2007 — Day 97 - best laid plans
Alas, we must return to my financial institution to tell them we've changed our mind about opening a new account with them. Closer inspection of their small print (not surprisingly) shows us that they stop people from claiming a joining bonus if the newly-introduced customer's (guess who?) regular influx of funds comes from one of their existing customers (guess who?) — they must have had prior dealings with wily pensioners...
Can't blame a chap for trying. Back to the drawing board. And at least this time we get to trudge in the snow unless it's all slushed by the late afternoon. Now, where did I put my bobble cap?
Tonight, for our viewing pleasure
I'm predicting a showing of two (aka "Un couple épatant") having watched one (aka "Cavale") last night. Good film, but the problem is we've apparently seen the second film of the trilogy before the first. Only the French would confuse us with such titles, surely? At least IMDB agrees that the third film is three (aka "Après la vie"). I wonder what the DVD labelled four has in store for us. I would probably be able to tell, and link to the cover artwork for you in my usual way, had I remembered to scan it before putting all the packaging up in the loft, of course.
BBC non-hubris department
How's this for a "priceless" admission?
On 30th January at 10:58 a milestone was reached in the BBC, a milestone that a lot of people think that we should have reached long ago. In short we launched a BBC Homepage that validates against a W3C DTD...
Getting pages to validate, easy? Getting pages to validate to XHTML 1.0 Strict, little bit trickier? Building a page that was designed to work in tables without a redesign, meeting BBC standards in order to maintain the service to the widest audience possible, while redesigning the accessibility layer and developing new accessibility functionality, priceless.
I couldn't agree more.
No visit to a financial institution in cold rain need go entirely unrewarded when Jonathan's bookshop is just over the road from it:
- Billy Bragg: still suitable for miners by Andrew Collins. An excellent & updated musical memoir
- A Night at the Majestic by Richard Davenport-Hines. Modesty forbids I should quote the particular (startling) line that attracted my attention, but there's plentiful goodness in here regarding Marcel Proust and his crowd in the Paris of 1922
- No such thing as a free ride? by a father and son team (Simon and Tom Sykes) who basically wrote to all sorts of people requesting tales of hitch-hiking experiences and then collated them. Sadly, Chomsky's own memories from 50 to 60 years ago await more spare time
- Time to emigrate? George Walden asks, basically, why is no one talking about what's happening in the UK? He casts this in the form of a lengthy letter to one of his sons. Shades of Lord Chesterfield, perhaps?
Mr Postie, meanwhile, dropped by with the latest CD from what I can no longer call the Tin Hat Trio as there are clearly five of them now. Henceforth "Tin Hat" it is. I was bemused to see that whoever had (kindly) supplied track details to the freedb database had classified this as "post-classical". I wonder what he or she would have made of one of my Desert Island Disc choices, namely, William Russo's Three pieces for blues band and orchestra. The recording I have features Corky Siegel on harmonica accompanied by what Seiji Ozawa had told him was his own band: the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.