2010 — 30 November: Tuesday
I refuse to read accounts of the "debate" in Toronto between Stage 4 cancer chap Christopher Hitchens1 and trainee Guild Navigator Tony Blair — though the idea of the "great communicator" teaching religion at Yale strikes me as a surreal (not to say emetic) one. No wonder an Ivy League education is so expensive. And such very poor value if that's the quality/cost of their faculty.
It's 09:08, there's a very thin dusting of snow, and my sister-in-law tells me that Big Bro has, in fact, been in Brunei for the past six months. What will he make of retirement, I wonder? Perhaps he could join the lecture circuit. Though would his chosen subject be sky pilots or cattle raising? :-)
Coital vocalisations are...
... as it were, coming up on "Woman's Hour", so I think I'll just nip out to the shops!
My word, it's cool out there. Saw Stephen H and his wife both looking hale in the Waitrose car park. I also left BlackBeast mulling over the transfer of my MP3s from a temporarily locally attached USB 2 hard drive to its own Terabyte of mirrored storage and am amused to note that I've found it a task that actually raised the %CPU figure into (barely) double digits. The drives are chattering quietly away at 25.2MB/second or so with about 4 minutes left. I've also activated and changed the PIN on the debit card I now have for dear Mama's little crock of current account gold. It amuses me less to note that every damned ATM I contend with has a similar but different set of ideas about what constitutes a good user interface. What a pity, then, that none of them gets it right.
It's drifted over into the afternoon and I think I've earned my next cuppa.
Thanks, Mr Postie
As I mentioned some while ago, the first real "date" Christa and I went on in 1974 was to the cinema in Slough where we saw Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man! (my second viewing of this fine film). It (finally) came out on DVD and now I've treated myself to the CD of the soundtrack (which I first had, long ago, on vinyl). It's only 25 minutes, but 25 minutes of Alan Price on brilliant form is worth several hours of coital vocalisations, I suspect. I also got this very early David Bowie compilation album (of his recordings in the late 1960s for the Deram label) having heard "Rubber Band" on BBC 6Music several nights ago and spent far too long trying to recall which Bowie album it was from:
There are some slight signs of snow flakes out there but, since I'm in here, I refuse to worry about it. Time for lunch, methinks. It's 13:06.
HDCP, how I love thee
Having just been told of a firmware upgrade for my original Pioneer Blu-ray player (which now lives with the Fun Guys down towards Bournemouth) I was idly poking around the (Pioneer) web site — as you do — and stumbled across this little gem:
Some Pioneer Plasma customers have experienced a HDCP compatibility message following connection of a Sky HD box to certain Pioneer Plasma screens... The fact that Pioneer may implement a counter measure should not be interpreted as an admission of liability on the part of Pioneer GB Limited...
That's the most wonderful thing I've learned (during my three-year set of skirmishes with this "technology") about the noisome, steaming, unfragrant pile of cack that is HDCP. It afflicts and inconveniences only the hapless, legitimate user. Pioneer's suggested short term measure (use the component connection) is shorthand for "use the standard definition analogue connection and watch your hi-def system in standard2 def". Judging by the array of badly-adjusted flat screen TVs on display in High Street shops up and down our green and peasant gland, Joe Public would be none the wiser.
Hic!
How's this for a combination of two of Big Bro's abiding interests, wine and aviation?
All done with my favourite graphics software package, from Xara, which started out as "ArtWorks" on the Acorn RISC platform nearly 20 years ago and goes from strength to strength. It's extremely slick on the 64-bit six-core BlackBeast :-)
Mercy me, it's already 18:18 so I'd better start getting hungry I guess. It's dark and cold outside. It's light and warm in here. [Pause] Yum. There's a bit more to getting an Apache server working exactly the way I want it to on BlackBeast than currently meets the eye, as it were. I think I shall take a break. It's 20:06 and I could murder a cuppa. Plus, if I don't do the dishes, nobody else will... Turn up the volume, and just consider it valuable pondering time.
I've decided to stick with the Ubuntu web server I know, rather than persevere in trying to tailor Apache to behave itself under Windows on BlackBeast. No point dancing endlessly with ugly software. Indeed, there seems little point in trying to keep my eyes open any longer. It's 22:46 and I'm more than ready for sleep. G'night.