2009 — 13 March: Friday
My lack of sleep is rapidly catching up on me. I'm drooping fast, here. Just time for tonight's picture of Christa, from a small set taken by Mike in his kitchen one evening in August 2002 when Christa, Peter and I were over there for one of our regular invitations to a meal and a movie. I don't remember what the conversational topic was at the instant of this photo, but it was certainly a fairly characteristic posture for her:
Christa in Mike's kitchen, August 2002
It's only 23:44 but I'm declaring it tomorrow already. G'night.
That's better...
... even though it's drizzling, and I'm a bit snuffly, the sleep debt has been repaid. It's 08:48 and I'm half-listening to Idris Elba, a black Cockney actor who's being interviewed on NPR's "Fresh Air". He had a major part in "The Wire" (which I've never seen) and will now play a part in the US version of "The Office". Meanwhile I heard, overnight, from that peripatetic Big Bro of mine, who tells me he's now in Taipei helping some Asiana chums to redeliver a 747-400F to ILFC. What can he mean? (And, no Bro, I have yet to rediscover the "missing" stamps, but they are still here somewhere, never fear.)
Rumpole!!!
This was just one of several bits that made me smile in a nice tribute to John Mortimer:
A few years ago, I lunched with him at Sheekey's, in Chancery Lane. Of the party was the sexy Kathy Lette... Patting his arthritic thigh as the oysters arrived, she said, "We should be having an affair." The old boy managed a leer that would have made Benny Hill look like a choirboy. Before his legs ultimately refused their office altogether, he would very often round off an evening by bidding good night to a young lady and then asking, "I suppose a f***'s out of the question?" At the very least it would make her expression change, which can be almost half the battle.
Somewhat later
After lunching with Len and giving him a quick demo of the new TV system, it's been a day of gentle pottering around. It was good to hear the amusing "Comic Relief" concert from the Royal Festival Hall this afternoon. It was bad to experience various intermittent network access problems between my Linux system and the Gateway's XP Home system. My tame lunchtime expert admits he doesn't understand the topic and there were some combinations of Windows systems that he never succeeded in getting to talk nicely to Linux. He strongly recommends VirtualBox, which I last looked at 100 days ago. The idea is to put Linux on everything as the base system, and then only put Windows on inside a virtualised wrapper — in much the same way as I ran Acorn's RISC OS for a while back in 2003/4 as I was migrating to Windows at home for the first time. We shall see.
What with that, and a much closer look at OS X Leopard, it's just like being at work. I don't actually give a toss which operating system I use; I just want to run the applications that let me do what I want to do. I really don't want to spend any more time than I have to fiddling around with the system software. What an industry. As has been said, if we built houses the way we build code, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilisation.
Neat: "Jesus saves. But Darwin scores on the rebound."