2015 — 23 February: Monday
I hadn't realised1 that Wendy Cope wrote anything besides poetry — her collection of prose, reviews, and what-have-you ("Life, Love and the Archers") which gave me several laughs in the bookshop, is now on its way to Technology Towers. Furthermore, now that my initial frantic flurry of technological fiddling2 with BlackBeast to mould and adjust its sparkling new Linux personality is (or, at least, seems to be) easing off, who knows? I may even find time to read it. I've already enjoyed yesterday's McGough, erm, yesterday.
How about...
... a nice cup of tea? And, maybe even a spot of breakfast? Or a few clothes? I've just realised it's not exactly warm down here. Better lay in some fresh food, too. Mondays, heh? What larks, Pip ol' chum.
Oh, good grief!
Generally, I don't much care what others choose to believe, or disbelieve. As long as their belief or disbelief doesn't impinge too directly on me. I like to think I'm a "live and let live" kind of chap. My present neighbours, for example, appear to be heavily 'into' the worship of an imaginary entity written of in the King James edition. Their immediate predecessors sought to convince me of the merits of the belief system enshrined in the Koran. Their predecessors were unconvinced of the merits of marital fidelity. Or business ethics.
Now consider power junkies. When they hold (or aspire to hold) high political office there are distinct limits to my tolerance:
But the notion that the evolution question was unfair, or irrelevant, or simply a "sorting" device designed to expose a politician as belonging to one cultural club or another, is finally ridiculous. For the real point is that evolution is not, like the Great Pumpkin, something one can or cannot "believe" in. It just is — a fact certain, the strongest and most resilient explanation of the development of life on Earth that there has ever been. And yet, as the Times noted, after Walker's London catechism, "none of the likely Republican candidates for 2016 seem to be convinced. Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida said it should not be taught in schools. Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas is an outright skeptic. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas will not talk about it. When asked, in 2001, what he thought of the theory, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said, 'None of your business.' "
Now, someone tell me more about this Great Pumpkin I should apparently be aware of.
Oh, don't mind him...
... he's just very shy. Leave him with his book; he'll be fine. The constant refrain of my childhood, it sometimes seemed to me. Mind you, had my parents had the wit to get my eyes tested and fitted with the glasses I needed to address my myopia, who knows how different life could have been? Darwin regarded shyness as one of the great puzzles in his theory of evolution, presumably because he simply couldn't fathom the (or any?) evolutionary advantage to "this odd state of mind". (Link.)
Sir Richard Stilgoe. When did that happen? Blimey.
The perils of webmastery
I don't have any rights issues. I steal from anyone (it worked for Picasso) but am always willing to make things disappear if asked nicely enough. The Grauniad has bigger problems:
But I only publish about 365 pieces of "content" in a given year. Max. Honest.
Here's a snapshot...
... of my current set of 'approved' applications:
Compare and contrast with the earliest days of BlackBeast Mk I under the thumb of Win7 Ultimate:
Not that it actually stayed that uncluttered, of course. It's a PC. They become cluttered. Bite me.
I didn't have time...
... to look into the suddenly-changed "minimise" behaviour of my MATE desktop windows3 of my running applications this morning before (looking at the gathering clouds) I decided it was time to nip out to fix the echo in Mother Hubbard's food cupboard. [Pause] Changed desktop behaviours annoy me — not least because changes I haven't set in motion myself are usually a sign that I've inadvertently ticked, or unticked, a non-obvious system setting.
I assume the 1GB of memory in my spiffy fanless graphics adapter is enough to hold and buffer the data for more than just four of my simple, "flat" mostly static virtual desktops without running out of steam. As I drove back with my bulging Waitrose bag (I jest!), it occurred to me that I can simply throw in a couple more virtual desktops, and stop bothering to minimise my windows. It took longer to find out how to add two new workspaces than the two seconds it took to add them. Right-click over one of the (four, in my case) existing icons and up pops a "Workspace switcher" applet with "Preferences". Six virtual 4K 40" screens should be an elegant sufficiency for a while.
And after all that hard work? I've earned a bite of lunch.
My lovely...
... Mandelbulb desktop background blends beautifully with the default desktop theme and colour screen of Mint 17.1 and is making a pleasant change from my stark, solid black. I shall now set about capturing a screenshot of it as I did for its Win8.1 incarnation less than a fortnight ago. My, how Time flies when you're forced to fiddle with Operating Systems!
I'm enjoying Mint 17.1 a lot, I have to admit.
As I fend off...
... the third of today's PPI mis-selling cold callers (listening, this time, for just long enough to hear that "Press '9' to be removed from our database") it belatedly occurs to me to wonder from where all the money is being conjured up to pay all this massive compensation for the bad behaviour of these well-known High Street Banks. After all, the original insurance premiums they sucked gleefully in have long since been spent boosting banking profits and gurgling off to places like Switzerland in the form of obscene bonus payments. Tucked away into secret accounts.
And not in all cases having been taxed :-)
Just wonderin'. [Pause] My current reading is switching back and forth between the Raspberry Pi "Beyond the manual", the online tutorials for Inkscape (about the nearest I can get to Xara's graphics programs, I suspect), and some Charles Stross short stories. My brain is beginning to fry... but in a good way! Mysteriously it has become time for an evening meal. It remains cold out there.
I was about to...
... congratulate myself on how well Mint 17.1 had just handled a 10K Vimeo HD movie in Firefox. Then I got an email from my energy supplier inviting me to compare my energy usage with other customers. I found myself in NoScript hell as, one by one, I temporarily allowed over half a dozen separate blocked scripts before giving up in disgust.