2008 — 29 August: Friday
Suddenly it's after midnight. Curious. Tonight's picture of Christa — again from August 1996 — shows her posing in the back garden of (relatively recent) Turing Award winner and IBM Fellowess Fran Allen. I took it in quite gloomy twilight and have had to tweak the brightness more than a little:
Christa in Fran Allen's garden
G'night, ahead of a much-needed walk later today. I hope... Happy anniversary, Roger and Eileen. (Guess who's just rediscovered Christa's master calendar of significant dates?) It's 01:18 — shouldn't I be sleepy?
Good yawning... dept.
A mildly experimental change to the daily routine, it's 08:19 and I'm already breaking fast before hitting the local road. If music be the food of love, I have some Chopin to do, and I thought I'd get it done this morning before today's walk. Once again, I seem to have proved that I now just need six hours of sleep. Meanwhile (while I was catching those hours) Bro sent over a picture of a Korean dragonfly (given the date on the photo, I suspect[ed] Lis took it but it was taken in situ by somebody else — he's just told me):
I think my golden-ringed UK variant is a bit prettier.
Right! Everything but the bananas and oranges safely gathered in. What's next, Mrs Landingham? Ah yes: prepare a packed lunch. I must say, whizzing around Waitrose is a lot easier (and the shelves are rather fuller) when they've only been open for half an hour or so. Though the proportion of "self-scanners" is a bit higher too. Well I have a few minutes in hand, so where shall I browse today? By the way, Lis, Amazon have told me that "Rubik's Sudoku" is now on its way, so I assume I shall have no more spare time ever after it arrives. It's all your sister-in-law's fault. Plus this link to explore. Thanks, Mike!
Today's new phrase: "corporate blankwash". (Source.) Not quite the same as in Johnny Mnemonic I guess, or the little red light gizmo in Men in black. Meanwhile, my Dad's last stint in hospital in 1975 before he was allowed home to die was in Amersham, where in later years dogs have been trained to sniff out cancers. (Source.) An interesting piece.
Time (10:00) to hit the road. And now time (16:54) to sit and sup another cuppa while pondering the next domestic task. A nice walk, but very humid. And a very good decision to avoid the M3 coming back from Winchester. Friday afternoon accident-related snarl-up as per normal. With 9,469 miles under my seatbelt I'm almost starting to get the hang of bits of this driving lark. Heck, I've even managed to get a card for the weekend birthday boy. I still wonder what Christa's system was; obviously not quite as "JIT" as mine. I think she probably picked up cards almost continuously to keep a stockpile of the things. I remember her coming in and asking me, from time to time, to "choose a suitable card for so-and-so" from a set of two or three. As I still have a nearly full set of Christmas stamps from last year it's clear I'm certainly sending nothing like as much snail mail as she did.
The evening looms up
The meal was, I have to say, a strange but tasty mixture: sausages, prawns, and a nice salad — my soi-disant version of "surf and turf" perhaps or, at least, a distant cousin of it. According to Wikipedia, it epitomises culinary kitsch! Is there nothing new under the sun? Well, I haven't seen one of these before.
Mr Postie was a bit of downer today. All I found waiting for me was yet another totally unsolicited batch of credit card cheques for shredding. And, yet again, the accompanying letter unnecessarily quotes my full name and address, my credit card account number, my credit limit... and then they have the cheek to tell me to keep such details private! So I still await the other "Theme Time Radio Hour" CDs that Amazon claims to have posted. It's a shame (in a way) that Bob Dylan's gloriously well-informed inbetween-track chit-chat is omitted, but there's certainly a heap of wonderful music on the first double CD compilation.
Buy enough books, by enough people, and eventually you hear them on BBC Radio 3! Tonight's example is one Felipe Fernández-Armesto (examining Chicago); the book I have by him is his 2003 "Ideas that changed the world". My rather wry comment on that in my books data base is "What it says on the tin"... I didn't expect him to sound like Lloyd Grossman, however. "Somebody who doesn't own something sells it to someone who doesn't want it" — the basic idea that grew out of the stockyards and their associated trading, it seems.
R.I.P. Geoffrey Perkins
Excellent and talented producer of many fine comedy programmes. (Source.)
IE8 beta2?
Having read the long list of known issues, (aka Release Notes!) I can't convince myself I want this level of IE yet. Better to stick with the devil that works; besides, my only current use of IE is the seemingly endless round of security patching. For my real browsing (personally) I use Firefox.