2009 — 12 September: Saturday
It may be just under 24 years ago (November 1985, to be exact) but I still wonder whatever happened to that favourite "lumberjack" shirt of mine. I harbour a nasty suspicion that it got turned into a duster or two when my back was turned. She'd been trying to get me to throw it out for years:
The happy couple, November 1985
G'night.
Time to start stuffing...
... the assembled contents into the next crockpot extravaganza. All those tasty calories. Yum. It's 08:21, the sun is shining, and "Sounds of the 60s" is blasting throughout the house. Cool.
Merciful heavens. That fine haven of fact-checked splendiferousness (the Economist's sibling) has — just — got around to a book I bought back in December 1990. It's attracted a moderately interesting, and perpetually truthful, comment:
The Kindle edition of my memoir was created using old files that included uncorrected typos from the first edition. Although the errors had long ago been corrected in subsequent paperback printings, the person charged with sending the PDF to Amazon managed to dig up the oldest possible version. So, as long as there are people involved, I think errors will remain.
One of my spookier party tricks throughout my involvement with publications was the ability to take a shipment fresh from the printer, open a volume at random, and be sure I was on a page with a typo. Particularly annoying when it was one of my books, of course.
BBC fixes page — shock horror
So it wasn't my browser after all. "My" BBC page is now beautifully sparse once again, just how I like it. No apology, of course. Or none that I can be bothered to go looking for. It's 09:43 and the crockpot is well embarked on its delicious journey (I hope). I observe that one or two of the songs during the last hour or so have still proved capable of provoking what, in grimmer times, I would refer to as a wobble. What can I say? Christa was such a huge chunk of my life...
Ever onward, heh? Now I see we've just lost Larry Gelbart. I still enjoy "A funny thing happened on the way to the forum"; it's so beautifully constructed. But who would want to steal art by Andy Warhol? I stand by my earlier comment.
Why am I unsurprised to learn that the "Payments Council, which oversees the efficiency of bank payments, admits there's nothing in the banking code about how errors like this can be dealt with". Shudder. This is one of my banks they're talking about, too.
Audible improvement
I made a spur of the moment decision to clamber into the car and nip down to pick up the speaker cables I'd ordered for the main front pair from Audio-T. That was at about 11:45, I guess. It's now 15:38 and I've only recently stopped listening to various bits and pieces. Mind you, I grabbed a hasty sausage and cheese sandwich, a cuppa and a couple of fresh oranges at some point. I also offered my neighbours to meet half the cost of repairing our little bit of shared front wall. I hadn't noticed a thing, but it seems a teenage idiot on a push-bike managed to knock some of it down and Mrs Next Door reassembled the bits without using any cement!
I have to admit, banana plugs are a vast improvement. But £160 for a total of eight metres still makes my eyes water. Though not to the extent that biwiring would, of course.
I've just finished...
... scanning the last piece of DVD cover artwork ("Zulu", in case you wondered). Next task is to explore the recesses of the loft to track down the few items that seem to have slipped between the cracks somewhere. That's not going to be much fun. It's 19:49 and the evening is now my oyster. Time, at last, to upgrade the iMac. Mind you, I've another two large lumps of software (iTunes 9 [85 MB] and security patches [93.6 MB]) before I feel safe in kicking off the Snow Leopard. And I only updated the level of Java a couple of days ago. So, at 20:23, while that lot downloads perhaps I should treat myself to a soothing cuppa first?
As of 21:58 I appear to be in possession of a working Snow Leopard, complete with its first batch of further updates (that is, 10.6.1 already). All seems to be, as it were, intact. Now it really is time for that cuppa. Plus the dishes, of course. Boswell's "Life of Johnson" has been slipping agreeably by during the process.