2008 — 6 April: Sunday, still cold?

Another placeholder, just after midnight... Not much point in documenting the fact that (for the first time in a very [very] long time) I actually sat and watched three consecutive TV programmes from soup to nuts. My first-ever episode of something called "Love Soup"¹. Then the tribute to "Love Soup" producer Verity Lambert, who was a pretty amazing person,² and (finally) who could resist a repeat of a "Minder" episode³ with Lionel Jeffries hamming it up as "Senior Citizen Caine"?

email afflictions

By the way, Geoff, my emails to you are still reported as getting bounced, in a way. I don't seem to have problems with any other emails, in or out. Sorry! The slight twist to the latest error message (last night) is:

SMTP error from remote server after transfer of mail text:
host mx-postini.core.plus.net[64.18.4.13]:
571 Message Refused

This morning's attempt (11:06) failed on your attglobal address:

SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection:
host mx1.prserv.net [12.154.55.40]:
550 unauthorized interface for 69.73.180.197 on kcin03

Make what you will of that.

Changes to the spam filtration at both his ISPs in the last couple of days is, he reports, the likeliest culprit... What is it with these ISPs and their disdain for emails from the molehole domain? So far, Verizon in the US has taken the toughest line, requiring the prolonged intervention of a resident US citizen to persuade their (laughably mis-named) "support" staff to take my then non-US domain off their chronically poorly maintained blacklist.⁴ Now it seems that having moved my servers over there, the European side of things is equally disdainful.

It's all gone white... dept.

This is April, right? So explain the fluffy white stuff on the ground outside, and still falling from a bright but rather grey sky at 09:53. Still, a nice hot cuppa helps. But shouldn't the PM (who used, after all, to be the prudently Iron Chancellor) have done more groundwork before removing the lowest 10% tax rate from today "to see whether the lowest paid are left worse off"?⁵ It's now a very long time since I read in an issue of The Economist⁶ a (for once) well-reasoned piece suggesting we throw out the entire complex system of tax-free allowances and varying rates of tax, replacing the entire shebang by a flat-rate of 17.5% that would yield precisely the same government income at very considerably lower cost of collection.

Instead of eating breakfast, I've been playing for an unseemly amount of time (it's now 11:09) with a demo version of a (new to me) software toy — TUT TUT! It's more fun than Spring cleaning, but very similar in overall philosophy, I suppose. (No overalls needed, however.) The sun is now shining, the snow has mostly melted. As long as I stay away from the "news" broadcasts I can kid myself that all's right with the world, apart from Christa's unavoidably permanent absence. That is no fun, but not anything I can fix, either.

As I've said before, music helps. (Even, though not especially, the Doobie Brothers. I heard rather a lot of their music from AFN in Germany while I was spending a fortnight with Christa at her parent's house in the summer of 1977 writing a freelance book for ICL. I'm even now sitting on the very same leather cushion I liberated from that room, which had been my brother-in-law Georg's study / bedroom. Thanks, G!) The Supertramp track from 1974 ("If Everyone Was Listening") is even more welcome. I note, bemusedly, that the album from which this track comes ("Crime of the Century") is available as a remastered CD for £4-99 when I clearly remember the half-speed mastered super vinyl album from Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs set me back six times as much 30 years ago when I bought it in Windsor. (I wonder if the newest pressing still has the analogue pre-echo?)

Critical updates

Hah! I left HP installing a critical update to its Printer Management Language gorp on one of the PCs. Next time I look, there's a pop-up that says (and I suppose I should have captured it for posterity) "Successfully installed" and, "Failed", in the same window. You hafta laugh. Nearly time for lunch...

How (un)cool is this?

In this day and age, too:

Happy Days

Now, here's a good question. Who needs to worry about where he's put his Photoshop Elements 5.0 CD when he's now installed the GIMP? And (with its assistance) here's a picture from a much earlier breakfast. I took it in our Old Windsor house, either late in 1976 (we'd moved in in April) or (possibly) early in 1977. The curtains (from Caleys) are still going strong up in the bedroom. Sadly, all three wonderful people here (Christa and her parents, of course) are no longer with us:

However, you can clearly see where she got her fabulous smile from! (Though I like to think I played some part in it, too.)

Footnotes

¹  Including an amusing episode of perfume-assisted "puppy love" that would have gone down well with Dutch author Midas Dekkers and his 1994 examination ("Dearest Pet") of what turned out to be an eye-watering history of our ambivalent attitudes towards cross-species sexuality. According to a clipping I kept of a review in FHM magazine in July 1997: "Cross-species sexuality is not an opening conversational gambit in most living rooms, but, as Dekkers points out, 8% of men and 4% of women have been willing players in the Love That Dare Not Grunt Its Name." (Hence, no doubt, the plot in one hilarious episode of Boston Legal.)
²  I had no idea "Eldorado" had been one of hers. What a thoroughly decadent evening, heh?
³  A quarter of a century old! Good God. It was about that long ago that I can still remember occasionally being joined downstairs for late-night showings of "Hill Street Blues" by Junior. He liked to fall asleep on me, as it were, and seemed to hate the idea that he might have been missing out on anything. Since I can also clearly remember the delight I felt in being allowed to "stay up late" as a child when holidaying once a year with dear Mama's elder sister, I couldn't very well refuse him, could I? Kids do sleep when they're tired, after all.
⁴  Their policy for determining spam was as simplistic as their President's line on the "war" against "terruh" — if you weren't one of us you were obviously one of them, fit only for the outer Darkness.
⁵  I realise the world is full of complex problems that always have simple solutions (all of which are wrong) but I'd hate to give up on commonsense entirely (even though its rarity suggests it's as badly misnamed as an ISP's "support" staff, IMHO).
⁶  I fear I have a natural disinclination to have much faith in a right-wing publication that enlists people like the ghastly Henry Kissinger in its advertising campaigns. I admit I used to buy their annual "The World in 199x" series, until I realised that their start of year predictions simply never came true when one looked back from the other end, as it were. I further admit that, during what one could I suppose have called the "Gordon Gecko" era (!) I actually subscribed to the damnable rag for a year. But then I was also an IBM shareholder at the time...