2016 — 16 October: Sunday
Yesterday evening's entertainment soon switched away from "Blood & Wine" and turned instead to the recent remake of Disney's "Jungle Book", which they both seemed to enjoy.
Meanwhile, it seems I'm still on the hook.1 And I'm also leaving Junior's FreeNAS box running overnight while it chews over all the metadata and artwork it's been scavenging for. It's a surprisingly noisy little box, and it runs quite hot.
The two empty...
... champagne bottles found by the butler as he was cleaning up the kitchen last night when the younger generation had finally retired may help explain some of the noisy hilarity. Not to mention the subdued nature of the sunny / showery early morning that the young people are currently missing as I sup my second cuppa. Particularly since I had just one flute of the over-priced / over-rated stuff.
I'm about to shutdown the FreeNAS box, too, as its noise is irritating me. [Pause] Well, my more brutal final manoeuvre worked.
Not looking...
... too promising, hereabouts:
Verlyn Klinkenborg?
Never heard of him!
Instead of entreating us to open the floodgates in our minds and let rivers of prose flow onto the page, Klinkenborg insists that we be harder on ourselves, but that we focus less on abstractions like argument or research and instead direct our attention to what each of our sentences is saying. One of his mantras is "revise at the point of composition." He calls for absolute ruthlessness, because so much published writing is marred not only by jargon but also by "weak constructions," "meaningless phrases," mangled diction, and hackneyed word choices...
I long ago concluded that a writer could be taught to improve, but a non-writer usually could not. And it starts with reading. Widely.
Horribly prescient
This is from a while ago:
Niebuhr has in mind "the good little people, so touching in their personal rectitude and individual discipline, who serve us in the shops, who till our soil and who perform all functions in our social mechanism with the exception of industrial labor." Their personal rectitude,
unfortunately, is accompanied by a level of "political ineptitude" that "exceeds all classes." ...
But a shrewd demagogue may catalyze a mass movement by preying on their social anxiety, playing to their anti-collectivism, and directing their resentment toward scapegoats.
Sound familiar? (Link.)
If, as they say, you can...
... read this, it means:
- my webfiles are now safely resident on the new dinky SSD Synology NAS drive,
- I've successfully pointed my "localhost" webserver (lighttpd) at the new location, and
- I've also successfully updated my AWS publishing script to reflect their new residence.
I shall toast my now-empty house with a fresh cuppa!
Done. My next step will be to follow the guidance here to synchronise these web files from my new SSD NAS to a RAID1 mirror on one (or both) of the other Synology boxes. All is (as far as I can tell) AFS sweetness and light with nary a trace of Samba.
Rather than pouring...
... fuel directly on any smouldering embers, I merely asked Peter whether he'd thought of exercising his right to claim German nationality in the light of the idiotic Brexit result. I was interested to see that this obviously hadn't occurred to him, and seemed to give him something to think about. Neither he nor his g/f have any particular ties to the UK (other than each having one surviving parent, at least!) and both enjoy travelling. Not a trait I share, as it happens.
Sinc (Lanczos3)
I've finally managed to find the Round Tuit needed to inform myself (somewhat) of the Lanczos resampling that I now always select when resizing scanned images in the Gimp. Until my new Epson arrives, I'm once again using the scanner portion of the HP, set at 600 dpi (as the only sure way of eliminating nasty colour artefacts). The file sizes of these images are way too big, hence the resampling. It's not as if I'm short of RAM, after all.