2015 — 4 August: Tuesday
I was — reasonably enough, I think — still asleep when1 the following excellent pun arrived from one of my more insomniac correspondents:
Among the goodies that Faust demands of the Devil is Helen of Troy. One day she is nowhere to be found, so Faust asks the Devil what has become of her. The Devil replies that she has "gone to Paris for the weekend".
I shall see you on Thursday, Roger. My next email revealed that the world is full of Faustian bargains...
Who left that Window wide open?
While one-quarter listening to some guvmint rep (Harriet Baldwin?) gabbling on, but totally failing, to justify today's RBS sale of 5% of the shares (it's "my" bank, as they keep telling me, but nobody asked me [of course]) at the wrong price and the wrong time... I've also been asked if I read the story in El Reg about the outrageous privacy-busting defaults of Win10. I hadn't, as it happened.2 But, following a link there regarding similarly poor default choices made in Ubuntu led me to an elderly web page with this amusing disclaimer:
In case you are either 1) a complete idiot; or 2) a lawyer; or 3) both, please be aware that this site is not affiliated with or approved by Canonical Limited.
Linux Mint, although "downstream" of Ubuntu, was unafflicted. And Ubuntu later got its act together in any case. Not so OS X though. There's a fork of that "Fix Ubuntu" site here pointing out privacy deficiencies in "Spotlight". Having long ago handed all traces of Apple kit (an iPod and a 24" iMac) over to Junior, I sleep quite well, thanks, Len.
I'm sure my Android phone and SHIELD Android Tablet PC are equally 'naughty' but they're not exactly over-used in these here parts. Indeed, the SHIELD is currently sitting safely in the (empty) bath tub while being allowed to drain its battery. (I perhaps naïvely assume "thermal runaway" is impossible with an empty power cell.)
I was unaware...
... of the term "disinsecting" until I read the story here.
This reply...
... to a (perhaps over-naïve, perhaps satirical) comment made on an Ars Technica story about yet another 0-day OS X vulnerability struck me as both unkind, and amusing:
I'm old enough to remember when it wasn't called Javascript.
Oh, good grief!
We humans truly are a scummy plague on the surface of this happy planet:
I wonder where illegal banking would slot in?
My dance card...
... for the week has filled up nicely. Lunch and a walk tomorrow. Lunch on Thursday followed by tea and biccies. When do I get time to do any work? Oh, hang on, I'm retired... In fact, prompted by a story in the Grauniad, I've been having a bit of a muse, captured here.
This show and tell...
... book review made me smile. Michael "Chronicles of Bargepole" Bywater is an amusing writer. Source and snippet:
My father, a doctor, was happy surrounded by nude (or, to him, just naked) people for him to inspect for defects or warning signs. My mother, on the other hand, was British. She would not remove her bathing costume, but reclined in the shelter of the rocks among the smell of immortelle sauvage and salty wild thyme. All day a steady stream of naked men diverted oh-so-casually to pass close by her. My father said this was because she was the only clothed woman in Le Levant, so they were coming to enjoy imagining what she'd look like with her kit off, a primal pleasure otherwise denied them.
Spurred on...
... by a chum's simple email enquiry a couple of hours ago, I finally made the round tuit needed to watch (and very much enjoy) Wes Anderson's cameo-packed "Grand Budapest Hotel". Excellent (and deliciously quirky) film. After "Life Aquatic" I see (from a letter to dear Mama) that I've since seen nothing of his work for a decade...
Is there any further news? Well, we saw a nice spoof movie last week: The Life Aquatic, which is very loosely inspired by that zany chap Jacques Cousteau whose book I remember reading in J3 at Cheadle Hulme. Me? Precocious? Perish the thought!