2010 — 20 November: Saturday
Unmisty good morning,1 as the kettle boils and Brian Matthew rolls on into his second hour. Time, perhaps, to get dressed and see about stuffing a fresh crockpot of nutritious goodies. Then I shall resume gentle skirmishes with the newest PC. It is, I have to say, very speedy on things like displaying large directories full of my photos. And (for all that I was scornful here) it whips through its malware scanning like a hurricane.
Oddly, having attempted to "hide" many of the sillier fonts that came with it, two of my Acorn-derived applications still seem able to winkle them all out. Investigations will continue.
State of my online world
With thanks to "Network Magic" and the "new, improved" version of Paint (which actually is, for once):
A mixed bag of sweeties: 64-bit Windows 7, Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) 10.6.5, XP Pro (32-bit), and 64-bit Ubuntu 10.10 Server. And twelve processor cores between them, too. Almost as sweet as the repeat of the Phill Jupitus celebration of the wonderful Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.
My first glitch
Now that the stuffed pot of crock is set to thermalise I can take stock (as it were). My attempt to install an elderly program failed at the final hurdle, and kindly invited me to edit the Registry manually. For reasons adequately covered here by John Walker I find that prospect unenticing, and shall cast my net for a workaround. Meanwhile, as it's 12:13 and the snailmail has just arrived, I shall cook myself a sustaining cuppa and then take a look-see.
Nothing too dreadful. Three separate items from dear Mama's bank getting me into a state of full engagement with her financial affairs,2 notification of slightly increased fees for chopping off the talons on the ends of her toes, and a new annual account summary of my combined gas and electricity consumption. For the record, I seem to have got through 17265 kWh of gas and 5671 kWh of juice. If I do so again, and nothing else changes, this is estimated to cost £1,287.69 so I shall be interested to see the savings (if any) from my new central heating system.
I tried, I really did...
... to like IE8, but Firefox is now once more my default web browser. It's 14:49 and nastily grey out there. Lunch is a thing of the recent (re)past and NPR's "Weekend Edition" is the least objectionable radio programme for the time being. Plus, although the built-in search of Win7 is pretty good, it doesn't have the "certain something" of Copernic, so that's going to be my next task. (Source.) As Brian said to me only yesterday, "We likes freebies".
On second thoughts, I shall defer that until I'm sure I've got the data I want more or less where I want it on the BlackBeast.
100 living geniuses?
I unaccountably missed this on its original publication on 28 October 2007. (Mind you, I had a few things on my mind back then.) It is a wonderfully insane list.
All canvas neatly trimmed
Bingo! The rather wonderful Gnu Image Manipulation Program offers a one-mouse-click solution (Image -> Autocrop image) to the problem of that ancient program that wouldn't install on BlackBeast. That oldtimer was, by the way, a 13 year old edition of Macromedia Fireworks that nowadays I was using just for "trimming" the canvas of the A/V system diagram I publish from time to time here. And the cost of an up-to-date edition of Fireworks is on a par with the cost of the entire PC. Rather too much to fork out for just one feature.
My first thought was to load Photoshop Elements (if only I could find the installation CD, of course) as its Big Brother has had a "trim" facility for ages. But my Elements subset either lacks this, or conceals it so well that I can't find it. Up until now, I've been creating a vector artwork diagram in Xara, and then lazily doing a "PrtScn" of the drawing window, popping the captured bitmap from the clipboard into Paint, manually removing the edges of the Xara window, resaving it, then opening the file in Fireworks, trimming it there, and saving it as a GIF. So the process gets easier; I should be able to paste the bitmap into the GIMP, do everything there, and save it directly as a GIF.
My crockpot is whispering to me. It must be time for my evening meal. By some process that escapes me, it's now 18:28 already.
Coincidence? I don't think so...
Seems to me, there's at least one obvious reason my (excellent) film choice tonight — Atom Egoyan's 2009 film "Chloe" I bought three weeks ago — was so very much like the (also interesting) 2003 film "Nathalie" by Anne Fontaine. And both films are a lot less disturbing than the BBC Radiophonic version of the book of revelation. I think I prefer the Aphrodite's Child version on the album "666". The associated PDF file on the BBC page is an intriguing read. So that's Foxit PDF reader also added to the growing set of software on BlackBeast :-)
And so on to Karlheinz Stockhausen...
"Have you ever conducted any Stockhausen, Sir Thomas?"
"No. But I trod in some once!"
As bedtime approaches (it's now 23:43) I've just finished making tentative plans for a walk tomorrow, if weather permits, somewhere near Cheriton and that pub with the deep well. But now it's time to stop fighting with sometimes-ugly software and resume the trials and tribs of young David Copperfield. G'night.