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2007 — 3 Mar: the study has been shelved

Yesterday morning's "John Lewis" delivery van was the prelude to a lot of dusty shifting. Ostensibly, we took delivery of the set of narrow Beech bookshelves that should have been supplied last week instead of the wider, differently finished, set that they actually dropped off. Furthermore, these were most definitely not for me, but for She. It was merely my job to assemble them. However, when push came to shove (and we'd got them up the stairs) it turned out that they fitted more naturally in my study than Hers. Given that I didn't pay for them, this is a result!

In between times, and mostly in between showers, we spent about an hour in town. I picked up a new edition paperback of a lovely book by Christina Hardyment: Arthur Ransome and Captain Flint's trunk. Here's hoping there have been some worthwhile new findings after a further twenty years of research since my first edition. I drew the line, for now, at an in-depth blow-by-blow examination of the Tintin oeuvre, however. And Christa was less successful in getting more decorative concrete stepping stones for a somewhat muddy patch of the back garden. But at least the Bank had already prepared a letter for us, and we'll be getting the Land Registry fee refunded directly into my account. Saga officially over, therefore.

Mr Postie also dropped in with the book of the website coldbacon. My route to that particular site involved a Google search for Chuang Tzu. I host a quote here but had decided to try to find out a bit more about this wise chap. Bang went another hour or so, followed by a brief email exchange of compliments. What a wonderful web!

In later early news

Just time to nip down to catch last night's showing of the 1999 Cronenberg film eXistenZ. The chronological hazards of starting a day's entry shortly before midnight... Well, it's very much better than I remember it being when I borrowed Simon's copy several years ago. But not totally my cup of tea. Interesting, though, the number of plots that hinge on layers and levels of reality. Bit like consciousness, I suppose.

What is it about "Installshield Update Manager" and its wish to check for updates¹ every now and again, do you suppose, that stops my XP system from booting (and leaves my screen dark 'n' dead) until I've stabbed the power switch briefly? Bad programming? Is such a thing possible? That's one of the things I so enjoy about life with Windows: the element of surprise it brings to the desktop. Unix does seem to be a different bucket of bits altogether despite the comments of some of my chums (mentioning no names, Len).

Ico, Ico...

Should you choose to empty your web browser's cache and then refresh me, as it were, you should (now that Junior's placed it in the root² for me) see my new site icon on your browser's address bar. It's a miniaturised version of this GIF:

Any guesses as to the font?

Summary is a'comin' in

OS X has a "summarise" feature (oh, alright, "summarize"). People on Digg have been playing with it. After someone claimed to have tried it on the Bible but given up, because it took too long, another claims to have got the following result:

Given the topic of his recent book ("Time to emigrate?"), I wonder if George Walden would be interested in this?

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Footnotes

¹  At least Macrovision has the decency to tell me how to uninstall this. And a further thread here tackles the Registry cleanup that might be needed. A bit like the rehabilitation needed after ingestion of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, seemingly.
Mind you, what they don't tell you is that, having downloaded and run their uninstaller, a) you're left with a locked file in your downloads folder that you can't initially delete and b) although the uninstaller is a mere 2.5MB or so, the re-installer (that you now need to download and run, just to stop one of the stupid packages HP put on this system ["Sonic Update Manager"] from bitching [in a miserable cycle of popups that can be neither cancelled nor avoided] about the unavailability of its network resource — that is, the Update Manager that you've just removed!) is a heftier 17MB or so. Methinks Macrovision's instructions and guidance to their customers could stand a tad of tweaking, though I don't hold them responsible for incompetent programmers in other corporations.
This is what they call progress, I suppose.
²  Why it has to be in the root of the server rather than just in the root of my userid, I do not know. So you can only have one icon per server, presumably!