2016 — 18 October: Tuesday
The wisdom — if that's what it is — of relocating my webfiles to the dinky SSD NAS reveals itself in the 'instant' way they present themselves for editing and saving. I shall teach the i5NUC the secret of their new location this morning. Then it will be BlackBeast's1 turn.
First (thirst?) a cuppa!
Today's lunchtime treat...
... is a joint birthday celebration out at Fisher's Pond with my birthday twin. Who cares about the drizzle?
It was ever thus
Interesting essay on early Soviet computer networks. Source and snippet:
The forces that brought down OGAS [All-State Automated System] resemble those that eventually undid the Soviet Union: the surprisingly informal forms of institutional misbehaviour. Subversive ministers, status quo-inclined bureaucrats, nervous factory managers, confused workers and even other economic reformers opposed the OGAS project because it was in their institutional self-interest to do so. Without state funding and oversight, the national network project for ushering in electronic socialism splintered in the 1970s and '80s into a patchwork of dozens and then hundreds of isolated, non-interoperable factory local-area control systems. The Soviet state failed to network their nation not because it was too rigid or top-down in design but because it was too fickle and pernicious in practice.
The amusing surprise here...
... is the identity of the writer of these letters:
He is also aware of the selfishness of the affairs he conducted with the knowledge of his future wife, Joan, even as she subsidised him from her private income. The letters to his mistresses include grippingly salacious, easily decoded euphemisms. When he thinks he might have given crabs to Ricki Huston, wife of the film director John, he writes of 'the beginnings of troop-movements in the fork'. And here's an entry for the 1959 Bad Sex Award: 'Woke up at midday, longing for ping-pong, and sentimentally stroked the handle of your cast-down bat.'
It gives me...
... an abnormally large amount of pleasure to reveal the first scan performed by my new Epson Perfection V550 Photo flatbed scanner:
It shows the front cover of my birthday present from Gill and Chris. Magnificent!
Achieved only after...
... first struggling through Epson's web site trying to pinpoint their highly-elusive Linux driver for this rather fancy model. I eventually tracked it down here but only after very politely asking Mrs Google for navigational help. Next came a minor tussle with the installation script itself. It was failing silently until I had the gumption to run it as 'super user'.
I found an Epson manual here, too, for their "Image Scan!" software package. This hints at the possibility of being able to unleash all the facilities (I assume, including slide scanning) though I've clearly already managed to install a working subset2 that the Gimp and Xsane can make good use of.
I suspect...
... my fascination with plagues and pestilences can be traced back to a "formative years" exposure to Charles Eric Maine's superb 1962 SF novel "The Darkest of Nights" followed up in later years by this little trio:
So Wendy Orent's essay here was a no-brainer.
Meanwhile...
... how many mistakes can you see in this picture, kiddies?
Hollywood accounting standards...
... of excellence, fairness, and transparency appear to have been exported to France. (Link.)
One could spend...
... a very long time traversing this amazing site. Try fitting that lot into your Ark, Mr Noah!