2007 — 26 Feb: a tripod, a tripod, where the heck's my tripod?
It was here just a couple of years ago. I indistinctly remember using it as a door stop for, oh, at least a decade. Dammit, it's in a little green rectangular cardboard box. Says "Tripod" on it. Can't possibly miss it. Bet we threw it out saying "Why've you been keeping this all these years?"
On a related topic, can anyone tell me why the iMac's built-in web camera produces a mirror image of me. Why go to all the trouble of inverting me left-right? Or have I overlooked some fiendish setting? Another mystery for the helpful lady Brack calls Mrs Google, no doubt.
The toy department revisited
Big Bro approves my choice of digital SLR and scanner. So that's all right then. And there is much to enjoy in a second viewing of the Wallace & Gromit Were-Rabbit film. Indeed, bits made me laugh out loud, which I don't remember happening in the cinema.
Plus I can heartily recommend Harley Hahn's Student Guide to UNIX, not least as a cure for insomnia after a busy day slaving away at the orifice (Black Hole, more like) that is my study at the moment. It worked a treat at about 1:30 this morning before I'd got past page 29.
And Mr Posty, instead of delivering the ERNIE cheque that — like Billy Bunter's postal order — is not now going to arrive, dropped in a suggestion (from the aggressive marketing department of a North American bank that I have a credit card with, but which I haven't used for several months) that I write myself one of their credit card cheques payable to my current account as if this somehow conjures free money magically out of thin air to solve all my financial woes. It reminds me of the mini-poster my chum Kate brought me back from a business trip one time which asks rhetorically: Can I pay my VISA with my MasterCard? Or maybe (harking back to the iMac's treatment of me) it was the other way round.
A pint of Pinter, and a pair of browsers to go
Just for a change, we sat down and watched the idiot box tonight. First, Harold Pinter's 1999 play Celebration and then a series of workshop sessions examining bits and pieces of his over the years. Is this where David Mamet got some of his trademark dialogue style from? Marvellous stuff, from "More4". More, please.
I've now installed both Camino and Firefox on the iMac, alongside the "native" Safari. An interesting exercise and, frankly, much more reminiscent of program installation under Acorn's RISC OS than your typical Windows experience. Not least because of the avoidance of any need to reboot the operating system. I've also got the new Epson scanner working fine under XP, and will attempt the equivalent exercise on the OS X box tomorrow. It's a pity there isn't (or I have yet to find) a USB switchbox that does the "same" as a KVM switch.
Mind you, I'm not sure what the XP world would make of the Apple's "Mighty Mouse". What was that about a "Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie"?