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Panem et circenses
Dec. 18th, 2019 11:20 pmWith regard to circuses, I dived into the Duolingo Latin course and completed it in four days. OK, it's in beta and as a result is heavily truncated compared to other courses. But even so, I normally would put aside a month of dedicated time to complete a tree. I must confess I was heavily helped by prior exposure to other romance languages, especially Italian and Esperanto. I am obviously going to have review everything a few more times as most of my successful answers were more due to recognising the right word in a sentence, rather than expertise in the various cases. That will come with revision, which I could probably do alongside Russian revision, given that languages love of cases.
In another circus-related activity, I've been slowly shifting all my various philosophical essays to the Lightbringers site that I operate. That's a process that I started literally several years ago, and only finished today. Sadly, I have also discovered that there is a number of missing presentations that I do not have hidden away online on historical sites (even using the wayback engine). This includes presentations to The Philosophy Forum on The Causes and Prevention of Violence, and The Philosophy of Education and Development, among others from around 2010. Hopefully I have a backup of them somewhere.
Bread-wise, work has seen the introduction of a new build system, still based on EasyBuild, but with stricter use of the modules hierarchy available in LMod. It is especially tricky during the tranistion period as we've needed to set up both side-by-side, with the eventual plan of shifting everything to the new system. There are some advantages, I will admit, although it is experiencing some infrastructure teething issues. Anyway the practical upshot of this has been that a lot of software that we already have installed is being re-installed to the lastest compiler versions, which of course is pretty time consuming at this stage, but will pay off in the longer run.
It is that time of year where various organisations, business and otherwise, are winding down and having their celebratory events. Our own workplace has two (one official, one unofficial) activities slated and whilst I'll put in an appearance at both of those, I'm making a deliberate and wilful effort to avoid any others this year. Whilst others are winding down, I'm increasingly ramping up to a mad panic and I try to pretend to get at least a portion of my year's aims and objectives towards a semblance of completion. If I am not too harsh on myself, I've actually done most of what I set out to do, and with additional actions replacing those I did not. But I am like this most Decembers, and I really shouldn't expect this one to be any different.
In another circus-related activity, I've been slowly shifting all my various philosophical essays to the Lightbringers site that I operate. That's a process that I started literally several years ago, and only finished today. Sadly, I have also discovered that there is a number of missing presentations that I do not have hidden away online on historical sites (even using the wayback engine). This includes presentations to The Philosophy Forum on The Causes and Prevention of Violence, and The Philosophy of Education and Development, among others from around 2010. Hopefully I have a backup of them somewhere.
Bread-wise, work has seen the introduction of a new build system, still based on EasyBuild, but with stricter use of the modules hierarchy available in LMod. It is especially tricky during the tranistion period as we've needed to set up both side-by-side, with the eventual plan of shifting everything to the new system. There are some advantages, I will admit, although it is experiencing some infrastructure teething issues. Anyway the practical upshot of this has been that a lot of software that we already have installed is being re-installed to the lastest compiler versions, which of course is pretty time consuming at this stage, but will pay off in the longer run.
It is that time of year where various organisations, business and otherwise, are winding down and having their celebratory events. Our own workplace has two (one official, one unofficial) activities slated and whilst I'll put in an appearance at both of those, I'm making a deliberate and wilful effort to avoid any others this year. Whilst others are winding down, I'm increasingly ramping up to a mad panic and I try to pretend to get at least a portion of my year's aims and objectives towards a semblance of completion. If I am not too harsh on myself, I've actually done most of what I set out to do, and with additional actions replacing those I did not. But I am like this most Decembers, and I really shouldn't expect this one to be any different.
