2016 — 14 October: Friday
Well, "Happy birthday to me!" as I officially undergo another of those ghastly rites de passage that befall us all from time to time. This time sees me casting myself upon the tender mercies of the UK's state pension 'system', and thus receiving in one swell foop a larger single annual pay rise than I ever endured/enjoyed at work. Yippee!1 Less stale bread, and softer cheese, from now on.
Actually, nothing feels in any way different, and I'm still 'busy busy' as my young visitors will be here tomorrow morning in time (I was told last night) to take me out for lunch somewhere. Predictably, I also managed to put off my further supplies shopping yesterday. Procrastination has always proudly been one of my core skills as a world-class potterer.
"Never put off till tomorrow tasks that can safely be left until next week." Could that be why I never seem to get anything done, I wonder?
When I left school...
... I never regarded my aeronautical engineering apprenticeship2 as anything but a means to an end. The end being simply to receive something near a living wage while hoovering up a tertiary education and simultaneously solving the "problem" of deciding what I was actually going to "do" as an adult — if I ever became one. Thus, I date my adult "career" from February 1974:
They paid me the princely sum of £35/week as a trainee instructional writer. Today's state pension (though I won't actually see any of it for another ten days) kicks off at £166-29/week and could thus in one light amusingly be seen as a rise of 475% 42+ years later...
Let's not talk about inflation :-)
Let's talk about breakfast. And foodie supplies.
I note...
... Adam Curtis is about to unleash another of his irregular three-hour spectacles upon us.
I was quite shocked...
... when the little birthday toy I'd ordered yesterday afternoon actually showed up just before noon. Mind you, now that I've been wrestling with it, on and off, for several hours it's fair to say that our relationship so far has been rather fractious.
Having recently proved that I could:
- relocate the "publish 'molehole' web files to AWS function" from BlackBeast to Skylark. And
- relocate the files themselves to the largest of my three NAS boxes. And
- use NFS rather than Samba as the file sharing mechanism...
... I clearly became over-confident. The drawback with having the webfiles on the big NAS was the way I could be kept waiting because the RAID1 pair of drives had gone to sleep. I don't like having to wait 10 seconds or so to be able to perform edits. So I thought "why not keep the files on a dinky SSD in a dinky little one-bay Synology NAS box?" This would be quiet, energy-efficient, and have negligible latency as SSDs don't spin down, do they?
But could I persuade NFS sharing to work? Don't be silly! And, although I've reverted to Samba as a stop-gap, I've so far been unable to specify the necessary file path to what is currently seen as a network drive rather than a "simple" NFS-mounted drive. Grrr. [Pause] Nor is it just me. Having dropped a little directory of music on to the SSD, I find that neither VLC nor Media Player can access it, though XPlayer sails through the test with flying colours.
Though at least I gained a potential clue from VLC's failure message:
Unable to open: smb://webnas03.local/molehole/music/etc etc
Plus there's a hint of a suggestion here that my fstab entry may be trying to connect to the dinky NAS before the network is "up" and ready for business. So were I to pop a little script called 'fstab' and containing just...
#!/bin/sh mount -a
... in /etc/network/if-up.d/ that would perform its "mount -a" only after the network is functional. This might well do the trick. Worth a shot.
So much for that idea!