2010 — 9 November: Tuesday
It's 07:061 and I've been awake for a couple of hours, immersed in yet another "Sandman" tale. Truly brilliant stuff. I shall be riding shotgun for my main co-pilot later this morning as we ride out to Micheldever for a new pair of tyres for "FiFi" (I assume that's the Fiat). Meanwhile, an early croissant is doing a nice job, and I'm sure I can find room for another cuppa. Is this the Life? :-)
For one surreal moment I thought this was about an extremely luxurious cruise liner, and that the head voodoo doll of the insane "Tea Party" might actually have had a brief flash of rational thought. Not so:
Land of the Free (to publish)
From a recent review of the US edition of a book by Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre:
Sometimes bad science is downright harmful, and in the chapter titled "The Doctor Will Sue You Now," the usually affable Dr. Goldacre is indeed angry, and rightly so. The chapter did not appear in the original British edition of the book because the doctor in question, Dr. Matthias Rath, a vitamin pill entrepreneur, was suing The Guardian and Dr. Goldacre personally on a libel complaint. He dropped the case (after the Guardian had amassed $770,000 in legal expenses) paying $365,000 in court costs.
No trace of that story hereabouts. Curious.
Beating around the...
In a confession probably not extracted by waterboarding torture, it seems Dubya is not a lawyer. Who would have guessed? "It doesn't matter how people perceive me in England. It just doesn't matter any more. And frankly, at times, it didn't matter then," he said. Crikey. So much for that special relationship. Perhaps he thought they said "surfboarding"? How about that lack of WMDs despite their existence being the pretext for a war? "Apologising would basically say the decision was a wrong decision. And I don't believe it was the wrong decision." Like they say, if you're going to tell a lie, make it a whopper. (Source.)
I sent a US President (Ike) a sprig of white heather for luck. I may send this ex-Pres a pretzel for Christmas.
Make no (bare)bones about it...
Chaps need hobbies. So after watching my main co-pilot have two new tyres fitted, and allowing him to treat me to an early sausage and mash lunch at Lillie Langtrey's tea shoppe in Stockbridge on our not exactly linear meander homewards, I nipped down to that Aladdin's Cave aka "Novatech"2 and (having remembered to take my credit card on this occasion) acquired a new toy. Details here.
Without going all geeky, I've upped the RAM to 8GB, thrown in a passively-cooled 1GB Asus ATI Radeon HD4350 graphics card, a matched pair of Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB SATA drives, and a nice LG GH22 SATA DVD re-writer. Should scratch my PC itch for a while, methinks. The (still somewhat) inchoate plan is to slap Ubuntu Desktop on it, and then set about carving a space for either XP or Windows 7 in some form of virtualised sandpit for any applications (and/or legacy hardware) I cannot live without.
Tea, Mrs Landingham. I need tea! It's 15:12 and no longer drizzling.
Later that evening...
I've been reminding myself of the facilities of VirtualBox which was refreshed just a month ago. Now that I finally have a system with (I fondly imagine) enough "umph" (to borrow Christa's term) and enough memory and disk storage, it's time to tidy things up around here. Mind you, I'm still amazed at what's happened to the basic hardware prices — let alone performance — since 1989 (when IBM so kindly bought me that 4MB Acorn A440 RISC machine — details here). Let alone the CP/M Z80 Amstrad system I bought in 1985!
I'm also enjoying Nicky Horne on PlanetRock. When I was a regular listener to him on Capital Radio back in the late 1970s the home computing revolution was barely beginning to twitch here in the UK. Indeed, David Tebbutt even asked me to write some stuff for "Personal Computer World" magazine when he took over as its editor. What a lot has happened since then. Let's do the Time Warp again, shall we? Actually, OS/2 Warp was a pretty decent operating system :-)
21:18 already? Must be time for supper and a cuppa...
Even later
As the witching hour (fast) approaches I can report successful installation of the extra 4GB of RAM, and the graphics card. Sadly, the DVD rewriter (despite being a retail pack that should therefore contain a SATA cable and power connector) contains neither. So my choices are to install only one of the hard drives and nick the other's SATA "set" for the time being — since without a CD/DVD drive I won't be able to load my Ubuntu3 ISO image — or fit both hard drives but beg, borrow, steal, or even buy, the extra connector and power lead I need tomorrow. How very aggravating.
Also aggravating is the way, in the wake of last year's bone infection, my right hand's forefinger top joint makes the whole fiddly job even more fiddly, as it won't bend and lacks strength. Grrr. I'm going to retire for the night before I kick a hole in something out of sheer bloody frustration. G'night.