2015 — 2 February: Monday
A bright, but frosty, start.1
I hear the Siren call...
... of the Waitrose shelf-stocking elves, but (frankly) I think they can wait for a bit longer. After all, as the chap who fathered the first British Army officer to die in France during World War I (while serving with the RFC) put it:
Their song, though irresistibly sweet, was no less sad than sweet, and lapped both body and soul in a fatal lethargy, the forerunner of death and corruption.
And which of us needs too much of that on a Monday morning? Or of this, for that matter:
But both "be like"s are brilliantly functional grammatical accommodations. "I was like" is neither just "I said" or "I thought," but an opening into either direct quotation or inner condition, as well as a much wider range of dramatic reenactment or, especially on the Internet, visual representations of feeling. In 2009, linguistic anthropologists Graham M. Jones and Bambi B. Schieffelin studied the IM messages of American college students and found that "I'm like" had spread to an unprecedented degree and was now being used with text expressions of gesture and emotion: "and he's like::moans:: Nooo."
Tell me I don't have to like this!
I'm like, sooo glad...
... I avoided teaching as a career:
As a chum remarked in an email last week "Having experienced the law of unintended consequences at first hand many times, it's often occurred to me that this law is a direct consequence of the inability of most people to think about complete systems, as opposed to their tendency to focus on a uni-dimensional projection of the complete system". And (I seem to recall) he was a nuclear physicist before learning to write code to add functionality to CICS!
It's still only -2C out there. What a ghastly time of year this is.
Crikey!
Windows 10 on the new, go-faster, Raspberry Pi. Whatever next? (MS Link.)
Guess who's been...
... taking the latest variant of "Wilbur" out for another little, exploratory, walk in the walled garden section of my virtual cyberpark? The slope of the Learning Curve in GIMP 2.8.2 does (finally) seem to be diminishing, which is a Good Thing. In fact, it was Wilbur who processed some of this image himself...
As you (can't) see (!) I'm still working on my drop shadows, however. The 'help' for the operation, or (more accurately) for how the operation of...
Filters ==> Light and shadow ==> Drop shadow
... actually works still strikes me as a little, erm, unhelpful. It brings into play an extra, transparent, layer and the need to allow image resizing before I can actually see the damn' shadow. On top of which, the shadows I was getting were not fading out as they distanced themselves (as it were) from the original object. Also, I'd quite like to understand from whence come their rounded corners? Not to mention their uniform colour density? So I fear it was back to trusty ol' Xara for that bit. Research and testing will continue after my next cuppa. I'm sure it's just me.
As twilight starts to loom...
... let's recap. I decided I'd had quite enough software wrangling for one day, thanks all the same. I was 'resting my eyes' (as a dear old aunt used to put it) while listening to a lovely bit of Schubert before lunch, when Mr Postie dropped off these three old favourites2 (all on Blu-ray) and an unseen new comedy:
Plus this nice, fat, paperback:
And, as that clearly wasn't enough to be going on with, after lunch I embarked on my first burst of retail therapy this month, during which I managed to tick off four of the titles that were on my vague, mentally-stored, "keep an eye out for" checklist courtesy of the bargain shelves of Asda:
David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, and David Fincher are all interesting directors. Morgan Neville? Never heard of him. (But I caught a feature on "20 Feet" on NPR quite some while ago now. It sounded interesting.)
OMG
My son is among the oldest of the "millennials"... I'd never paid the slightest attention to the term:
Just a few months before Peter was born, I bought and read this little 1939 gem:
The reliably-entertaining "Ansible" (click the book pic) has a snippet about this book, right at the end... "Je Suis Sprague". The book is a well-written variant of Mark Twain's classic "Connecticut Yankee".