2010 — 13 May: Thursday
Midnight again already. Flipping heck! Just time to pack the freshly-grilled sausages away into the fridge ready for turning into a sandwich lunch in a few hours from now. Death to nasty bacteria, say I.
Had enough of elections?
Almost!
The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
G'night.
Oh dear...
... although it seems to be working fine now, my new Ubuntu server obviously seemed to have a mini nervous breakdown on initial startup this morning. I would say investigations will continue, but I'd be flying blind and, as I say, it's currently serving web pages like a trooper so I shall tiptoe gently away.
In other news (as of 08:56) it's a gloriously sunny morning, the half grapefruit was jolly wholesome, and the tea is very welcome. I went to bed last night quite deliberately pondering some DIY web picture gallery possibilities and SHTML solutions to prime whatever it is that passes for my subconscious these days, and now have some ideas to explore. But first comes breakfast, the packing of a lunch to munch, and a walk in the unBlack Forest. I'm not on driving duty today, but mustn't keep my chauffeur waiting...
Discord dept.
There is (why am I not surprised?) an amazing lack of responsiveness (from BBC management) to hundreds of articulate, well-reasoned blog postings protesting the proposed (asinine) closure of award-winning, audience-share-up-50% in three months, BBC 6Music here. It cannot be pleasant to be shown up as so thick and wrong-headed, of course, let alone to admit the grotesque blunder, but I suppose the salary1 of a third of a million pounds per year softens the criticism of young Tim Davie...
A tall chap from the land of Edam (is that a font?) has suggested I might enjoy this. I might, did I not have to nip out on an errand or two following a pleasant 6.5 mile ramble around the edges of Minstead. And before what looks like a pending shower. It's 14:16 and — hooray! — my copy of that new Kai Lung has just arrived. It was printed, I note, all of nine days ago! It's amusing to recall that the first edition of the first collection of these droll tales, issued by Grant Richards in 1900 in a print run of 1,000 copies, took (the publisher later reported) a mere 28 years to sell out!
Video nasties?
Mike's lent me a Blu-ray version of Beowulf to watch. The film came out (I gather) while I was otherwise occupied in 2007. The production pedigree is very promising, but he's predicted I will give up within the first 10 minutes2 or so. He's also reported that his NTSC DVD copy of Out of sight is "very soft" compared with his HD DVD version. Though using some of the previously untried video processing options built-in to the Oppo improved matters.
As it happens, I haven't watched this film (I have the same DVD) using the Oppo, nor have I ever felt the need to tinker with any of its video processing (apart from picture brightness) as the Oppo factory defaults and the Kuro plasma defaults are pretty well bang on optimum. So that's another task lined up in the input hopper. First, though, there's a new release of the player's firmware to be installed. [Pause] Done.
Nearly time to...
... stop trying to wrap my head around an over-convoluted subdirectory structure entirely of my own over-complicated making, and nip downstairs to catch "HIGNIFY".