2009 — 1 October: Thursday — rabbits!
Let's start with a very early picture of Christa:
Believe it or not, she was already showing here an expression I can recall her using in adult life. This must have been the very early 1950s, though I don't recognise the drinking fountain or its location.
I deliberately chose to avoid the "evening of death" on BBC 4. I think I've done enough contemplating of mortality to be going on with. In fact, I've most recently been playing a CD of natural wave sounds — claimed to be very therapeutic. I feel like I've been put through the "Desert Island Discs" wringer, having just selected about 200 CDs (actually, nearer 320 or so, as many of the cases are doubles) to keep close at hand in the living room. And relocated all the classical music CDs to that newly-empty chest of drawers under the stairs. Mind you, now that I've been playing with the digital audio output from the iMac I have to say that the result from a (nominal) 320 Kbps LAME-encoded VBR mp3 is well-nigh indistinguishable from a CD's raw WAV file.
One of the acid tests was the track "Private Investigations" from the Love over gold album by Dire Straits. Though how it can now be as old as it is beats me. I remember buying a 12" vinyl single of just that one track. Wonder which spot of landfill that's now in.
G'night.
Still at it
The comments that Gore Vidal's interview has attracted are at least as entertaining (though not always in a good way) as the Grand Old Geezer himself usually is. Source and snippet:
The "War on Terror" was "made up", Vidal says. "The whole thing was PR, just like 'weapons of mass destruction'. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He'd be
cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you're both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination."
Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it's a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word
'conservative' you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They're not, they're fascists.
It's 10:45, still vaguely sunny, and definitely time for breakfast.
Software, heh?
Having just brought my little HP Media PC (the other Linux box) back online, this time up here in the study, I feel I could mildly observe that my three main devices (one each of XP Home, OS X, and Ubuntu — all fully up to date and patched, as of ten minutes ago) could all "do better" at playing nice together across my little LAN. Perhaps the time has come for a tad of standardisation? Alternatively, I could make some lunch, raise my blood sugar level, and be more sanguine. Mercy me, it's 13:09 already.
Rather later
It's 20:14 and I've got half an ear on "Talk of the Nation" while re-downloading and running Cyberduck. I wouldn't (yet) go so far as to say my iMac Snow Leopard system is unstable, but (for example) iTunes will no longer quit, or force quit, and every time I zap its preference list (as advised by one of the self-styled geniuses in the Soton Apple shop this afternoon) it regrows faster than one of the Hydra's heads. And the Beta Cyberduck wouldn't load and run, so I've gone a bit back-level, as it were. I shall post this just to ensure it's working, before resuming in much greater comfort (ie, not squatting on the living room carpet putting a crick in my neck).
That's better.
My usual delight at receiving a new "Ansible" is tempered, as usual, by its obits section. How did I miss the passing of Troy Kennedy Martin on 15th September? (Answer: I gave up the Grauniad, of course.)
Just had a clean bill of health from Steve Gibson's "Shields Up". Very interesting scanning process.
What do you read, my lord?
"Words, words, words." While I was tottering around town in the delicious late afternoon sunlight I somehow stumbled into a bookshop or two. (Actually, I was a man on a mission: to read and absorb the chapter on the (data)Base programme component of OpenOffice in "Beginning OpenOffice 3" without actually buying the blessed thing. Piece of cake.) As for these two; well the Letts was almost irresistible when it was first out in hardback. Now that he's added another five baddies (not unrelated to recent financial idiocy) it's a no-brainer. The Fowler looks like a delightful memoir.
In fact, now that I've browsed his blog I've ordered his "Bryant and May" series. I fancy a few classic detective novels for a change. It's 23:23 and I've actually had the heating on for part of the evening.