2010 — 13 December: Monday
Before you know it1 it's 01:26, -1C outside, and just time for a night cap. But I've already sorted out a lunch companion for a few hours from now. Progress, heh... One of the evening's films was a fascinating documentary ("A Mother's courage") about an Icelandic woman seeking help for her young autistic son.
Despite appearances...
... the fact that it's still only -1C out there now (08:36) in the slight mist means the car's glass bits were only thinly coated with slush rather than fully glaciated. So I've given them a quick once-over after fortifying myself with a cuppa. I have to nip out for some supplies this morning, have a lunch date, an evening visit from Peter's g/f (meal status / requirements uncertain) and should probably fit in a trip to the care-home at some point. Plus, as an email from Carol reminds me, I too have done the square root of nothing whatsoever by way of preparation for the onrushing horrid festive spasm.
Normality reigns there, then.
The admin wheels have...
... evidently fallen off the part of the UK "justice" system that Peter's g/f is currently contending with. The case is now reset to mid-April which has clobbered her intended evening visit. As she's currently in Bognor I told her to go home. Still, at least they enjoyed a weekend trip to Bruges, though Peter has yet to watch the film "In Bruges". KBO.
It's nowhere near as sunny as yesterday, but not too grim. Time: 11:06. Breakfast? yep Supplies? yep Emailed NPR to tell them their signal has disappeared? yep
I'd been wondering what's causing the occasional quite long delays in saving edited files back to BlackBeasts' RAID disks. It only struck me yesterday that it's the fact they spin themselves down to save power — hence the "green" in their model name. Silly boy.
Ignoring the typos...
... this is one of the neatest descriptions I've yet found about the difference between the various DVI connections between graphics card and monitor display.2
I've been trying to find out if my relatively cheap little graphics card in BlackBeast is actually capable of higher resolution than 1920x1200. There's a line in tiny print on the box that (life size, until you click on it) implies it is...
... whereas the web site is altogether less clear on the point. Of course, whether I can both find, and afford, a larger, higher-resolution screen remains to be seen. They are rather thin on the ground.
That said, Len helped me find this tasty-looking morsel after our lunch. He also straightened me out on my misunderstanding about where the term "green" came from. All it took was a minor tweak to the hard drive power saving settings that Win7 offers. Cool.
Apparently, the Governor...
... of the Bank of England, no less, feels I should be saving more and/or working longer. Well, sunshine, I'll consider that after you've hung all the bankers from the "casino" departments of those wonderful institutions that needed so little regulation until the financial bubble went "pop".
Horrid local news
My ex-neighbour, back just for the day, has been contending with a plumbing disaster. Some time during the last three weeks a power shower connector in the loft came adrift and water has been, as it were, finding its own level since then, taking with it much of the upstairs ceiling, soaking down walls and into carpets, and then moving on downstairs — utterly ghastly. His insurance is OK for much, but not all, of the resulting mess, poor chap. It occurs to me that water is just about the nearest thing we have to a universal solvent if you give it long enough. The fact that the house was unoccupied didn't help, of course.
He's now on his long drive back up to Hull. And I'm about to do something about a meal. It's 19:25, looks nastily misty, and feels cold out there. I'm in full-on batten-down-the-hatches mode for the rest of the evening, I think.
I've just invented...
... a new drink, though I suspect it wouldn't be to everybody's taste, and it looks very much like Christa's favourite: the ghastly Campari and soda. It's a splosh of my "damson brandy" mixed with tonic.3 Quite disgusting. No, strike that: utterly disgusting. It's 23:18 and I have a potentially long day ahead of me tomorrow, kicking my heels while waiting for a TNT van to arrive, and magic away my broken bits of several bookcases. Such good fun.