2008 — 6 December: Saturday
Back to Old Windsor for tonight's picture — the excitement of those first few steps! This would have been in earlyish 1981, possibly just after I knew we'd be on the move down to the IBM Hursley Lab:
Christa and Peter on the Old Windsor front drive, 1981
Those were happy days, mind you. Peter rang me a couple of hours ago, as soon as he got my email to him about my punctured adventure, in fact. He, too, had a puncture a few weeks ago, but on the motorway (which would have scared me to death, I suspect). Bad enough on a not very busy Otterbourne Road... G'night. It's 01:15, I'm drooping, and it sounds windy and feels cold out there. Yuk!
What a way...
... to start the day. Glorious sunshine, and a (triple) burst of Roy Orbison. (Good ol' Brian Matthew.) It's 09:41 and definitely time for that initial cuppa to complete the rebooting process.
I was (mildly) intrigued, not for the first time, by a search string in my server log. For whoever searched molehole.org specifically for "plagiarism" within the last 24 hours, I can point you here, and here! ("Did you copy that?")
While this piece wasn't very cheery, I did smile (at the end) to learn that the author's "book about the pet industry, One Nation Under Dog, will be published in the spring."
Lunch prep already?
Learning from last week's migraine precursor, I've started the grilling process — it's now running in parallel with the "Copy nearly 200GB of data files to the Linux machine" process, but will be complete a lot sooner.1 It's 12:35 and still sunny, though cold.
Correct me if I'm wrong... dept.
... but wasn't Linux supposed to be robust? It wouldn't even restart until I physically powered off the blighter after a boring stretch of blank screen. Other unreliable blighters include my old adversary, my neighbour's burglar alarm (which, of course, only ever goes off when they're not around to deal with it). The longest I recall it singing its unmerry warble was ten days one summer, until its backup battery went flat. The local "Bobby" told me I would face charges of criminal trespass and damage were I to take a hammer to it, or to the electricity supply to his house.
I now know what I was doing on 7th December 1980. I was sitting in Old Windsor, thumb poised over the "REC" button of (I expect) my Tandberg TCD330 3-head cassette deck, recording the BBC's "Sounds of Jazz" programme (hosted by the deliciously erudite Peter Clayton) because it featured a set from Ian Carr's Nucleus. It was initially recorded on to cassette, of course, and (about 18 years later) on to minidisc. I'm now listening to it, to chop it up into individual tracks prior to turning them into mp3 files for the consequent freedom to fling the sound all over the house. Oddly enough, while I'm in the midst of this "work" another random email request for a copy of one of my ancient BBC radio plays thuds into the Thunderbird Inbox.
Me and my minidiscs... dept.
... as reported to Carol nearly eleven years ago:
... my audio and hi-fi enthusiasm ... used to manifest itself in hi-fi equipment reviewing for magazines, and voracious record collecting. I find the bug has not entirely left me!
So, last Friday I went one better, moving on? up? into the world of "MiniDisc". These are little 3-inch optical discs in neat caddies. They can record up to 74 minutes stereo or double that mono digital audio and they sound pretty bloody good! Even better, you can re-record them (none of this write-once-read-many WORM nonsense), fling them across the room, and be fairly sure the puppy cannot pull miles of tape out of them. If this doesn't mark the final death of tape cassettes, then I don't know2 what will.
But now what do I do with all the cassettes? And how do I label such tiny beasts with up to 255 tracks of title information? I'll have to switch to 4-point!
I should have paid a lot more attention to that last bit! I've been spending the afternoon trying to work out exactly what tracks are lurking on my minidiscs. There are some obsessive people around who actually list album tracks, running order, and running time, which (I agree) should make my task easier. However, I made my first batch of minidiscs from cassettes which I'd been in the habit of filling to the brim by blithely re-ordering tracks to fit. When I labelled these cassettes I took all this chaos into account, but when I labelled the minidiscs I restricted myself to just album titles. Entropy strikes again.
Meanwhile...
... the relentless hunger of the inner man has, once again, been satiated. It's 19:22, pitch dark (of course) and the mammoth file copying downstairs is just past the halfway point. On reflection, it would probably have been faster to use local USB rather than the home network, but so what? Perhaps I shall watch a DVD for a change of pace. I could even tackle some Sudoku... haven't done one since this morning. I'm enjoying "Little Dorrit" in its book form, but deliberately limiting myself to one chapter a night. Last night was the awfully familiar-sounding Circumlocution Office. Now why would that remind me of IBM, do you suppose?