2008 — 5 June: Thursday

Now this looks jolly useful to those of us continuing to avoid Microspit Orifice and the (dis)like. I note, also, that it's after midnight, and I'm falling asleep.

Here's a slide of Christa standing in the middle of our Old Windsor conservatory, shortly after we'd moved in. Not sure why she was scratching her head; she was probably thinking of my next domestic assignment. Believe it or not, the few bits of balsa wood visible on the right were part of a mad re-implementation of a model I once built of the Tokyo Tower (itself a replica of the Eiffel). I suspect I ran out of patience before I got much further with it!

Christa in the "conservatory", August 1976

And so to bed. It's 00:35. G'night.

Change of feather...

... warcast (by the BBC) equals change of plan for the day. My walking co-conspirator rang about three minutes after I'd woken up this morning (after 09:00) to say today's "outlook" is now a lot brighter than tomorrow's so, how about it, chum? I shall throw a sandwich lunch together and hit the road. And get dressed. So, a temporary halt to the slide scanning (I found another huge batch yesterday evening, too). I shall take a couple of the more difficult images over on a USB stick to see what Mike can do with them.

Must swing by the supplies shop on the way home this afternoon, too. Busy, busy. Toot, toot! Time for brekkie. Time to wake up, too. I note my DVD of The Owl Service is on its way today. Good-oh. I further note that, although the John Lewis Partnership is very sorry to learn of the sad loss of Mrs Mounce, they still want the outstanding balance settled, please. (Pity.)

Back, albeit briefly...

Got back from a delightful walk around Froxfield (a loop of about eight miles) and an examination and comparison (yet again) of Nikon versus Canon. The grass may be greener in the Nikon's opinion, but it is also slightly less as we both remember it being in real life. The Canon is more realistic, but definitely tends to underexpose (which can be fixed later by software, of course, more easily than the tendency to overexposure shown by the Nikon). But these broadly comparable cameras, both basically in the "pro-sumer" arena, ought surely to produce shots that don't look as if they were taken on different days?

Calories have been consumed (pork sausages, carrots, peas, spuds, and half a huge Bramley apple [raw, 'cos that's the way I like it]) and the dishes etc are about to be neglected while I whip out for some fresh supplies and then call in at Brian to let Mrs Brian assess the suitability (or otherwise) of my little solid-state Linux mini-laptop — and particularly its keyboard — on her upcoming jaunt down to the Falklands. Strikes me as a long way to go to get away from Brian, but each to her own...

Speaking of keyboarding:

The Classic Typewriter Page

I'm not convinced by those sexed quotation marks now that I look at them!

Black swan... dept.

Nearly a year ago, I bought (and read) The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. As I leafed through Mike's Sunday Times this week (being too much of a cheapskate to buy my own copy) I noted that they'd caught up with him. There's an interesting interview here by Bryan Appleyard.

I note, with bemusement, that the global economy (as viewed through the eyes of the IMF) partially revolves around the changing housing cycle. There's a jolly good reason I'm not an economist, I guess.