2007 — 24 May: It's been a quiet week, in Lake Chandler's Ford

I jest.

News about She Who Must Be Adored and her surgical repair as and when I get it. First things first: Nil by mouth! In other, more minor news, my re-ripping currently stands at 3751 tracks, with very few duplicates so far. Or 10.4 days of listening. Second (or was it fifth?) time around, the network drive and Explorer played very nicely together.
Update 1: Christa, my remarkable wife, has just phoned, after her operation to complain of being hungry, but is looking forward to tomato soup this evening, and the chance to watch House! Did I mention she's remarkable?
Update 2: the latest score is 3,781 "songs", not counting the twenty Van Morrison albums I have ripped but not yet transferred over. Or the seven Doors albums. Or... you get the idea.

I've also brushed off the dust and cobwebs from the Sennheiser noise-reducing headphones that chum Len very kindly let me have at a special price. They work wonders on the audio tracks from the railway tracks through the (necessarily) open skylight where the iMac now lives. Though I don't expect the summery weather to continue, of course.

And so, as Pepys might put it, to bed...

In later news...

Well, She's safely (I hope) tucked up in hospital, and tells me she's already selected her evening menu. Whether I'll be able to eat remains to be seen. I treated my chauffeur to a pub lunch in Crawley from which we crawled just as young Corporate hordes (wearing ties and I.D. badges) started to surround us. Meanwhile, all is not quite yet sweetness and light on the MP3 front. And I don't just mean the news that Apple may be the next in line to be hit by a patent infringement lawsuit from Alcatel/Lucent. Mind you, I expect it would take them a while to recover from the $1.52bn award just made against Microsoft (six weeks cashflow, apparently, in Redmond).

No, I'm referring to the odd behaviour of the network storage drive and the way the MP3 files were segregrated from the corresponding ".m3u" playlist files (which, ironically, I actually didn't need to generate in the first place now that I'm letting software such as iTunes do all the grunt work of library management) in a duplicate set of sub-directories. These made it very confusing when I came to copy across, incrementally, later ripped files since it wasn't clear where I should put them. I've therefore deleted all the playlist files, nuked the NAS, and am trying, yet again, to copy over a clean set of files in a clean directory structure from the XP system. Tell me again how come these things get marketed as productivity aids?

It's a jolly good (un)job I'm retired!

And now, on NPR, I'm listening to an interview with the founder (David Talbot) of online magazine Salon.com who has just written a book ("Brothers") about the Kennedy brothers. From this, I learn that JFK approached his movie director friend John Frankenheimer and encouraged him to make what became one of the best of the Cold War paranoia films: Seven Days in May. What a strange world we live in, to be sure. Talbot is convinced that the Warren Commission — how can I put this delicately? — was economical with the truth about how many shots were fired back in November 1963. Let alone by whom.