A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
December 31
Anna Karenina: now
there's a cheerful pick-me-up of a story. The stylistic
"we're doing this on a stage" thing was mildly
distracting at the start, but kinda faded into the backdrop (ha
ha) after a while. I can't recommend this unless you're a glutton
for punishment; the production is fine, it's the story that's a
downer.
December 29
The Golden Compass was good,
but it's a shame that they never made the rest of the
series.
December 28
09:38 Your remaining Vodafone [...] balances at 06:03 on 28/12/14
are [...] 962 Mbs of data [...]
11:19 You're approaching your monthly data allowance.
Actual data usage during this time, per iPhone metering:
approximately 10 megabytes. Perhaps they're measuring my balance
in megabits?
One of the Christmas gifts I sent this year came from Abercrombie
Kids; for reasons to do with sizes and handwaving, an exchange
needed to be made. The site demands a postcode to avail of their
"Speed Exchange" service; I'm in a country that doesn't
have such things, and no amount of trial and error produced
success. So I thought I'd try their "live chat" customer
support; I was told I'd need to phone. THANKS, THAT'S HELPFUL. My
options for phoning are a long-distance call to the US, or a
toll-free number; the toll-free number is (a) incorrectly listed
(it's absent the 1- prefix) and (b) non-functional - not only
could I not call it from my mobile, but my brother tells me it
doesn't work from his landline either, suggesting that they've
provided an Irish toll-free number that doesn't actually work in
Ireland. So now I'm waiting for a response to an email request for
assistance, which I'm told will take something in the order of a
business day. Woohoo.
AAAaand the email response just tells me to call the international
number. And just now I got a "let us know how we did"
email. How do I put this succinctly? YOU DID TERRIBLY.
December 27
More of the same... Johnny English, good for a laugh
but a little too reliant on the heavily-telescoped cringey humour
that made me steer clear of some "classic" British
comedy in the past.
December 25
'tis the season... so far we've watched Bridget Jones's
Diary (fun, filled with that unique? British humour that
arises when two people labour under incorrect assumptions and the
whole movie would unravel in three seconds if they actually aired
those assumptions, but no worse for that) and Skyfall (also fun, but I'm supposed to believe the
smartest guy in the room plugs a laptop of known bad origin into a
secure network with no protection whatsoever?)
December 23
Currently in the midst of converting the Chez Waider setup to
non-UPC, starting with provider agnostic WiFi; however, I noticed
that my MacBook would periodically lose its network connection for
no reason I could determine. Some fiddling about led me to
investigate WiFi country codes, of all things, which lead me to a
very helpful post on what might be causing your Mac to
periodically claim there are, in fact, no WiFi networks in the
area. This post is neat for two reasons: firstly, it helped me
identify the problem, and secondly, it clued me into the fact that
MacOS has a command line that'll show you the currently visible
wireless networks. Cute!
Of course, trying to fix this by setting the country on the UPC
wireless device predictably failed. I wound up disabling its
wireless entirely, then taking over the SSID it was using so that
everything should seamlessly transfer to the new
hardware. The other discoveries that this fiddling led to are that
my UPC wireless modem doesn't actually support Ireland as a
distinct country code, and most of the UPC-flavoured networks
visible from where my laptop is sitting are configured as
Dutch.
December 19
Rush is a rather good movie about the
rivalry between Niki Lauda and James Hunt in the mid '70s, but
what it does really well is to sell you on the notion
that the two main characters are complete assholes. Seriously. No
redeeming character features whatsoever. Even absent an interest
in Formula 1, this might be worth a look, since it's more about
the characters than it is about the cars (IMDb in fact tells me
that an initial draft was written on the assumption that the
budget wouldn't stretch to any race coverage at all, which might
account for the more story-based nature of what could have been an
out-and-out petrolhead movie).
December 14
How to claim Tesco clubcard boost points, redux (I seem to
recall mentioning this before...): Go to the clubcard site. Don't
bother logging in, it doesn't improve matters. Select "Redeem
Vouchers", if you can find it. Enter your full clubcard
contact details (Every. Time. The whole lot. Including your
physical address, which is only required if you subsequently
select an offer that requires physical delivery, and two phone
numbers, which can be identical, but which are mandatory, and
which won't actually be used because if there's a problem with
your clubcard they'll email you to ask you to call them). Check
all the "Do Not Send Me Junk" boxes. Proceed to the next
page, where you get to select which deal you want to avail of, and
give an amount from a pull-down list which doesn't match the
amount of clubcard vouchers you'd like to use. Proceed to the
third page, where you enter the 12-digit code from the clubcard
voucher, twice, then select the value of the voucher, then
discover that once you've added one voucher the form retains the
values you typed in for the next voucher. Submit this
form to get a prompt for email validation, which sends you an
email, which contains a link to click on, which brings you to the
next page, where your order is reiterated. Click on the box to
agree to the terms and conditions and submit to get a "Thank
you, we have received your order" page. Now wait: first you
get an email reiterating the "Thank You". Fifteen to
twenty minutes after that, you get another email with the tokens
of your choice in them, which you do whatever you need to do
with. Hurrah, victory, or something.
How this should work: sign into your clubcard account, select the
vouchers which Tesco knows they've sent you, select the offer you
want to apply the vouchers to, AND YOU'RE DONE. Worst case,
because it's involving third parties, you get a bunch of codes or
tickets or whatever in an email or by post (I mean, I can always
copy and paste off a webpage or print it, but
whatever).
Charitably, I'll assume some portion of this nonsense is complying
with some legislation or other, but then, how is it that in order
to use e.g. an Amazon gift voucher I enter the code into the
website once, and it just works?
December 12
Office Christmas Party, in which we now have enough staff to
occupy the same space as was occupied by the queue for
Mrs. Waider's citizenship ceremony (although less tightly packed,
admittedly).
December 6
The Great Gatsby was an
absolute blast. I read this years ago, and the only thing I could
vaguely recall about it was a car crash, so it was nice to see
that at least I'd been correct about there being one, even if I
couldn't recall any other details. As you might expect from Baz
Luhrmann, there's some nice mixing of period and contemporary, and
the whole thing is a riot of pretty scenery and beautiful
cinematography. Never mind that it's also an enjoyable movie as
well. Well worth seeing.
December 5
It would appear that the initial release of Yosemite is, in
fact, full of leaks. I just now killed of usbmuxd because it had
eaten all available network sockets; I've also noted various other
things disappearing (most significantly, things that should be
handled by dns-sd/bonjour/zeroconf/whatever we're calling it this
week) in a way that suggests, whoops, no more resources to do the
thing I wanted to do, because I lost track of the fact that I
alreadt consumed said resources. Hopefully there's a patch release
in the works now that they've had a few thousand, hundred
thousand, million, whatever beta testers kick the tires on this
thing.