2007 — Day 83 - bring me sunshine

Last night's entertainment¹⁸ was the delightful Little Miss Sunshine. Thoroughly recommended to all but the least/most jaded. I note, by the way, that Asda now offers a small set of HD DVD titles, though the only one that could currently attract me is Serenity. (And I already have both the UK and US variants in any case.)

Tonight's entertainment? Watch this space.

Cute little suckers department

We varied the route on one of our fresh air walks to take in the local Matalan and Comet yesterday afternoon. So I saw a pair of cute suckers: my first HD DVD player operating in the wild. It was a £445 Toshiba hooked up to a dinky 42" Toshiba LCD with 1920x1080 resolution, and it looks very nice. (I couldn't judge its Freeview performance as it was being fed from a specially prepared HD DVD doubtless designed to show its stronger points: nice large areas of single colour [blue sky, for example] and slow motion pans with nothing too fast going on in the visual field.) The combined package is about £2,245 or so.

However, I didn't pay all that much heed as I was busy at the time persuading She who must be adored to buy me cute sucker number two: a dinky hand-held Dyson for £99.99. I was the one who had to lug it home, of course, by which time it felt rather less dinky! The battery life gives you about six minutes unfettered sucking and then needs a three hour recharge. This is, of course, the perfect ratio of time spent maintaining law 'n' order in the fight against household dirt ("corralling the dust bunnies" as Doonesbury's Boopsie character puts it) to time spent on funner stuff. Like studying Linux?

My how the Mighty are fallen department

Perhaps I shouldn't have bought that HP Media PC? I take nine weeks vacation from IBM, retire in the first week of the new year and, next thing I know, they've just been passed in annual revenue by HP unless that's a Guardian typo! Mind you, a letter in today's issue is already looking forward to the publication of the wallchart of corrections to the mistakes¹⁹ on the wallcharts.

25 January 2007

Footnotes

¹⁸ If you discount the BBC Radio 4 "Chain Reaction" interview with Phill Jupitus, the further fretful but somewhat fruitful reading of Linux material, and the freezing trip to Asda that enabled me to post the letter to Ms Taxperson and, as a consequence, feel so virtuous that I yielded to temptation and bought the new Richard Linklater film A scanner darkly for a mere £11.94 there and then.
¹⁹ The utility, toy, hound and terrier dogs wallchart in the series on pets (or pests, depending on your viewpoint) misspelled bichon frise, dalmatian, dachshund, foxhound, miniature schnauzer and miniature poodle. Surreally, it seems that the Boston terrier classification was given as terrier, but should be utility. Glad that's all cleared up.