2016 — 13 October: Thursday
My film selection for the evening just gone1 was long enough — and was begun late enough — to tip me over into 'tomorrow morning' (as it were). Christa and I first watched it in June 1998. But, what with not really being a youngster any more, I now really need to get some sleep before my next burst of supplies shopping (for my weekend visitors) and my lunchtime treat. Busy busy.
The secret of life?
I've often wondered...
He read thousands of ethnographies, concentrating on kinship terminologies, marriage rules and modes of reckoning descent. And he came up with a Cartesian first principle: the original cultural rule was the incest taboo. This taboo had a revolutionary effect, driving men to find mates
outside the immediate family. Societies were, originally, machines for the exchange of women between men...
Lévi-Strauss now characterized marriage in ["archaic"] societies as a gift exchange. Because of the incest taboo, a man had to give up his sister to gain a wife. Options were limited. Three algorithms could account for all systems of marriage exchange in the simplest societies.
The secret of literary life?
I've often wondered...
3. Write a bad novella Before starting on your debut novel, get your first novel out of your system. If you're used to short, controlled forms, the mandate to stretch out will bring all sorts of unpleasantness to the surface. Digging deep for material, you find your dog's scrotum and your grandmother's vibrator, along with cheesy fantasy tropes from some movie you secretly loved when you were 14. Everybody does. I'm not saying, "Don't go there." Everybody goes there. Just don't think it has anything to do with creativity.
This is getting...
... remarkably silly, and I'm sure will end in tantrums and tears before bedtime. I wonder whether Junior and his g/f have changed their opinions yet? My conversational probing — if conducted at all — will need to be cautious:
"Amid death threats and intensifying political disagreement, three of the most senior judges in England and Wales will hear claims that the government cannot trigger Brexit without parliamentary approval."
No way to run a railway, let alone an entire country. (Link.)And now Marmite is under threat!
The Unmanned Warrior
... roboat exercise off the coast of Scotland reminds me of a couple of ideas that Daedalus — of DREADCO fame — once (excuse the pun) "floated" for underwater jet propulsion, inspired by the bath toy, the pop pop boat. One being a sodium-burning ramjet.
It belatedly occurs to me...
... which is, by the way, by far my commonest modus operandi these days, that I could have saved myself a whole lot of time, trouble, and angst, if only I had read more carefully (many moons ago) precisely what it so clearly says in the default web page that is served by lighttpd until you supply your own web pages to be served.
Had I done so, I would have seen how trivially easy it is (one line of lighttpd's 'config' file) to point lighttpd at the most convenient2 place (for me) to keep my web pages rather than dancing all round the houses adding my userid into lighttpd's group, and setting up a symbolic link from lighttpd's default "webfiles" location to my convenient place. This was the last jigsaw piece needed to complete the replication on Skylark of all I was doing on BlackBeast.
BlackBeast is now switched off until either something dreadful happens to Skylark or I think of some amusing task to run on BlackBeast without crippling Skylark. Let us leave to one side the entirely reasonable assertion that there's nothing I do on either i7 PC that I couldn't do equally well on the i5NUC. It's a hobby.
Actually...
... there is one remaining experiment I wish to try. I shall connect BB to the Dell (temporarily) via the HDMI port that the i5NUC usually uses, and make sure the display works perfectly. I then wish to see what happens after I shut BB down, but restart it without any physical connection to the Dell. When I fire up a NoMachine Remote Desktop session on Skylark to control it and NoMachine doesn't find a physical screen it can use, I expect it to offer to "create" one, and I'm interested in seeing whether the characteristics of such a "virtual" screen can nonetheless be tailored and resized to replicate the Dell's resolution. (The long-persisting Kernel bug isn't with just the Dell, but with all screens of the Dell's ultra widescreen resolution.)
[Pause]
Well, although the offer is made, the created "virtual" screen is a sorry mess. It has the correct resolution, but my two panels are badly treated. I powered back down, re-connected, re-booted, and confirmed that all was well before sending BB off into the Long Night.