2010 — 1 December: Wednesday — rabbits!
December again already? How is that possible?1 Ho hum. The cheerful chappie on BBC Radio 3 has just urged me "if I can" to keep warm. My cuppa will help. There seems to be a light dusting of solid phase H2O out there, and I shall eventually find out if the dawn comes up — Mandalay fashion — like thunder as it's a rather early 07:07 and still dark outside. Yawn.
Where is Mandalay? I expect Kipling knows.
File infractions
A badly part of yesterday evening was spent tracking down and repairing around fifty image files (of DVD artwork scans) from which bits had fallen off during their network transfers around my little LAN. Once a JPEG has dropped a bit or two it generally renders itself invisible, reporting either that it is "too large" for the Preview viewer (whose behaviour under Win7 is just sufficiently different from ditto under XP to irritate) or simply corrupt. Quite why it remains possible to generate a working thumbnail nonetheless must remain one of Microsoft's little Mysteries.
What jolly fun. All I'm trying to do is map the local Apache server I'm running on my Gateway PC to the drive on BlackBeast where I now wish to locate all my web files. (Probably better not to ask why... but — as I'll be running the Gateway for my email and one or two other "legacy" XP bits'n'pieces — I see no reason not to keep its local Apache service ticking over. I believe I should only need to change the two references in its httpd.conf file to "DocumentRoot" so that they point to the shared, mapped, subdirectory on BlackBeast rather than the corresponding subdirectory on the Gateway. It's obviously not quite that simple, but far less obvious exactly what is making Apache unhappy.)
Time (08:13) for some breakfast and a further ponder. [Pause] After casting an increasingly-jaundiced eye over the latest (underwhelming) revelations dribbling out of the diplomatic cables. Contrast the NYT's coverage with that of the Grauniad. I wonder what "Private Eye" will have to say.
Guess who's just found a rather nifty folder synchronising tool? (Allway Sync) Guess who's having trouble kicking off its automatic synchronisation? (Doesn't work with "some" network drives, I now learn.) No matter, I've learned a lot in the last few hours about networks and drive mapping that I didn't know (or understand) before. I've also learned just how cold a mere -2C feels on the ungloved hands when there's an ungentle zephyr blowing while I scrape the frozen snow off the windscreen. That's my fresh air for the morning. It's 09:54 but that dawn is well concealed behind dull grey clouds.
High noon
Back from a brief, but refreshing, blast of further fresh air caused by a letter from my optician. So that's where I shall be bright-eyed and early tomorrow. It was still only -2C. When I asked the attractive young receptionist in her pelmet skirt whether she didn't find it just a little short for this weather she smiled and said "No pain, no gain!" That's the spirit. Lurking behind this innocent verse (if you choose to click on it) is a...
... lovely little Eric Gill sketch that seems appropriate. It's a 1925 pen and water colour that (as of 1981) lived in the University of Texas, Austin, of all places. I scanned it from the chapter "The excess of amorous nature fertilizes the spiritual field" in Malcolm Yorke's 1981 biography2 of this fascinating artist.
It's 13:57, lunch has been lunched, and I'm listening (not for the first time) to a chap talking about the coming revolution in "video on demand" and the convergence of the TV and the PC. Until there's anything worth watching I shall stay calm and carry on...
Next thing I know...
... it's nearly time to do the rounds with the curtains and blinds upstairs. Where does it go? On that topic, and given that this is now the fifth time 1st December has rolled around since I was required to attend the IBM Hursley Lab, let's just recap on those past days:
- 2006: booking a retirement dinner, arranging some radiator flushing, and then DVD shopping in Fopp
- 2007: rambling up Saint Catherine's hill with Mike
- 2008: rambling with Mike and chipping a tooth
- 2009: visiting Ian in Bordon the day his boiler packed up
So it seems I should have been out and about and/or on a walk, but it strikes me as a bit cool for that. How about a cuppa, Mrs Landingham? It's 16:29 after all.
Little Steven's Underground garage
Always worth a listen! (Link.) And a jolly good way of cheering up a chap after a chap turned over his kitchen calendar a few minutes ago and immediately spotted Christa's upcoming birthday later this month. Hell's Teeth. [Pause] Another reliable mood-lifter is the monthly Ansible newsletter:
Geoff Ryman (in the bar): 'How come I can remember the phrase "nominative aphasia" but I can't remember anybody's name?'
Having transferred quite a lot of my digital life over to BlackBeast I'm now letting the Copernic Desktop Search tool do its merry indexing thing on the whole shooting match (yes, I remembered to add file type ".shtml" this time, too) while I contemplate doing something about my evening meal. It's 19:20 and some warning pangs are starting up. Still, that's the beauty of reheating a dollop of crockpot — prep time is minimal. That's my sort of cooking. Zero points for visual style, maybe, but full marks for taste and nutrition. Glancing at the status window on the other desktop, I see BlackBeast's 47,570 indexed documents are tagged with 665,019 keywords. Giving it full scope to drive the six cores speeded up the task considerabubble, too.
And (inevitably) some harder thought a bit later saw me clearing out and re-building the index, considerably better aligned with what I will be wishing to search. And very considerably faster. It's now a mere 2,924 documents, tagged with 124,404 keywords. For that, I think I deserve my next cuppa. It's 21:56 and about -2C out there. Yuk.