2016 — 20 October: Thursday
A guru1 asks, regarding my SSD TRIM last night: "You are aware this happens automatically on Mint 18 at weekly intervals?" Well, say I, it seemed to find lots to TRIM, did it not? (The guru replieth not.)
I've modified...
... my clothes régime for the coming cooler2 times, but added a fresh wrinkle: I now shake my ex-plastic-bottles fleecy jacket before putting it on, to dislodge any of those nasty insect overlords (wasps).
Speaking of overlords...
... I read a suggestion (including the unusual verb "coronate", but let that pass) that voters should simply write in their choices:
America's two-party system has failed us as never before. We have two candidates who are unpopular and riddled with scandals. They don't just have skeletons in their closets. They have graveyards packed in there, threatening to break the door down the minute one of them is elected...
What a relief it would be to consider our own far superior system. If we had one! Term-limited benevolent (and non-public-school-educated) dictatorships would be my choice.
Binary choices
These two lists of books (from which I've nicked the Top 10 in each case) purport to rank liberal and conservative reading preferences:
American Assassin The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Left Behind The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Without Remorse The God of Small Things Patriot Games A Visit from the Goon Squad Clear and Present Danger The Marriage Plot The Sum of All Fears Oryx and Crake Red Storm Rising Freedom The Testament The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay The Runaway Jury The Sense of an Ending Along Came a Spider Interpreter of Maladies
(Link.)
I've not had...
... the particular experience here:
Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.
Shades of Wart's training experiences in TH White's wonderful "The Once and Future King". [Pause] I liked this Wittgenstein snippet:
The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery.
I was pointed both to Nagel and Wittgenstein by the interesting Aeon essay — don't miss its wonderful illustration of a black cat and an octopus— here.
From earlier times...
... but nicely put, I feel, by Emily Bell in the Observer a while ago:
We have a widening gap in world poverty, a globalised market in cheap and unskilled labour, a concern over both the regulation of financial markets and the wider regulation of globalised businesses. We have a technological revolution threatening to dispossess the poor and illiterate in the knowledge economy. All these are matters of crucial importance that would benefit from the minds of business, political and academic leaders.
Back then I was having not quite the time of my life...
I've taken my new ThinkPad (did I mention the new toy obtained one day after the official job offer?) home several times, but only once ventured out upon the Net with it (not using IBM's services, that is). It took me the best part of an hour, back in the orifice, to repair the consequential damage before it was in a state of sufficient grace to stalk the IBM net again. So I re-re-applied for host password reset(s) so I could set about getting a new LIG id (whatever that is) as the one I had last time, back during King Tony's reign o'er me, had expired long before I even received it as it languished unforwarded in his in-tray while he was off on Prozac being sore depressed (quite possibly at the thought of managing me, but let that pass). I may actually have a lemon, as it has twice suspended itself with a fever when all I left it doing was running a screen saver. Guess what? You need a working system to be able to find out how to restore it to health when it's sick. Catch-22 or what?
The way I see it...
... if your former employer's Pensions Trust writes to you, it's best that the letter kicks off like it did this morning:
I have no idea how or why the GMP has gone up, but "gone up it has", as Yoda might say. However, Brenda's tax thugs also wrote today, speedily reducing my tax-free allowance to help themselves to an unseemly amount of the revised total now dribbling into the Technology Towers vault.
Two of these titles...
... took their own sweet time to arrive, dagnabbit:
