Cioran, Bach and God

After a discussion on negativity and nihilism, doctor_squale put me on to the philosophy of Emil Cioran. Already impressed by his gloomy taken on things, I particularly liked these two quotes on Bach and God:

without Bach, God would be a complete second rate figure

And:

Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe can not be regarded a complete failure

Both claims which seem to me to be completely indisputable...

The burnt hand teaches best

At least when I botched my own shell script yesterday, I had the decency to do it entirely within my own space and on my own home machine.

Others — no, you probably don't know them — with greater ambition managed to make a similar error in a bona fide script which, with the aid of dsh, they executed on a number of machines simultaneously as root. Needless to say, the machines had not been backed up for some little time...

Talk about a painful learning experience...

A final fling

Out to dinner with the remains of the usual crowd to mark the final few days of the NEC era, what with the system gets the chop at the end of next week. Despite town being crammed with a combination of rain-dodging tourists and newly minted graduates out with their proud parents, we didn't have too much trouble finding somewhere to eat.

I didn't stay late but instead headed home straight from the restaurant, leaving the others to party the night away without me...