2007 — Day 99 - Big Bro comes to town
Or at least, he's scheduled to pop in at some point, pick up his super-duper slide scanner, pop off, and has even threatened to treat us to a lunch outing. Let's hope too much snow doesn't intervene.
Meanwhile, we jointly decided that part #3 of our strange French trilogy looked a bit too grim for a Friday evening, so we equally jointly settled on a large dose of Boston Legal second season — the whole of the third disc, in fact, including an episode our supplier last time round had failed to provide. (I feel sure we would have remembered senior partner Shirley Schmidt being held hostage with a cake server wielded by the accounting wizard with Asperger syndrome.)
Such a concentrated dose of James Spader and William Shatner is quite possibly unlawful, and is akin to being marinated in something, though I'd be hard pushed to say exactly what. But it helped restore some of the good mood that had earlier been dissipated by my signal lack of success in helping my neighbour with the problems of his wireless network setup and its own lack of signal. PC systems are all very well, but it's a lot less frustrating when the electrons just line up and do as they're told.
Tonstant Weader1
And the usual Friday afternoon trip to the shoppes of olde Southampton. Anything to report? Well, yes. I took shelter from the bitterly cold rain in Waterstones, of all places. Once there, it would have been churlish not to buy Another Day in the Frontal Lobe by Katrina S Firlik though (staying with the legal theme) the jury is still out on whether this is as good, or as well written, as the superb Confessions of a Knife by Richard Selzer. That one, back in September 1982, left quite a scar!
I also browsed Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing but only bought it from Amazon after I was back at home and had warmed to the idea. I'm prepared to believe that insider stories on the evolution of Microsoft Windows make for interesting reading, but I preferred not to pay the High Street (West Quay, actually) price. So that, and Jessica Livingston's book of interviews with the founders about the early days of various software startups, are now "dispatching soon" as Amazon puts it.