Going to Loncon3?

Make time for a trip to the Tower of London to see Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red.

The installation of 888,246 red ceramic poppies, each one representing a WW1 British or Colonial Military fatality, is underway. It already creates an image...a series of images...I hope I'll never forget. I'd love to hear and read the reactions of friends who see it in person.

The installation will be formally unveiled on August 5. It's 100 years "since the first full day of Britain's involvement in the war. The final poppy will be placed ("planted") on November 11.

They're going to sell the poppies for £25 each, with 10% plus all net proceeds being shared between six service charities.

The photos are amazing. Kudos to ceramic artist Paul Cummins and stage designer Tom Piper, who wrote back at the beginning of June, "This could end up being epic." Why, yes, yes it could. Yes, it already is.

Tidying up

My elderly 27" iMac desktop computer has been showing its age and then some of late. I've endured the waiting, waiting, waiting spinning disk for a few months now and finally reached my "okay, I simply must try to do something about this" breaking point this afternoon. Yes, I need rather strongly to be working on two other significant projects, but 1 click followed by 2 minutes of waiting isn't working, it's futile.

After unmounting all of the attached devices and confirming that the problem's with the computer rather than its interface with one of them, I've been using my laptop to search various Apple support and other forums for ideas. While I'm not down to 10% disk availability, the 1T internal drive is holding onto considerably more than it should need to. So I'm working on that.

The super-sluggish computer just took about 1.5 hours to uninstall Adobe CS3. To keep from going utterly mad while it worked as best it could, I turned my attention to the kitchen. After dealing with the dishes, I moved onto another source of ongoing annoyance: the drawer of plastic containers.

You see, yesterday's impulse purchase at Costco was a new 30-piece set of Rubbermaid containers. Enough with the constantly reaching into the drawer for a container then trying to find a matching lid, and the ever-challenging problem of the drawer over-filling with more and more different sizes and brands of containers. So now all is tidy once more, with space for things to get jumbled...for a few months, at least.

The former residents of the drawer have been removed. I'll store containers with lids that fit in the fan room party kit for future convention use, and discard the orphans. ( Unnecessary documentation below )

Twelve pieces of non-recyclable plastic, mostly lids, are now in the trash. The matched containers are now stacked in a tidy, organized fashion and stored in the box the new containers came in. And the high-quality, Rubbermaid round lid? It's going back in the drawer where it will no doubt breed the next drawer-full of chaos.

Resetting the SMC (System Management Controller) appeared to have some benefit as demonstrated by speedy (i.e., normal) responsiveness from the finder upon restart. But I'm back to super-slow copying of files off to an external hard drive as an extra safety archive before deleting them. (They're already on Time Machine & my other regular back-up drive.)

Time to start a load of laundry, and to continue doing other things that take me away from watching the slow loris of a computer make its way through the rest of the 16.62 GB of data it's currently dealing with.

Onward.