2010 — 25 November: Thursday
Just about time1 for a feeble little placeholder before the eyelids, which have become curiously heavy, slam together for the next few hours. There's some typically strange music by Ligeti (père) on "Late Junction". And I've just installed "NoScript" on my Firefox browser on the Gateway PC. First thing I had to do was tell it to trust my own web sites, of course. Not that I do, necessarily.
G'night.
Bright, sunny, and...
... frosty. What's not to like? It's 08:31 and listening to rotten news on BBC Radio 3 somehow makes it sound slightly less horrid.
Do we really want this?
Mr. Upson says that 60 percent of businesses could immediately replace their Windows machines with computers running Chrome OS. He also says he hopes it will put corporate systems administrators out of work because software updates will be made automatically over the Web. But the vast majority of businesses still use desktop Microsoft Office products and cannot imagine moving entirely to Web-based software or storing sensitive documents online — at least not yet.
Am I simply being a Luddite in wanting stuff on my own desktop? Or am I annoyed because as I hone my system admin skills their usefulness is being whittled away faster than I can develop them? :-)
I shall go down into Soton and see if I can find myself a new hobby (and a 2011 desk calendar for my kitchen worktop). [Pause] A brief pit-stop after the more mundane supplies run and now (11:39) off I jolly well go again. It's mighty cold out there, but bright and shiny. [Pause] The lunchtime chicken salad tasted all the better for being eaten mere minutes ago — it's now 15:11 and hovering on freezing out there. Hello, Mr Cuppa... I shall call you "drunk"!
Went the day well?
Yep. Not bad, though quite how it's managed to become 18:08 already is a bit of a puzzler. My first adventure (after scraping all the ice off the windscreen) was trying to get my Spanish bank to agree with me that blocking my (day-to-day) use of my current account's debit chip'n'PIN card for the 7 to 10 days that it will take them to replace it (it's again physically splitting) is just not on. They were prepared to concede that it might inconvenience me but, even though I suggested this might be sufficient reason for me to change to another gang of thieves, "there's nothing we can do, sir" was the gist of it. This was after I'd tried to get their damned machine to accept my latest little windfall from Mr ERNIE. A small amount of rain damage had partially erased bits of a couple of the MICR characters — this was interpreted (fixedly) by the machine as the stupid user (me) failing to insert the cheque with the correct orientation.
Brain-dead programmers strike again.
In my shopping trolley
I didn't find a calendar I liked, but I did pick up a replacement (hardback) copy of David Copperfield — my venerable Penguin Classic, which I bought as an apprentice in 1973, and which has travelled to Germany with me more than once, fell apart on me a couple of nights ago and I got fed up of trying to hold it together while reading it. So much for "perfect binding".2 I also found a couple of DVDs...
... I've read two books by Howard Marks, and have heard him on the radio occasionally. He doesn't write quite as well as Robert Sabbag (check out "Snow Blind") but he's amusingly amoral. As for the Glaswegian lesbian soap opera... a small donation will reveal the name of the chap who commended it to me. I was unaware of its transmission as I really do seem to have weaned myself off the stuff they squirt at us by way of popular entertainment. (Besides, I'm a devoted fan of The "L" Word.)
I also studied the specs of Photoshop Elements 9 and Nero 10 (I'm still "on" 5 and 7 respectively) but resisted both. I think the GIMP and Xara between them will do all I need for bitmap and vector art manipulation. Actually Win 7 seems to have got CD and DVD burning down to a fine art, too. Having also leafed through a glorious book of art ("A life in pictures") by Alasdair Gray, that's now on its way from Mrs Amazon at just over half the High Street price, leaving enough spare change to throw in an interesting-looking biography of him by Rodge Glass.
It's cold out there, dark (of course) too, and I reckon it's nearly time for tea.