2008 — 13 April: Sunday
There's a faint possibility of a walk later today, I gather. Remains to be seen. Rain is the problem, of course. But if forced to stay in on a wet day, there are worse things to do than browse these amazing old computer ads. (Binary dinosaurs, indeed!) I also found a link (from here) to a nicely-written memoir "My Adventures with Dwarfs: a personal history in mainframe computers". Though why the Charles Babbage Institute can't be hosted here in the UK is too much to contemplate at this lateish hour — it's somewhat after midnight.
In fact, it's nearly 02:00 and Bob Harris is just finishing his show with a blast of Nirvana. On those notes, it's time for sleep. Today is the same day! Just read (here) that New Zealandland is considering making 3rd party insurance (as a minimum) compulsory for its drivers. At least a third of motorists have no form of vehicle insurance... Can't say that fills me with eagerness to take my new driving licence out for a spin down there!
Not too bad...
It's now 08:21 and looking quite sunny. The skylight has obviously been rained on recently, however. Maybe I'll discover just how waterproof one of the jackets I've inherited from Junior actually is, later today. Bah! The sun's just found a cloud to hide behind. BBC is still suggesting "heavy showers" as the "predominant" weather for this post code. Never mind. I can always fall back, as it were, on FileMaker Pro 8 "The missing manual" — not that it's missing — far from it, there are 720 pages or so of the blessed thing. (The chapter on importing data starts on p 623...)
Update at 08:45 — my personal walking consultant has just told us his executive decision: I'll be standing down the boots until (probably) Wednesday. I'm sure I can find a few bits of fresh air to go and sniff between now and then. Oh well, as I said in a recent note to my dear friend Carol in NY:
Life carries on ticking along. The sun shines, the evenings are now lighter. The cooking becomes slightly more predictable. The shopping is somewhat more under control. The crockpot is a wonderful invention, though a life of pure casserole (to give it a kindly term) isn't quite the limit of my ambition. Amusements continue to amuse, a bit more so than of late. And whenever they pall, there always seems to be some domestic chore available to fill the shining Hour.
Heck! I suppose I could even squeeze in another haircut. I admit the loneliness1 and quietness is a bit difficult to handle, but there's no law against talking to Christa, is there? And I do quite a lot of that, particularly when I'm driving around. Life is a funny critter.
In other news... dept.
Good to hear that American Airlines has managed to re-wrap wiring bundles2 in its 300 aircraft in less than a week to meet Federal safety standards. Bad to hear that it was necessary in the first place. Worrying to hear that R.E.M. was "one of the first Indy bands, formed in 1980". This one goes out to the one I love (their first Top 40 hit) dates back to 1987, for goodness sake. R.E.M.'s website has just crashed Firefox. (Is it my imagination, or has Firefox become just a tiny tad less stable recently?)
Bad to hear a weapons targetting chap (the Pentagon's "Chief of high value targetting") describing the dropping (he arranged, in Iraq) of nine 2,000 lb bombs as a "fairly significant" amount for a small target area trying to pinpoint "baddies" in the all too close vicinity of a civilian hospital. One euphemism3 after another. Since joining Human Rights Watch, he's gained a new perspective, of course. (He's also noticed that some former Pentagon colleagues don't talk to him any more — now there's a surprise.) It seems "The application of weaponry toward an end is a political act". Nothing to do with killing people, of course. At least he later got to walk through some of the craters from the air strikes he'd helped to plan. (Though he never let on what his rôle had been to the survivors he met.)
Yep! I've tuned the dial (as it were) back to NPR for the time being.
Meanwhile, back on the BBC at 14:06, Tim Rice has just recommended the wonderful Paddy Roberts4 to the nation. Excellent. I endorse this. And Christa's friend Ute in the Canaries has just sent an item that arrived under the rather dubious heading of "Chinese Eye Test". I've always enjoyed optical illusions, and latterly I've added an amateurish appreciation of the art of font design. This (sort of) combines both, though I won't comment on the truth of the statement it makes:
Big Game hunter returns... dept.
In the 1960s, motorists were invited to put a Tiger in their Tank. I've just returned from Southampton's "Apple" store with a Leopard next to mine. I don't think I'll install it until I've sorted out the activation details of the few bits and bobs of software I currently have on the iMac — the advice given about this "rock solid" operating system is that glitches are far fewer with a complete "Nuke'n'Pave" but the "Archive and Install" option sounds initially attractive. Watch this space.