2009 — 8 March: Sunday
Tonight's 35 year old picture of Christa is another from the summer of 1974 in High Wycombe when Uncle Tom, Aunt Joan, and cousin Leigh were visiting my parents:
Christa and what was to become some of her family, 1974
It's been an interesting evening. Part 1 of Arthur C Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama" was very well done. The extended edition of QI with Emma Thompson was very funny. And listening to Harold Pinter, in a wheelchair, giving a reading of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, (reminding me very much of Dennis Potter's final TV appearance in April 1994) was a powerfully blood pressure raising experience. I must do something to boost the satellite signal strength as the reception of "More 4", although a better picture than the terrestrial Freeview signal, was often badly pixellated.
In between all that, the DVD artwork scanning proceeds. I've nearly finished titles beginning with the letter "D".
G'night.
What would we do without weather?
Despite the current (09:54) brilliant sunshine, it looks as if the brolly will be deployed later:
And, speaking of being under the weather, my neighbour has kindly invited me round this afternoon to advise him on the virus his Vista PC has caught — and him a doctor, too.
Hah! If the Beeb's weather forecast is correct, there's minus two minutes to go before the downpour. I've just been on two little supplies expotitions: the first was downloading the latest Ad-Aware, SpyBot, and AVG anti-virus to pop into my little black bag (reminding me [naturally] of the 1950 SF short story of the same name by Cyril Kornbluth) and the second was to refill parts of the fridge and parts of the fruit and biscuits cupboard. I checked my weight this morning; it's shot up to 88 Kg so I got more fruit and less biscuits...
Clive Stafford Smith is picking some beautiful music, and has also admitted to listening to Pink Floyd on an Australian beach after having too much to drink. Good man!
Your first flush of youth...
... has long gone when you hear the impeccable Chi-Chi Nwanoku pronounce the 1977 recording she's unearthed of Khachaturian's Violin Concerto in D (admittedly conducted by the composer) as a "vintage" recording. Oh well, time to saddle up and get on my anti-viral horse. Maintaining a composer's theme, wish me Gluck!
Several hours later...
The problem turned out to be good ol' "MS Antispyware2009" which had neatly insinuated itself onto his HP laptop. The malware is skilfully socially-engineered and basically blackmails you into paying for it to "remove" a whole bunch of fake infections that it reports. More worrying is how he picked up this little beauty in the first place. It's new to me but there are removal instructions aplenty for zapping it, but... given the 1GB+ of rubbish I'd already removed1 from his PC, and given the state of chaos that is his hard drive, and given his own admissions that a) he relies on his ISP (BT) for all his antivirus protection,2 and b) he installs only the occasional MS security patch... either when he remembers or when he feels like it...
I've suggested — given the non-critical nature of the work done on, and the data contained on, this particular PC — that he simply attaches an external drive, sucks off the data (a lot of music from an iPod and a few work-related Office-type files) and then comes back to me either for help in using its HP recovery partition to re-install the Vista system, patch it, and laboriously set up his system again or (fingers crossed) that he simply converts the whole thing to Ubuntu and gets on with his life. ("Linux? What's that? How much does it cost? Really! Where can I get it from?") Still, at least he's lent me a copy of "The kite runner" which, for some reason, I've managed to miss.
Blimey, it's 18:31, I've missed the first broadcast of the final part of Rendezvous with Rama, not to mention an hour of the "Freak Zone", and my lunch is a distant but delicious memory. And it's cold, dark, windy, and raining. Life goes on...
R.I.P. Ian Carr
Or so I thought! Damn! Another fine musician (and writer) has left the building. I was a great fan of the jazz-rock music of Nucleus from about 1971 onward. As with the Alan Parsons Project, I could never understand why they were so relatively little known or appreciated on their home turf.