2010 — 27 December: Monday
Well, that's about it1 and I'm off to bed, confident that it's going to be warm and sunny for a change tomorrow :-)
Technically, it's already quite well into tomorrow now, of course, but who's counting? It's only 01:23 after all. G'night.
Nothing to scrape...
... off the car windscreen this morning, as (at 09:11) it's a balmy +1.5C. Still a dull grey sky, though, and Mr Barometer has started a sad decline. But the late, great Kenny Everett is to be heard asking (in his faux posh voice) "Can I say 'bum' on the BBC?" Apparently the "Start the Week" programme has been going since 1970 so there's a spot of navel-gazing going on.
Prufrocked
Having just (10:36) checked both the weather and the traffic,2 I find myself wondering (or do I mean wandering) in the absence of a peach:
Shall I wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach?
There are — isn't it always the way? — a whole slew of more mundane tasks clamouring for my attention, of course. But I find myself curiously tempted.
Despite having observed...
... the relatively clear state of the roads when I nipped out for a few supplies and to warm my cold car up earlier, I let discretion be the better part of Valerie (as Roger McGough so memorably put it) and stayed home to catch up on some of the endless domestic administrivia that just doesn't seem prepared to do itself, as it were. Very boring!
If it stays this warm (+3.5C) for much longer, all the ice on the pavements here will have melted before the next forecast dollop of fluffy white stuff lands on us later this week. I note one of my neighbours currently has his arm in a sling. And my friend Carol in New York is already contending with 18" of the stuff, according to the "news". It's 14:29 which, in my book, is (cuppa) tea time.
If my jaw had been ...
... capable of dropping further (as I listened to this appalling rubbish on our primary national radio news station a few minutes ago) my chin would have been on the floor. I much prefer Arthur C Clarke's 1955 SF short story "The Star". I read that 46 years ago in my 11th SF paperback — "The Hugo Winners" — with its amusing introduction by Isaac Asimov.
Back in the slightly more real world, I mentioned (here) the exorbitant price then being asked for a DVD of Michael Radford's film "White Mischief".3 And (here) my intention to re-record its transmission when it was being shown on BBC4 — it was, after all, a BBC co-production in the first place. However, my new DVD-R has a tendency to freeze about 45 minutes in, so I still wasn't happy (not that I'm any kind of geeky completeist, you understand). So, many months later, the few minutes I wandered the web earlier this afternoon means there's now a much more reasonably-priced DVD copy (with German and English soundtracks) on its way to me from those fine folk a few miles across the Channel in Holland.
"Everything" as dear ol' Dad used to say, "comes to he who waits".
I thought it sounded familar. Precisely one year ago, I was listening to Jerry Goldsmith's atmospheric music from "Chinatown". That very same Words and Music programme is now being repeated as I type. Good ol' cash-strapped BBC?
Just (19:40) back from a swift mercy dash over to Winchester to deliver a couple of DVDs and pick up a stuffed memory stick holding my viewing for tonight: HIGNFY or, to be more precise HIGabmNFY. On with the (Hislop) show.
Having just enjoyed a power cut of 40 minutes or so, I'm left vaguely wondering about how to restart my heating system. At least I knew where my two torches were. We may even have candles somewhere, I guess. Jolly fun. Power came back on at about 21:00 and my Linux server seems to be chugging away quite happily. I've yet to switch BlackBeast back on, but the Gateway XP machine seems OK. I was all set to turn in for the night as, without heat and light then — short of sitting out in the car on the drive with the engine running — my entertainment options are rather curtailed.
Mrs Google to the rescue
Having browsed the online manual, I pressed one button for about two seconds and we have heating and hot water safely restored. This is one helluva improvement over the previous system!
This example tickled me:
Good old Error 404... page gone walkabout.
I provoked it while hunting for a story in the Torygraph in which a minor UK Royal otherwise known as Lord Nicholas Windsor (the Duke of Kent's son, and a new convert to the Pope's gang) is sounding off about abortion "the single most grievous moral deficit in contemporary life" being worse (on his personal moral scale) than that well-known terrorist group. You know... the one that a small but significant proportion of North Americans are convinced their president belongs to (if what I heard Hislop say on HIGabmNFY before the lights went out is accurate).
I wonder if I dare try switching the kettle on yet? Or my A/V system, for that matter. The power's been back on for about 75 minutes. [Pause] Unlike the XP system, BlackBeast spotted that it hadn't shut down normally, and offered me a variety of "safe mode" startup options. I chose the simplest, let it load all the bits it wanted to, then did a simple restart and all was hi-res normality once again (it seems). I also finished watching HIGabmNFY off the memory stick with no apparent ill effects or data loss. And the kettle did its hot water thing. It's now 23:06 and I'm thinking maybe it's time for some sleep.