2010 — 4 June: Friday
I found this 1972 curiosity among Christa's books yesterday. I suppose if I spotted a paperback by "David Mounce" I might well buy it, but this one dates back to her radical firebrand student days so it may well have been bought for some less whimsical reason — nothing whatsoever to do with me!
I'm ashamed to say I have absolutely no idea what "Problem 218" was, or is1 (for all I know it's still a thorn in the German side somehow). She never mentioned it to me, however.
Now that "Late Junction" has wound gently down, it's once again time (01:23 or so) for some sleep. I must say, I enjoyed the first two episodes of True Blood season two, even if it's almost exactly a year since I watched season one and the action has resumed, two weeks on, rather in at the deep end. My odd memory means I recall it as vividly as if it were just yesterday — for example, Sookie's brother Jason remains as amusingly thick as ever :-)
G'night.
Sunny and warm start
Perfect, in fact, for a seaside picnic. But I still have some prep left for the plumbing so it's "no go" I fear. 09:58 and counting. Breakfast, perhaps?
Come up and see my etchings...
One of my (myriad) background tasks, as time, energy, and inclination permit, is a better solution to the satisfactory on-demand display of all my DVD cover artwork. The hard work, scanning all 3,000 or so of the blasted things and processing them into uniform 1080-pixel height images for an optimal fit on the plasma screen, is all done. But I still keep the physical artwork in a series of folders in the living room, and space there is in ever-diminishing supply. (A curious paradox of this relatively recent single state of mine.)
At the moment (as I demonstrated to my visitor Brian last night) I can simply fire up the iMac's screen saver, pointing it to the folder containing all the JPEGs and Robert is, more or less, your uncle. But that's just a decoratively random display, of course. In the past, I used the cross-platform "JAlbum" gallery generator, but I found it rather tedious re-generating galleries, and quite tricky to integrate the "skin" I was using with my overall website look'n'feel. Besides, lots of visitors were nibbling away several gigabytes a month at my server bandwidth nicking all these copyright images. So my first move was to retreat behind my firewall.2 It's my optimum second move that is now the background task.
Brian was inspired (he tells me) by my demo to sort out a solution to DVD screenshows, and now claims to have a 50% perfect solution:
I have the hi-def artwork direct from the DVD Profiler site in some obscure folder inside Ubuntu's Wine windows environment infrastructure that contains my database — so I made a symbolic link from that folder to something more sensible and then I instructed my PS3 media streamer to serve pictures from that folder and voila a really quite nice screen display.
Why only 50% perfect you ask? Unfortunately the DVD Profiler folder contains both front and back scans so I actually get all the rear cover art as well — I would prefer just the front cover. It is easy for me to tell front from back, there is an 'f' or 'b' suffix on the filename (before the '.jpg' suffix). Getting 3rd party software to filter on this might be a challenge :-(
Don't ask the hoops I had to jump through before discovering how to make a symbolic link to a folder with spaces as part of the name — what 'effin cretin in Microsoft dreamed up "My Documents" etc?
I wouldn't dream of asking such a crass question. It's on a par with "why stick us with 8-digit filename and 3-digit file type extension for all those years" Mr Microspit?
As I stuff...
... my 130th carton, it occurs to me that this has been a very "cleansing" process. (Not that anything much has been cleaned, technically.) De-cluttering the house, even though only temporarily, seems to have had a similar effect on my psyche. I have the first chance since I moved here in mid-1981 to take a cool calm look around and reconsider how I might now wish to organise things. I suspect the first exercise after the dust from the plumbing has settled will be rather more wall-shelving here and there. It's actually very nice to have the carpets almost clear of "stuff". Although I think the carpets — which all date from 1987 — are now themselves on the "endangered" list as I much prefer the vinyl floor covering we fitted in our bedroom after the second of our two waterbed disasters.
It's 12:47 and getting jolly warm out there. Not, in fact, a good day for a walk. However, I've had to defer my usual free cuppa and chat over with R&E as they're otherwise occupied this afternoon. I shall just have to fire up the Dyson instead. I wonder where the Dyson is these days?
Back from the warehouse and the tip...
... where I left Christa's laser printer fax machine (which paid for itself many times over) I'm thinking "It's time to get some food for the weekend" but not before a reviving cuppa and a shot of this gorgeously colourful creature. I wish you could smell it, Christa! The effects of your green thumbs are lingering on, it seems. Don't click on the picture unless your broadband is now working, Lis:
I think I shall have a chocolate biscuit in your memory :-)
I'm not sure...
... quite why I find this sort of stuff (about choosing a video colour space, for example) so unhealthily fascinating. But it's clearly-written and beautifully laid out. Also (dammit!) it told me stuff I didn't know but had never properly researched.
It's 18:53 and powerfully warm up here as I listen to the "News Quiz" while gently digesting my recent evening meal. I have a fan running, but it merely blows warm air around, of course. I bet Junior's flat in Battersea is even warmer.
I'm ripping the most recent set of incoming CDs to MP3 format before the accumulated pile goes critical and topples over, and/or disappears in what I'm confident in predicting will be the state of chaos about to engulf me here in Technology Towers, while listening to NPR's "Science Friday" and idly wondering what sort of music show Tom Ravenscroft (DJ John Peel's son) is going to come up with on BBC 6Music later tonight.
Forty years on
No, not the marvellous Alan Bennet play!3 Straining my tired old eyes over the 2009 notes regarding that wonderful album "Lizard" from an impossible 40 years ago:
Within the corpus of Crimson albums, Lizard is, historically, one of the least popular — if we are to rely on royalty statements for the numbers (NB but best not to rely on royalty statements for very much at all, including numbers and royalties). *
* A current distributor and Lizard fan notes that in recent years sales of the album no longer fall behind other KC catalogue albums & are now closer in quantity to those of its chronological near contemporaries Island and In the Wake of Poseidon.
I eagerly await the 40th anniversary remastering and release of both those fine albums.
Later
It's a little weird to think, while listening to some excellent music (and some naff) presented by young Mr Ravenscroft, that in 1971 (while living in what was then a little hamlet called Meldreth just inside the border of Cambridgeshire) I was listening to an evening concert on BBC Radio 2 introducing the world to a performance by Pink Floyd of their new album "Meddle" (including, if you please, drummer Nick Mason's "vocal debut" on One of these days [I'm going to cut you into little pieces]) with John Peel doing the chat. How Time flies, heh? I had to wait for far too many years to catch a re-broadcast in stereo (the local relay transmitter was still only FM mono at the time).