2007 — 6 Mar: pension safely banked!
And, in what I sincerely hope is not going to turn out to be a re-run of last month, ERNIE is again suggesting I have acquired a free £50 note. This time, I've taken the precaution of capturing the results screen though I'm perfectly aware such things can be faked.
The magnificent Ambersons is an odd film. I've now seen it (I believe) three times over the years. I still want to deliver a hard kick up the backside of several of the charmless characters! But it's beautifully shot and edited, of course, and well in keeping with Citizen Kane, which I first saw in the Lower Sixth, unless memory tricks me.
Fingers crossed
As of midnight minus four minutes, the parcel tracking system has been showing my Helios DVD player sitting in Northampton for nearly five hours. That's another thing worthy of a hard kick, seems to me. Perhaps the wrong sort of rain is on the line. Guess who's still tracking the little blighter?
It's arrived safely, and is settling in nicely! More critical viewing experiments will take place this evening.1 Since it delivers its upscaled output via both HDMI and component leads (whereas the Humax Hi-Def satellite box will only output HD via the digital HDMI lead) I may yet swap the two boxes around. It depends whether I can indeed persuade digital video 480i and 576i via HDMI to play nicely with my scaler box, or whether I settle for the new player's upscaled analog output via component. Decisions, decisions. Still, flawless multi-region operation, and no sign of any intrusive Macrovision artefacts (sorry, do I mean "copy-protected by Macrovision"?) for my enhanced viewing pleasure.
Pension payments department
"I got a letter from my broker
He say he broker than me..."
We both had letters from financial institutions today. I had nearly a full ERNIE's worth of upwards adjustment, as a) one of my AVCs had been inadvertently cashed in with its January 2006 value rather than January 2007 (said the nice lady from the IBM pension department, "due to a typing error") and b) my bank has indeed refunded the Title Deeds fee (which I had to pay upfront, of course).
But Christa did much better than me in sheer entertainment value:
