2010 — 26 November: Friday

To my surprise1 getting my ancient copy of Fireworks 3 to run perfectly satisfactorily under Windows 7 turned out to be a simple matter of a) trawling through the midden of Optional Updates, picking those that claimed to resolve application compatibility issues and b) doing a little Googling to find the hint that "Run as Administrator" was the magic spell. Excellent. No need to grapple with the GIMP's frankly rather odd user interface. Now, if only I could find my installation CD of Photoshop Elements 5 and get that up and running. It's in the house somewhere, but that doesn't really help me much.

As it's now 00:20 (and jolly cold out there, too — I've just checked) I'm going to call it a night. I watched "Mr Nice" and two episodes of "Lip Service" in between delving into "Windows 7 Inside Out" and the washing up bowl. Tomorrow is another day. G'night.

Cool

It's 08:56 and Big Bro has sent over a "Broelman's View" cartoon by Peter Broelman that is right (as it were) up his street. The unfragrant father-son team in "charge" of North Korea are manning a smoking field cannon aimed at Seoul, confident that Australia's threat of retaliation is a bluff... unaware that as they speak a falling Qantas aero engine is about to do a "Donnie Darko" on them. Neat.

It's -4C here. Bright sunshine, too. Yet another neighbour is switching over to a metered water supply but without any disruption (apart from pneumatic drill noise) to my getting in and out of the house. Not that I'm planning any expotitions today: I've unearthed both my Photoshop Elements CD and the dual-platform FileMaker Pro database I bought for the iMac but never got the round tuit for in the wake of Christa's illness. It would be a shame not to try that out on BlackBeast, wouldn't it? Time for my next cuppa, too.

Mr Noisy hole-in-the-pavement has now moved along to the next but one neighbour. I can gloat (a little) having had my own water meter fitted — crikey — back in May 2008. I've also lined up a free cuppa over with Roger & Eileen for my afternoon treat. Photoshop is safely gathered in. Next move will be that database program. I must say, my Win 7 desktop is looking nicely Zen. I shall capture a screenshot of it in due course.

Meanwhile, proof (from just a few minutes ago) of a working BBC BASIC 5.91b system up and running. Not that I make a habit of running this clock on my desktop...

BBC BASIC clock

I do have a sentimental fondness for this ancient programming language, dating right back to my time in Hatfield Polytechnic and their then-new decsystem10. I devoured the original programming manual by John G Kemeny and Thomas E Kurtz that they wrote for their Dartmouth system (1963 or thereabouts). I found a copy in Oxford's Blackwells and devoured it hungrily, cover to cover. The BBC variant on my Acorn RISC PC in 1989 had evolved very impressively, and Richard Russell (click the pic above) has done a fantastic job over many years now in keeping the flames healthy.

That's my fresh air...

... for the day — scraping ice off the see-through bits of the car for quarter of an hour while gently pumping the water meter chaps to see what they're up to :-)

They're basically going round replacing all the stop-cocks that need it in prep for the coming round of mandatory water meter installation. Legislation went through Parliament last year, it seems. So, for once, I was ahead of the curve. Gosh! It's 12:30 and part of today's lunch is now sitting on the kitchen windowsill, slowly clambering up towards ambient.

My working set

Having snaffled yet another small bunch of grapes (I can't ever remember picking any this late in the year before) and while I wait2 for a full security scan to finish and a fresh cuppa to become drinkable (this is the Life, heh?) I think I'm just about ready to declare BlackBeast fit for purpose, as it were. Pinned to the taskbar are the dozen or so key applications I use, in some primitive mimicry of / tribute to the OS X Dock...

Programs

... I'm keeping email off this system — the one thing Thunderbird seems to be incredibly good at is fragmenting a hard drive faster than anything else. I'm still pondering longer-term email client alternatives, and I suppose I may even revert to hosting an email server on my little HPC Media PC Linux box. After all, it's running 24x7 calmly serving up my intranet web pages. The extra work wouldn't kill it.

My chum Brian has already suggested it's time to modernise my choice of programming language, suggesting I investigate something named after a snake that goes in for asphyxiating its lunch before ingesting it. I mildly replied "Have you ever noticed how bigoted people can sometimes seem to be in their proselytisation on behalf of their preferred programming language?"

Nor did I have to asphyxiate my (recent) lunch. But I will have to bestir myself shortly if I'm to snaffle that free cuppa. It's 14:44 and the sky is mostly blue. It's also crept up to a positively balmy +1C on my front porch.

I shall postpone OpenOffice until either I need it or OfficeLibre makes a compelling case. That means no Java on my system so far...

Rather later

I've just done something I last did nearly four years ago, when Christa was still alive...

Switcheroo

Thanks to Mike for reminding me... I've just saved the cost of BlackBeast, it seems. Every little helps.

Over-heating? I think not

Roger put me on to this little utility from the same outfit that makes CCleaner. I'm not quite sure how useful it is...

BlackBeast (not quite cooking with gas!)

... but it's certainly interesting! And it shows the bare bones system was considerably over-cooled as delivered with two large fans on medium speed rather than one on low speed.

  

Footnotes

1  And delight, actually.
2  Less than 15 minutes for over quarter of a million items. No threats found.