2008 — 4 April: Friday — another week gone!
Last night's film Last Life in the Universe was — how shall I put this? — different. I can agree with the "dreamily stylish" comment but I'm sufficiently old-fashioned to hanker after the good old sequence advocated by Philip Larkin: "a beginning, a muddle, and an end". While making sure1 that this was indeed Larkin (I had a faint idea it just might have been his chum Kingsley Amis) I found an unrelated Larkin quote new to me:
The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.
According to Lowell Edmunds (in a book called "Martini, Straight Up: the classic American cocktail") Larkin was describing in an interview how in his opinion the chromatic scale had been the innovation by which Charlie Parker wrecked jazz. To my (mild) horror, it seems the piece was reprinted in "Required Writing" but I don't have that book. Yet I do have "Further Requirements". Oops. So much for being a completeist. Amazon to the rescue.
Time for bed (01:04) before I do any further damage to the battered credit card. But having just heard about the government's plans to curb sex offenders by barring their emails from social networking web sites doesn't sound as if they quite grasp all the technical aspects of email somehow. As for the "research" purporting to show a Yorkshire accent conveying a greater level of intelligence than, say, a Brummie one... G'night.
Good morning, sunshine
It's now 11:18 but I've been up and atom for some time. Long enough, at least, to have stuffed the next crockpot, perused Mr Postie's (welcome) offerings, dressed and cuppa'ed. Breakfast will have to wait until the effect of the crockpot has worn off. (It nearly has!) So in the meantime I've been adding the scanner and printer to both systems, courtesy of this really rather clever "Avocent" KVM switch.2 And the next attempt will be to add shareable audio to both.
(I have the 2-port baby brother version of this one.)
Thank you, Mr Postie
Say hello to:
- Eulogy
Tagged as "a comedy that puts the fun back in funeral" — it has a great cast, so here's hoping - Jerome Bixby's Man from Earth
as mentioned here
Thank you, IBM!
I realise it's compliance with legislation, but I'm pleased to learn that this old pensioner is to be granted a small3 increase. And Mr Tax Man also seems to have decided he doesn't need quite so much from me in the coming year. "Every little helps" as Dad used to say rather often. And an old colleague many years ago drummed into me the thought that "any mechanism for transferring cash from the Corporate a/c to the personal a/c is a Good Thing" (for those of you who remember 1066 and all that).
It's all on the "go"... dept.
I lazily decided to let somebody other than me feed me for lunch, so I hightailed it gently over to my preferred lunchtime garden centre restaurant. Meanwhile the crockpot chunters enticingly on for the evening meal. "Being as how" (note the Brummie accent) it's Friday, I then decided to pootle down into Southampton to keep up the multi-decade tradition of a spot of retail therapy on a Friday afternoon. Parking by Staples is a breeze, and that shop is always worth a browse in any case. A stroll along to Borders then suffices for almost all of a chap's intellectual stimulation these days. And calling in at Tescos for a browse of the bargain shelves was fruitful, too.
So now we can also say hello to:
- Working Girl
The 1988 Mike Nichols film with Harrison Ford, Melanie Griffith, and Sigourney Weaver. It will be nice to see that one again. - In the shadow of the moon
Basically, all the surviving members of the Apollo missions get to tell their stories. Should be fun. - Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
An examination of the way the human brain imagines its future, and how well (or badly) it predicts what it will enjoy. Looks interesting.
Thence back up through town and, avoiding the motorway, home in time for an orange juice and whatever just ahead of the arrival of Mike's flight from Alicante. (This is five minutes behind schedule if the BAA site is correct, so I still have a few minutes in hand yet.)
Now where's all that useful loose change for the airport carpark? Off we go again. I shall take my latest Linux magazine with me to read, just like a seasoned airport picker-upper, even though this is the very first time I've ever done this on my own...
Catching my breath
It's 19:03 and (from the smell of it) a perfect time for me to deal with that crockpot's contents. Mike's flight was indeed a little delayed, but the pickup went very smoothly. As we trundled up the M3 we decided avoiding it on the way back might get me home before midnight, so that's what I did. I also took the opportunity to swing past Waitrose for a couple of melons to accompany the tasty pack of "Jamón" that Mike kindly presented to me:
Even the font looks tasty! 'Scuse I.
Did you know...
... how trivially easy it is to remove music from your iPod, even when you don't want to? Just uncheck the tickbox against, for example, a playlist you've been assembling and — in the proverbial blink of an eye — there it isn't. (And there aren't all the mp3 files associated with it, too.) I was always taught it was very rude not to ask a user to confirm an action such as file deletion before carrying it out. Of course the programmer's first line of defence is usually along the lines of "Only an idiot would do that" where "that" is whatever you've just done that the programmer never for a moment considered.
I knew a chap (Bernie Quinn) in ICL who had a positive genius for being able to crash software by doing things the programmers had never thought of with it. (He could also keep software up and running but that's another story.)