2016 — 15 October: Saturday
Beyond today's fixed point1 all else this weekend is currently as formless and unplanned as the Void...
No change there, then.
NFS tinkering...
... became a little fraught with that "delay until network is ready" script as the net result seemed to be just to add an interminable (five minutes, at least) wait while Mint 18's five coloured blobs cycled endlessly before the login screen even showed up. Since there was then no difference in what had been mounted in any case, I'm not putting up with that.
I appear to be stumbling (as usual) over a permissions issue. I shall assign the problem to Junior at some point. Mind you, he told me last night that he'd recently investigated all three of Samba, NFS, and AFP and currently concluded that Samba is the "least worst" of a sorry trio. Though he did agree that in my all-Linux setup NFS should be a better bet.
This is, I fear...
... exactly the stupid situation the UK is now in:
Theresa May is heading for disaster. Either she will bring economic collapse by shutting Britain off from the EU economy on which Britain relies, or she will go soft on Europe and be torn down by the Eurosceptic ideologues of her own party. Margaret Thatcher, John Major and David Cameron were all destroyed by Europe. Unless the Prime Minister changes course, she will be no different.
It just strikes me as a great pity that our Right Wing — the entirely self-anointed party of "natural leadership" — apparently sees no way of fixing its four-decades-long internal strife without bringing the whole damn' country economically crashing down around it.
I await...
... the delivery of Alan Bennett's (possibly final) chunk of diaries. For stories like this:
John Bird calls to ask where I found the phrase "the habit of art". I came across it in Mystery and Manners, a book of the incidental writings of Flannery O'Connor: "The scientist has the habit of science, the artist the habit of art." John, who is more widely (and rigorously) read than I am, had come across the phrase in the correspondence between Stravinsky and Jacques Maritain in the 1920s, making him think it came from St Thomas Aquinas. Since Flannery O'Connor was nothing if not Catholic that might be the link. I tell John the story of Dudley Moore and me seeing Stravinsky and his wife Vera in the Hotel Pierre in New York in 1963, saying how the name Vera has always seemed to me to humanise Stravinsky. "Not so much as Stockhausen," says John. "His wife's name was Doris."
Which of today's deliveries...
... is more grounded in reality, I wonder?
The film is a 1996 thriller by Bob Rafelson that had somehow escaped my notice; I had to settle for this Dutch pressing. The book — an excellent quality 2008 hardback — was ridiculously cheap at £3-23 if it does, indeed, succeed in clarifying "reality"!
Lunch...
... at a Thai place called Kuti's (though we ate upstairs in the grill, as a Thai cookery class was in progress downstairs) was very tasty. While Junior's g/f is toddling round the crowded shops of Soton on a cold, wet, afternoon, lots of bits are being flung hither and yon between Skylark, one of my (many) "backup" devices, and Junior's finally-finished FreeNAS server. I'm faintly reassured to see the difficulties he, too, had with setting up Samba file sharing as I like to think it means I'm not completely stupid, after all.
I won't pester him for a solution to the SSD Synology NAS unless there's time as it's working fine for now with Samba. However, I'm determined to bend the thing to my Evil Will sooner or later. "This is Linux — you can do anything with Linux."
Here's...
... my birthday present from the young people, by the way:
I'd spotted it back in mid-August and submitted my "plea" to the Birthday Pressies Committee accordingly. [Pause] I was tickled to learn that the bill for hosting 'molehole' in its AWS storage bucket (all 420MB or so of static HTML files and image files) is working out at less than £0-60/month when the previous ISP (in Texas) was charging nearly $10/month. Ev'ry little helps.