2010 — 28 June: Monday
I've been reduced to tears of gratitude on hearing further of my nieces' achievements with their grandmother up in the Midlands yesterday... It's 07:32 and I appear to have slept like a log despite the heat. Where's that cuppa?
Beagle board
Get thee behind me, nostalgia!
Mind you, I did run Virtual Acorn A5000 for nearly a year on one of my Windows boxes while I eased myself gently but firmly away from my favourite platform a few years ago. And it was very useful to be able to do so.
Emulation always reminds me of a lovely cartoon used in a software ad for some library management software. I spotted it in a trade rag in June 1986 on the day I began my sixth year with IBM. It may have been a Charles Addams original, but had obviously been given a new caption. The scene is a graveyard on a wet day. The widow and her two kids are staring somewhat dolefully at a fresh, open grave. At their side, in a smart coat (and, doubtless, equally smart dark suit) is a typical DP management type who is saying "I know this may be an awkward time, but do you recall him ever mentioning source code?"
Classic, on several levels.
"Weeds" comes to life
Where there's money...
Forget the furtive transactions that have defined American pot dealing since the dawn of the dime bag. The best of Boulder's dispensaries display their product in the sort of glass cases
found in jewelry stores or high-end bakeries.
The people behind those cases, known as "budtenders," like to think of themselves as sommeliers, although the names of the strains for sale will never be confused with chardonnay: Bubble
Gum, Sour Kush, God's Gift, Grand Daddy Purp and Blue Skunk.
Budtender, heh? Well, why not?
Unshiftlessness
That's quite enough fun for one morning. I'm going off the air as I shift more stuff around including, but by no means limited to, network cables and switches. I need to be as ready as possible for phase II of the re-flooring since that, in turn, gates my next set of tidying-up. It's jolly useful (I must finally admit) having a car's worth of garage into which I can stuff stuff without it costing me an arm and half a leg per month. I could wish it were cooler weather, though! Still, at least I've got all the waterworks back online / onstream and can shower ad lib. (Softened water makes for a very slippery soaping process, I find.)
It's 11:08 and I may yet have to make a supplies run, too. We shall see. [Pause] Network back? Check. How about lunch? I'm starving. Must have been the unusually early start — better not say "kick-off". It's now 12:18 or thereabouts and still warming up out there.
Whoops! I was actually trembling. Cut it a bit fine there. Nothing that can't be fixed by the swift ingesting of a roast chicken sandwich with tomatoes and plain crisps. Yum. And a cuppa, of course. And a pair of plums. Now, remind me which idiot around here plugged the ADSL modem's wall-wart into the wall socket in Peter's room instead of using a power strip? Erm, that would be me, sah! Well, fix it, so you can park the in-house server there too for the time being. Roger, wilco. Stop being silly.
A lovely pair of tracks by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra (from the 1987 compilation "Angels in the architecture") as I take a brief break from shifting stuff, to contemplate spending two years engineering a pop-up book. Source and snippet:
"I nearly created a political incident, because I almost missed one of the magnets," Sanders says. In the underground version, this magnet is made up of 5.5 miles of wire, but on paper it's practically imperceptible. "It's very skinny, but it's there."
I remember very well how the entire family enjoyed the Haunted House. Jonathan Miller, on the other hand, missed the obvious pop-up in his 1984 "The Facts of Life". Both are still lurking on a shelf somewhere hereabouts...
If you squint...
... you can see a tiny bit of the side of my house in one of the photos of my neighbour's house, now offered for sale here. I have to say, the photographer used a wider angle lens than I have ever possessed :-) I can also pinpoint the date of construction to better than "1980's" (sic). It was finished in July 1981 (since I was here to see the original owner Bob move in).
"Wivout havin' hardly done nuffin'..." next time I take note, it's 18:41 and I'm hungry again. I've hooked one of the scanners up temporarily to do some catching up. It's horribly hot again — really not my preferred weather. Mind you, I suspect Peter's Battersea flat is even hotter. Having just revisited the Jon Mark / Johnny Almond Band, I thought I'd better cheer myself up with "A momentary lapse of reason" though quite how this fine Pink Floyd album1 can already be 23 years old completely baffles me.