2016 — 17 September: Saturday
My initial choice of music is a nice blast of 1971 'Krautrock' — "Tanz der Lemminge" or "The Dance of the Lemmings" by Amon Düül II. My cousin Clive had recommended it to me, and I first bought it on vinyl, in Birmingham, in the summer of that year. Who could resist track titles like "Stumbling over Melted Moonlight"?
All I will say is that it has stood the test1 of time. Not just my opinion, either. (Link.)
Now why am I...
... not surprised that, having let an automated "cold call" run to completion so I could hear which number to press to be "taken off the list" I continue to get called? This particular call is amusingly fatuous, featuring a chirpy female saying "Hi! Now that winter is here..." Needless to say, it's about replacement double glazing.
I was more pleasantly surprised to discover a small stash of unread "Sight and Sound" magazines from the autumn of 2007. I'd been far too busy with Christa at the time to give these any thought and had literally shelved them.
Interesting piece...
... on shyness with, for a change, a number of sensible comments. Source and snippet:
Where did my shyness come from? It was generally agreed that my mother's side of the family bore the responsibility, and I gathered fresh evidence of the truth of this a few years ago when I tried to kiss a dear cousin goodbye and she, then aged nearly 80, shrank away with words like "Och, you surely haven't learned that habit!", a reference to what Moran calls "the ever-evolving etiquette of tactility" that has crept north through Britain — from Mayfair to Aberdeen and maybe to Unst — to make all of us who started life as non-touchers feel uneasy.
It amuses me to recall that the protagonist of Andrew Davies' "A very peculiar practice" harboured a strong "touch taboo".
Excellent first novel, by the way. One of the people commenting on Ian Jack's article mentions a piece in the "Economist" about how organisations discriminate against introverts (confusing extroversion with strong leadership2 skills). It seems to suggest that neither Gates nor Zuckerburg would have done well in IBM. Now why would anyone possibly think that, I wonder? (Smirk.)
Coincidentally, I was reviewing Facebook's privacy rules just yesterday. They give me absolutely no reason to change my opinion.
As a change from SQL...
... I've decided to take a more serious look into LibreOffice's "Calc" spreadsheet3 capabilities. I wish to use it for music list item handling down at the individual MP3 track level. Of my media collections, the music and speech items have long posed the "biggest" challenge. (If only on the number of items involved.) I made an initial stab at this in the bad old days of Windows. It's fair to say the music mountain has added a few feet since then.
Still, at least the documentation has improved.
My post-prandial treat has been...
... to read another article on Julian Jaynes. Your mileage may vary — perhaps even depending on the extent of your bicamerality. Personally, I rather hope he was on to something. But then I also think AI will become "strong" quite some time before machine consciousness "wakes up" and smells the coffee, fascinating though the prospect is. (And, rightly, scary.)
Should I worry that the Julian Jaynes Society has perhaps 600 'enthusiasts' worldwide?
I've reached a...
... comfortable modus vivendi with all three Linux PCs sharing my 34" Dell screen, but with two of them "coming in" via NoMachine connections. Skylark drew the short straw and has to use one of the DisplayPort connections while I keep an eye on it from time to time for DP Screen of Death symptoms. The i5 NUC is on the other end of a 10m HDMI cable (though could just as easily be much nearer now that I've unhooked it from the Rotel pre-amp). Thus, both those PCs can supply the resolution information NoMachine needs to construct their "virtual" displays.
BlackBeast has six workspaces, with two dedicated to the NUC and the Skylark desktops. And, of course, just the one keyboard and mouse thanks to adroit use of USB hub magic in the Dell. I may yet bring Len's spare 2-into-1 USB switch into play for more subtle scanner and/or external hard drive sharing.