2015 — 2 November: Monday
Kicking off with another thick mist — dense fog elsewhere, I gather — I suspect autumn's arrival is now official.1 But my initial cuppa is already made. What's next?
Well restarting BlackBeast...
... to remind it there's an X-Fi soundcard with a digital optical output, for one thing. Some mornings, it seems the PCI bus simply fails to get scanned, or at least fails to deliver a truthful report of what's attached to it. That may have been linked, this morning, to the equally occasional waking-up with the login prompt actually requesting my user name rather than my password (and me noticing in time, of course). I suspect this is because of an occasional automatic disk check process though, with an all-SSD system, I barely notice any extra delay if and when that happens.
Speaking of "truthful reports"...
... Big Bro has passed along an amusing piece of paleopsychobabble-based electioneering junk from an emeritus perfesser of clinical psychology in Virginia, no less. Read it and weep (with laughter):
Given what little we know about the inner workings of our own heads, it always strikes me as specious to second guess the inner workings of those of our contemporaries, let alone those of our mutual ancient ancestors. But a chap who's impressed by a Trump, or a Palin, or a Schafly, or a Coulter, is far too intelligent for me to bother with.
Breakfast beckons. [Pause] And another piece a bit too depressing to grapple with. (Link.) I have enough trouble tackling a simple PC crash without worrying about a global meltdown.
Perhaps...
... I should switch the thing off? I was blissfully unaware of Messrs Pierre-Félix Guattari (died 1992) and Gilles Deleuze (died 1995):
The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. [Guattari] has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position — licit or illicit — and effects a universal modulation.
Deleuze said "we are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world". (Link.) It won't be long now before some other philosopher / sociologist / paleopsychologist says a politician has a heart.
While it's disappointing...
... to find quite so much mould growing on the last slices of my current fancy Italian "Fibrano" light wholemeal "with rye and toasted barley" bread loaf, it's still impressive to see how quickly it develops.
Speaking of devouring fungi...
... the cover of this particular lost sheep...
... turned out to be by far the best feature of the book. 'Twas often thus. Meanwhile, I've been dipping into one of the translations (Thomas Cleary, 1988) of Sun Tzu that was a major influence on Boyd:
It's somewhat gnomic, and reminds me (in parts) of the voiceover in Jim Jarmusch's "Ghost Dog: way of the Samurai" (not that that's a Bad Thing). Given Boyd's partial demolition of ol' Carl Von Clausewitz, I think I'll leave that to sleep on its shelf for now.
I popped into Asda earlier, cheekily catching up on the latest issue of "Linux Voice". Not interesting enough to be worth buying, however. And no noteworthy new DVDs either. Still, the sun was shining. Time for tea, methinks. Twilight is fast approaching. Six minutes to go, in fact.
While munching tonight's chicken salad...
... I decided to try some TV. I flipped between the BBC HD news and a BBC2 HD programme about some pretty, but very remote, Scottish islands in I presume some mimicry of Boswell and Johnson's Highland Tour. However, salad finished, I reset the Oppo BD player away from the rear HDMI input I'd been using (to feed in the Freesat TV signal from the Humax)...
... and back to disk playing. Oops! A pop-up message from the Oppo reported its (failed) attempt to establish an ARC audio channel. (ARC is irrelevant to my system, but I had no idea the Oppo was smart enough to go looking for one.) I learn something every day.