Visiting Cornwall

Being back in Cornwall at present it is interesting to be reminded of small details that I had forgotten: for example, at lunch in a restaurant today I was asked Where's your table to? in contrast to the Where's your table at? which fits what I sometimes heard after moving to Ohio.

I realized that driving down yesterday I spanned the extent of the British motorway network from its northeast to its southwest tip: from the A90 I entered westward at one end of the M90 near Perth and exited the end of the M5 at Exeter westward onto the A30. My radio listening included Alice Levine's show on BBC Radio 1. I also enjoyed Vanessa Paradis' Live album: I like Dis-lui toi que je t'aime and she does sound sweetly enthusiastic in covering Les Cactus.

Agreeable simplicity in computing

On the Debian system that I use at work I wanted my x-www-browser and similar to point to /usr/bin/firefox. update-alternatives complained that Firefox wasn't registered as an alternative and resisted my naively attempting to fix that. The manual page didn't make it obvious how update-alternatives works nor how to placate it but I was still able to manually create the symlink in /etc/alternatives/. I highly value being able to easily manage such behaviors especially as many Unix-like systems progress away from keeping the underlying details penetrable.