2009 — 4 September: Friday
Quite a lot to do today, so I'm going to grab some sleep while the chance is there. My next picture of Christa shows her sitting on the spare bed in what was to become Peter's room in the Old Windsor house, back in (probably) 1977. I'm pretty sure we'd just been getting it ready for us to sleep there while her parents were over for a couple of weeks holiday that year:
I spent quite a lot of time yesterday evening relocating the subwoofer, cleaning up the mains leads, and re-instating the Linux PC. Since the NAD CD player's analogue output level is too high for comfort, and since I don't really ever expect to want to play a CD downstairs while listening to it upstairs, I've also simplified my little router for sending a choice of audio signals upstairs to the study. I've also tried on my new set of walking shoes in readiness for our next expedition, set for Sunday.
Outgoing email is not yet sorted as we sail through midnight... G'night.
Calling all cars...
While my cuppa stews gently downstairs I've just sent an email to my Google mail account from molehole, and seen it arrive there within less than two minutes. This bodes very well for the resumption, as it were, of normal service. On with the show. It's 08:48 and the sun is shining.
Noam Chomsky is always an interesting read. As are (generally) the comments he provokes. Crisis? What crisis? Source and snippet:
Also sidelined is a possible way to make a significant dent in the financial and food crises. It is suggested by the recent publication of the authoritative annual report on military spending by SIPRI, the Swedish peace research institute. The scale of military spending is phenomenal, regularly increasing. The United States is responsible for almost as much as the rest of the world combined, seven times as much as its nearest rival, China. There is no need to waste time commenting.
"To save the (global) village, it was necessary to destroy the (global) village." (Source.)
I shall have to stop surfing this Interweb malarkey.
Somewhat later
Chores domestical being more or less complete — sadly, only for the time being — I think I've earned the right for some (very) late lemonses followed by a quick trip down into Southampton to see if it's still there, and still has any bookshops. Somehow, it's already 13:11. How does that work?
My ears are spinning
Some while ago, I mentioned a surround-sound hybrid SACD. It just occurred to me that I can also play it in the Oppo Blu-ray and extract the extra channels via the hdmi lead instead of the multi-channel analogue outputs. So I've just been doing that (successfully) while otherwise absorbed by my latest copy of Linux Format and learning of the existence of a Java-based "collections" manager — called "Data Crow" — here. What a web.
Now (18:17) my tum is gently suggesting it's time for more input.
A swift change of plan at the pudding stage. I discovered one of my three grapefruit was embarking on the same journey of dissolution I first observed here. It made the choice of victim that much easier. Meanwhile, I also observe that Ligeti's "Atmospheres" sounded a lot different in Kubrick's film 2001 than it just has in tonight's Prom. I won't be troubling myself with Mahler's "Songs on the death of children" however.
They are all around
One of my chums was telling me a couple of days ago about the inane plans of her management for the coming year. She asked "Do they really get paid for coming up with idiot ideas like this? How do such morons get to run companies?" Well, I couldn't let that go unanswered, could I?
I too (too) often used to wonder about the morons who end up running things. To the point where I bought and read Robert Hochheiser's "How to work for a jerk" as I found myself working for one at the time. I passed it along to Peter as, what with being a retired chap, I no longer give a toss about workplace moronicityness. I can also highly recommend Norman Dixon's "Psychology of military incompetence" along similar lines. Mind you, Popski put it a lot more succinctly back in the days of his private army: "bullshit baffles brains".
Well, it's 22:12 and Marcus du Sautoy is rabbiting on about maths in the Baroque (or some such). More importantly, the next batch of sour, green plums is safely stewed. But, given the little I have done today, why am I so tired?