2009 — 11 March: Wednesday
Well, it's 00:55 and well past time for tonight's picture of Christa. "Somewhere in Germany" as the phrase goes. I'm pretty sure this was in the North, and in the summer of 1977 when I was taking a break from a freelance book I was writing for ICL (during my holiday, mad fool that I was):
She would have watched tonight in some bemusement my struggles with a "hung" Blu-ray player.1 Perhaps I do need that firmware upgrade after all? She would probably have been less upset than me at Junior's casual news that "the antibiotics have nailed the bronchitis", too. Kids!
Right; I'm off to bed. G'night.
The four "eyes"
Immediate, indiscreet, intimate, and indecipherable. Gyles Brandreth's rules (worked out with Alan Clark) for the best political diaries. Well, I must say I enjoyed most of Alan Clark's diaries. It's 08:50 and the second cuppa is already now cooling. The sun's out, I've been up for over an hour, and must remember to nip out for a birthday card to accompany tonight's little bash. There's some foody shopping needed, too. But not before breakfast. I've also arranged the satellite dish re-positioning and re-plumbing exercise for next week (ahead of the great Rowridge re-tuning2 exercise). I suspect I shall no longer have much need for Freeview terrestrial digital TV other than as another source of radio.
Advance notice...
... that, after 18 months with the present Texas-based ISP, molehole.org will shortly once again be upping sticks and moving to another ISP. (The intention is to distance ourselves from a known, and black-listed, email spammer on a nearby server — it's been causing Junior some distress with several of the commercial websites that he's set up for various people.) As Junior says on his blog "This will undoubtedly involve a bit of downtime/DNS-mismatchery, but hopefully this will be confined to the weekend".
We shall see. (I note from his "posh" CV that he is unaware of the difference between the verb and noun forms of "license/licence". Should I tell him?)
Imponderables
The BBC tells me that my foody shop chain (JLP) has seen profits drop by 26%. Their latest credit card statement reminds me that they allow themselves to charge an outrageous 23.9% effective APR on cash advances. The Bank of England base rate is now 0.5%. Is it any wonder I don't understand the dark science? Oh well. Time (11:14) to re-hit the shops — I'm back from the birthday card expotition and food stuff. Now for the more fun part.
Back, fed, and watered. It's 15:21, and I shall now start thinking about the size of the slice of humble pie I am considering extending to Brack in NZ. I blame one of the two books I picked up in Borders a couple of hours ago:
You see, although I bought my iMac two years ago, just for fun in my new state of retirement, many many things have since conspired to stop me doing more than gently scratching the surface of its capability. I suspect that is now (finally) going to change. Apart from getting the rest of my life back on to a form of even keel, I've no intention of further enriching the MicroSpit empire, and I'm still not quite convinced that Linux is all it should be. Though it's probably all it needs to be for my use of it on the dinky HP Media PC that I've now3 sited next to the A/V system downstairs.