2010 — 5 January: Tuesday
If I'm to get to the dentist (yuk) in time, I'd better get some sleep... now.
G'night.
Is there anything...
... nicer than a cold, frosty morning and a dental date? Of course there is! It's 08:16 and breakfast ahoy.
I must admit, the nervousness with which I attend Dr Fang is as nothing compared to the nervousness with which I drive around on well-frosted roads. It's a mere -6C out there and surprisingly busy, too. After filling a small hole,1 my next task is to fill the food shelves ahead of the blizzard heading our way. It's 09:36 and the temperature soared by a whole degree while I was out being gently drilled. Still not quite sandals and shorts weather, though, is it?
Hibernation still strikes me as a good idea. Waitrose was full, but not all of its shelves. Still, it's not snowing yet, though I note the barometer is on its way down. Doubleplus ungood.
I remarked recently on the tendency for errors to occur in the media. Here's a very neat encapsulation of the same phenomenon within the Science News Cycle over at "PhD".
Old boilers
It's no surprise to learn that my venerable central heating boiler is (at 29 years old) "G-rated", though I had to dig a little to find a definitive list. So, my "household" is one in about 3,500,000 heh? The guvmint says the average remaining lifetime of such boilers is six years. Wonder if that would see me out, as it were?
Finally...
... after being so freaked out by the BBC's "extreme weather" warning that I made my second supplies run of the day, I can now (14:23) relax with a cuppa and a couple of globes of fruity Vitamin C, listening to the magnificent Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor by ol' "Sugar" Beet, and sadly contemplating the way in which Saint Pilling has just neatly expressed the dilemma of the programmer in a moribund market:
What I meant is that Ovation Pro, is on the same path as Kunzle cakes and Callard and Bowser's butterscotch. Well loved, but not by enough.
However much of my limited time I put in, the project will not survive. It is perhaps a mistake to do nothing when you can only do a little, but that is the situation.
I think the best thing would be for me to find something else to do, and OP to become an open source project, but I can't bring myself to give away all the years of work until I
find something else.
Even I remember Kunzle cakes — and the state of some of my teeth may well reflect that! Mind you, dear Mama (who also had a very sweet tooth and adored butterscotch) had lost all her gnashers a decade or so before she was my age today.
If only...
... web fonts could be as attractive as any of my DTP options on the Acorn nearly 20 years ago. I've been spending the afternoon looking into the wealth of activity around the re-introduced support of "@font-face" in CSS. There's a superb summary of many of the issues (as you'd expect) from Jeffrey Zeldman and one very interesting-looking solution available here.
Meanwhile, I expect I shall continue to plough my lonely little furrow (a phrase I don't believe I've ever used in all my many years as a writer) on this web site, sticking to a tiny subset of supposedly "web-safe" fonts and as simple a layout as I can manage.
Later
It's 18:46, the meal is digesting, the snow has been holding off so far. Dishes to be done, and time for another cuppa.
I thought the rain had gone quiet. There's now a thin white coating out there — at 20:03 — and I've just been reading the advice on emergency kits from Hampshire Constabulary. Fingers crossed.