2009 — 18 March: Wednesday
The briefest of placeholder entries for tonight. It's already 01:55 and I'm drooping fast. Here's Christa, on 4th September 2007, doing whatever it was she always found to do out in her garden:
Christa in her garden, September 2007
Happy days, as the saying goes. Happy days. I shall save for later a picture of my newest honorary cousin — a sweet little redhead called Henrietta (the hamster). G'night.
One damn' thing...
... after another, if you recall Alan Bennett's marvellous History Boys. The cold in the head is something I shall keep to myself, so I bailed out of today's planned walk in Exbury. The (completely) dead-in-the-water Linux PC has at least taught me that a complete re-installation takes a basic 42 minutes, followed by the ATI proprietary driver install, followed by the 268 updates available as of a few minutes ago to a clean Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit system. (For all I know, it was one of the last ten of these from last night that did the dirty on me.) No data has been lost as I'm cautious ("paranoid" might be a better adjective) in keeping that PC's user data on an external 500GB USB hard drive. And I made sure that was physically disconnected before I pressed the big red re-install switch, as it were.
But, I have to say, it's a great waste of an otherwise lovely day. Christa would have dragged me out of doors, and we would have gone somewhere and had a nice picnic, I don't doubt. But at least I have doors and windows flung wide open, as it were. It's 13:26 and a light lunch is under way while the PC plays with itself. I suppose I'll once again lose digital audio output from it until Brian manages to recall the magic spell. I will have to put gThumb back, as well, for the DVD artwork displaying. It's a 99.9% vanilla system. At times like this, that is a major blessing.
It's now chewing through the MP3s on the re-connected external hard drive. I had to re-find and re-load various codecs first to handle MP3s. I've also got the network access to the systems upstairs playing nicely and — for the first time ever on Ubuntu 8.10 — I have working access to multiple desktops(!). gThumb has done its DVD artwork displaying thing, too, so I'd say we're nearly back to Square One. Good grief, it's 14:02. I'm half-listening to NPR and learned (a couple of hours before the first email also told me) that IBM is thinking about buying Sun. I'm also hearing that station report the horrible UK unemployment stats.
As promised...
A pic of Henrietta the hamster (an omnivore, by all accounts):
It's 18:00 and the planned evening meal is crawling towards final thermal perfection slightly more slowly than my appetite is increasing. Had a nice little jaunt out for afternoon tea and a muffin for my companion in crime. All is now (apart from the lack of digital audio) Linux bliss on the Ubuntu PC. Heck, I've even got some of that Compiz visual candy, should I wish it. (Do I look interested?)
I've also popped the Oppo DVD player back into the system to save me flinging a brick through the nice new large screen the very next time the Blu-ray player gets its Java-powered knickers in a twist when fed a standard definition DVD of (shall we say?) unusual aspect ratio. The system of screen size choice is so clever on the Pioneer that one could almost describe it as stupid. After I've pacified the tum I shall report on the goodies from Mr Postie... Three of the items are Blu-ray discs, in three different forms of packaging, dammit.
This piece on WMD is worth reading, even if only for its headline.
Later that day
There have been a few distractions: a phone consultation with Brian in an attempt (so far unsuccessful) to kick digital audio back into life on the Linux box, the downloading and upgrading to OpenOffice 3.0.1 on the two XP boxes, the washing up. But now, here's the filmic haul from Mr Postie earlier today:
If you're paying attention downunder, Ian, I know only two of these four titles but continue to live in hope. Even though Laura Linney will be forever "Mary Ann Singleton" as far as I'm concerned. I shall take a quick look at our mutual chum's web site and then maybe pop one of these silver platters on the turntable, as it were. It's 21:34 already.