2008 — 20 May: Tuesday

My, how the Time keeps ticking away, heh? 33 years since my Dad died. And now it's already 00:51 and I'm down to the last handful of CDs to rip (leaving to one side the minor detail that I have yet to tackle either the classical or the spoken word material). I'm certainly too tired to transfer them onto the iMac and into iTunes at this late stage.

So, I shall sign off for tonight with an ancient family portrait. I'm guessing the photographer was my ex-school chum Ralph and the year (carefully carbon-dating Junior's approx. size) will have been around the time of the Falklands conflict. You will speedily deduce that dear ol' Dad never actually saw his only grandson, which always struck me as a rotten shame. I tell you, this here cancer lark has a lot to answer for.

On a local family walk?

G'night!

Bottom line... dept.

You want cynicism? I got cynicism! Just skimming the BBC's news page this morning we see that M&S has managed to make a £1,000,000,000 profit,¹ food² price rises are going to clobber the UK "hard", and that well-known charitable institution Ernst & Young suggests (illogically, in my opinion) that "As food and energy prices contribute 1.7% to Consumer Prices Index Inflation — which recently reached 3% — this leaves 'little room' for price rises elsewhere." Curiously, they conclude: "There is a good case for switching the [government's inflation] target to core CPI inflation, which excludes the effect of food and energy prices". (Source.)

See why I stopped bothering to track these indexes? If a component rises, (as did mortgages) just exclude it from what you "measure", declare victory, and move on. And, as has become normal, people reporting a problem kick off by looking to assign the blame for it.

Wonder if I've got anything left for breakfast? Pity I can't eat the minor-league item from ERNIE. Thank you, Mr Postie.

Understatement... dept.

Nicked from page 9 of an unfunny, two-column, unbeautifully-written PDF file "Five misunderstood features in Windows Vista" put out by those wonderful folk who brought you Vista:

On machines configured with the appropriate specifications for their operating system, the
speed of most operations and tasks between Windows Vista and Windows XP is virtually on parity.
Which is pretty remarkable when you consider one key thing Windows Vista is doing that Windows
XP isn't: indexing for near instantaneous search results for desktop files, even embedded in
email messages. The result is users can find information significantly faster (measured in
minutes), increasing productivity far in excess of the loss in speed of operations (measured
in milliseconds).

That's OK then. It still can't find my keys though, can it? Wendell Berry put it well (in 1987!) with his "Why I am not going to buy a computer":

"[A] computer, I am told ... will help you write faster, easier, and more. ... Do I, then, want to write faster, easier, and more?" he asks. "No. My standards are not speed, ease, and quantity. I have already left behind too much evidence that ... I have written too fast, too easily, and too much."
He writes elsewhere: "Going off to the woods I take a pencil and some paper ... and I am as well equipped for my work as the president³ of IBM."

Wendell Berry, quoted by Mark Engler in Democracy Uprising

Time to read about super-sized British house mice snacking on albatross chicks. And the thorny question of "How did honour evolve?" (I'm not sure it's answered here, but it's always interesting to read David Barash.) What a world!

Lunch? How can it be time (12:49) for lunch already? I wondered what the rumbling sounds were. Still, I need refuelling before I nip out to refuel. Life grinds on, as my chum put it in a recent email. He's right, too.

Brought up with a jolt... dept.

There I am, gently reading a classy look back at Saul Bellow's 1970 novel "Mr Sammler's City" (a tale of New York at a time when there was a murder every four hours) when I find myself stepping on a stair that isn't there:

It's the ultimate satire: the state that promises you the security of an old-age pension can't even provide you the security to keep it — the primary purpose of a state. It's almost as bad as today's Britain, where the welfare state provides for your welfare not by stopping omnipresent thugs from beating you senseless but by sewing you up afterward for free.

Myron Magnet, in City Journal

Ouch! (My emphasis.) Right! Time (18:52) for another bite to eat, methinks.

And now (22:19) please explain why Steve Reich's 1978 CD Music for 18 musicians — a single, 56-minute piece, initially showed itself as having been catalogued by the online music database ("MusicBrainz" in this case) as Brian Eno's Thursday afternoon — from memory, also a single track of about that duration? Just as puzzling, was it classified as "jazz" simply because it's on the German "ECM" label? I note, wryly, that Steve Reich was not high on the list of Christa's preferred music. And I'm currently (22:52) listening to a BBC Radio 2 documentary about Elton John, who was always higher up that list for her than he was for me.

The CD ripping process is really very simple; a trained monkey could manage it: a) bang the next CD into the HP machine's drive, b) wait for it to be recognised, and the title, artist, and track data to be filled in, c) correct as many of the errors as you have the patience or the wit to, d) click "rip", e) rinse and repeat until ready for bed! Yawn. I'm ready for bed.

Footnotes

¹  In language that I swear is identical to that of recent IBM top management statements (as I recall them, with my doubtless failing pensioner's old memory) M&S chief executive Sir Stuart Rose said today that "while the group had a good year, despite tougher economic conditions in the second half, it had missed its profit targets and will not be paying a bonus." So I won't be going there to see happy, smiling faces today, I guess. The board and senior staff bonuses there last year were £90,000,000 while the shop floor staff swept up the £26,000,000 crumbs left on the executive dining room floor, I guess. (Source.)
²  The UK runs a food trade deficit. Pity we can't eat all those pound notes the "City" makes, isn't it? Or drink all that nice North Sea oil?
³  Actually, one recent occupant (John Akers) of that doubtless gleaming office was reputed to have an IBM PC in it, but never to switch it on. Another (Lou Gerstner) at one point told his workforce (in an ironic twist on that old phrase about "Nobody was ever sacked for buying IBM computers") that — in essence — if they bought anything but an IBM computer for their personal use, they ought to be fired. I wonder which of the two cost IBM more money in the long run. The first presided at a time when IBM's corporate loss was then the greatest ever made. The second seemed to do quite nicely, thank you, with stock options and salary compensation guarantees of various kinds.