towels became satisfyingly filthy, at least.
"Laundry" is not one of my core skills, either, but I've found the way to stop it from becoming too tedious is to keep on top of it. As for the clothesline, the space at the side of the house gets a useful blast of fresh air, so Christa long ago had me fit several hooks firmly into both the wall of the house and the garden wall, and then ran a simple line to and fro between them. That line, alas, vanished during the recent brickwork repointing exercise. My "new, improved" clothesline is undergoing Beta testing under the load of my overdue-for-laundering quilt cover. With luck (and a following wind!) the process of evaporation will do its magic before I next need my quilt cover later this evening.
I don't think...
... I've seen an artefact quite as potentially addictive as this fidget cube since reading about the "Hypnoglyph" many, many years ago.