2009 — 22 September: Tuesday
I spent much of yesterday sifting through just one (of many) of Christa's "archive boxes" of "stuff". In this case, I found photos of her dating back as far as 1949, our engagement notice in the local Meisenheim newspaper from 14 September 1974, some diaries, and even the English draft of the first letter I ever wrote to her parents, on 4th July 1974. Good grief!
Here's one of my finds:
I also found a small stash of further colour slides that I hope to get scanned in due course. They show Christa and Peter at work in the garden here after I'd "rotivated" the bulk of the builders' rubble out of it so that it more closely resembled a bomb site. Mind you, it now closely resembles a thriving jungle.
The ears have it
After a couple of hours careful listening last night, chum Brian professed himself "quite taken" by the new audio kit. I also discovered — when I'd hooked up the plasma screen to the iMac once again, and the iMac was already in its screen-saver mode — that the screen saver images on the plasma didn't match the ones on the iMac's own screen. Since I'd just pointed the screen saver to the DVD artwork directory, this meant that we could see twice the number of pieces of cover artwork than expected while listening to the CD of Jacqueline du Pre's performance of the Elgar Cello Concerto.
G'night.
There's a first time...
... for everything, and everyone. This morning (and it's 11:16 already) I've set about some autumnal cleaning with a vengeance. The green bin is full of back numbers of Private Eye, New Statesman, Scientific American (thanks, Len!) and a couple of years of Linux Format, etc. Breakfast was so long ago, I fear "lemonses" is rapidly approaching. Plus there's Phill Jupitus on Bill Watterson's whimsical "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip in quarter of an hour.
I've only fired up this PC for long enough to make sure it still works after I'd been shovelling so much dust around. I shall be plumbing in the new USB hub shortly and (I hope) simplifying a morass of dusty cables. I think I may now reload XP on my smaller HP Media PC, too. It's a perfectly capable number cruncher (dual core 64-bit AMD of some description) and has been displaced from the living room by the iMac.
Glad you liked this picture of Christa, Lis, and thanks for saying so. I'd carbon date it to about 1963. It's a studio shot from Bad Kreuznach, and Mutti and Vati probably had it taken before Christa's High School exchange year in Nebraska. Sadly, she doesn't seem to be around anywhere for me to ask her. Maybe she'll turn up when I've finished my burst of Dyson activity.
Ciao for now. [Click.]
He's back!
With a nice, new keyboard, a directly-connected mouse, a new seven-port USB hub installed and raring to go, a largely dust-free environment, and three DVD-Rs filled with archived material from the Panasonic Freeview PVR (a useful background task as it was being carried out in so-called real time). It's 16:36, lunch is at least as distant a memory as breakfast was earlier, and it's got to be time for my next cuppa. I've emptied the mini-Dyson three times, and will have to tackle its bigger sibling soon. (I told you it would come in handy, Christa!)
Just brought the scanner back online, so I can reproduce that engagement announcement I mentioned. I also found a postcard I wrote home in July 1984 while on a business trip to Dallas trying out a draft of the first CICS Application Programming Primer on a set of batch COBOL programmers, under the late Bob Yelavich's eagle eyes. I'd better keep that to myself, however, as it was a little candid.
