2012 — 26 November: Monday
Sleep having fled1 and the morning's ghastly news and weather having been half-listened to, and observed, I see no reason to raise my already low opinion of November. Meanwhile, it's nearly time to top up dear Mama's account ready for the next care-home invoice. (Proof positive of the relentless flow of Time.) The ol' dear will be 96 in January, but can no longer count to ten. Amazing, but not — it seems to me — in a good way.
Beware the 11th hour
And those balls of Mayan prophecy-fire.
When we're younger, we impose schedules on ourselves. We use machines to wake us from sleep. We use artificial illumination to escape a mandatory night. But the circumstantial realities of old age change
that, to a significant extent...
Retirees can sleep when they need to, wake when they want to, and generally obey the whims of their bodies much more readily than younger people can.
Well now, ain't that the truth? :-)
I envy...
... people who can write so well, so young. Even in translation.
I want you to remember me but not grieve for me. If I truly mean something to you, and I know that I do, you will probably suffer when you learn I am dead. But if I really mean something to you, don't suffer, I don't want that. Don't forget me, but go on living. Live your life. Pain will fade with time, even if that's hard to imagine right now. Live in peace, my dearest love; live, love, hate, and keep fighting...
Good advice.
Brian Sibley...
... has a nice set of 'Thanksgiving' images and parodies. (Link.)
Browsing bemusedly
I mentioned (a while ago) a delightful-sounding study I'd stumbled upon which asked: "Genital Sensation and Sexual Function in Women Bicyclists and Runners: Are Your Feet Safer than Your Seat?". I should add, I have no idea of the answer. Meanwhile, today's rather older (November 1989) woolly assertion is for anyone feeling sheepish:
It is very difficult to look at the possibility of lesbian sheep because if you are a female sheep, what you do to solicit sex is to stand still. Maybe there is a female sheep out there really wanting another female, but there's just no way for us to know it.
Perhaps my NZ chum Ian would care to comment? Bah!
I've decided...
... it's time — now that I've finished sorting out the desktop and laptop upgrades to Win8 Pro — I spent a little more effort getting to know my somewhat-neglected Android Tablet PC. Leaving it on just to burp quietly whenever email arrives is hardly taking full advantage of it, is it? It's actually getting a bit brighter outside, too. 9C and hardly raining at all. Mostly because there's none left. Who knows? I may even get a lung or two full of fresh air.
I find it...
... rather sobering — having shopped and lunched before settling down to a concentrated burst of comprehensive file back-ups that has seen off the rest of the afternoon — to think that my PC-based "digital life" still only clocks in at around the 1TB mark. 1% of that total lurks on my inhouse web site, and a subset of that is allowed to poke its head up outside the firewall.2
Nearly half of my data is audio material of one sort or another. (And, instead of being physically cumbersome, and sprawling over many a wall-mounted shelf — as it most certainly did back in the analogue days of vinyl and tape — I can now heft it all in the palm of my hand. Or, as I proved a while back, I can also knock something over on to a 1.5TB hard drive and instantly lose all access to the data in one swell foop.)
At some point — I wasn't really paying attention — Mr Postie dropped off this little triplet of Ryan Reynolds films.
It may have been when I was upstairs straining my eyes looking up "alienation" in my one-volume Complete OED (nine pages reduced to one on each leaf) as I felt sure the word wouldn't have been in use at the time it was used by a modern author of a period piece I was reading. I was only out by four centuries. I hate it when that happens.
25 years?! (part 2)
This, too, brought back amusing memories. Another random snippet:
For most of us, the fights weren't just between Microsoft and IBM. Often they were technical staff versus managers, who repeated the mantra "we are not a computer company, we are a business" so often that within a few years IBM posted the largest loss3 ever made by a company in a single year since the "business" people produced almost nothing you might want to buy.
I'd rather not comment on what he says about OS/2 1.3 :-)