2011 — 5 January: Wednesday
They've just played "Baker Street" on BBC 6Music. As I mentioned,1 Christa and I both enjoyed the music of Gerry Rafferty. Ho-hum. In other news, at least I have a fresh cuppa. It's 08:33 and a vaguely bright sky with hints of warning pink. Above freezing, too.
By the way, which one's Pink?
Just been reading about the trading difficulties of High Street gouger HMV (their in-store prices are generally a very bad joke indeed). And I speak as one who bought hundreds of CDs from them in the 1980s.
The sky is now almost cloudless and there's a bright thing up there, too. Cool.
Malicious thumbnails?
Something else to worry about. What an ingenious species we are, to be sure. (Source.)
I must say, this cracked me up:
As always, we encourage Internet users to follow the "Protect Your Computer" guidance of enabling a firewall, applying all software updates and installing
anti-virus and anti-spyware software. Additional information can be found at Security at Home.
Happy New Year -
Angela Gunn
Sr. Marketing Communications Manager, Trustworthy Computing
Mind you, there are catches all over the place. Not only have I — once again — crashed my TextPad edit session by performing a paste into Paint,2 but I can now see that teleporting is fraught with gotchas:
I mean, don't you just hate it when teleporting leaves you hanging? (From page 99 of the user guide for Version 4 of VirtualBox.)
Brrr!
Having just nipped briefly out to pay in last month's beneficence from Mr ERNIE and rob one of my banks (it's my shout for lunch today) I can report that it's cold, has completely clouded over, and Mr Postie left me some further goodies. It's 11:26 and Mozart is still battering away on this 12-day BBC Radio 3 orgy of notes (some more memorable than others). [Pause] And an email from 'technicolor' suggests I'm to be the lucky recipient of the 12,793rd replacement DVD of "Inception". It will be amusing to see how far the numbers have gone up by the time they respond to my request for the second replacement.
Oops!
A careful reader has (quite correctly) lambasted my opening sentence. I can only plead semi-consciousness at the time I wrote it. I was just muttering "Come on, Len, I'm getting hungry" when he drove on to my drive. So now it's 15:19 and the tum is nicely filled for another couple of hours by the finest local sausage and mash the "Bridge" had to offer. It's cold and drizzly out there. Very nasty, in fact. Batten down the hatches, Mrs Landingham. There could be another cold snap on the way. Oh, and make me a cuppa while you're at it, would you, please?
Done. Thanks!
I'm listening...
... in, frankly, unamused amazement, to the astonishing assertion (being broadcast by the UK's national radio news) that some young female will, in a couple of months from now, be driven by car to a large building dedicated to an imaginary creature, will undergo there some form of ritual, and will be driven away after that in a vehicle of glass, thus marking her metamorphosis from a "commoner" to a "royal". Perhaps I'm joining dear Mama on that path strewn with lost marbles?
Audio shenanigans
I want to extract the stereo audio soundtrack from my (signed!) Tim Minchin "So F***ing Rock" DVD of his May 2008 concert at London's Bloomsbury theatre. Simple enough, yes?
- Rip the DVD to my hard drive, using DVD Decrypter in IFO mode to produce one, stonking great, VOB file from all the smaller ones originally on the DVD
- Extract from said stonking file the rather less stonking audio track, using EVOdemux
- Discard the unwanted video file and the unwanted Dolby 5.1 file
- Play the remaining Dolby stereo .mpa file using VLC media player
So far, so good. But what I'd really like to do is convert the semi-stonking .mpa file (a healthy 178MB) into a series of separate mp3 files so I can feed them into my giant iPod. "Actually", says Mike, "you can probably do it in two steps — converting it to linear PCM, and then re-encoding that to mp3." Analogue audio was so much simpler... Now, where did I put my copy of Nero?
It's 20:41 and I've played at the PCs long enough, I think. I'm (almost) sure I can find a film to watch that I haven't seen before :-)
I was right:
Good choice! [Pause] Unlike the supposedly unrestricted shareware audio format converter I downloaded, installed, and ran, which then said "I'll only convert the first 3 minutes of any files until you pay up!" It has been expunged. Time for a supper cuppa. And to read this (always amusing) lady. Source and snippet:
I have the distinct impression that being, if not happy, then grimly amused will be one of the lower-cost items we need to get us through the next 12 months of support slashing, book-burning, rioting, outrage and attempts to divert our attention with shiny things. Are there any more royals who could get married? Is there a long-running soap opera that hasn't suffered mass casualties and apocalyptic emotional trauma? Could the few, loveable survivors get married? Could said survivors front populist campaigns to generate massive phone-in votes for new bills that favour the reintroduction of trial by ordeal, serfdom and the 24-hour projection of Sky News on to the surface of the moon? I suspect that if we don't laugh — and come up with some imaginative ways of saving ourselves — then our only other options will tend towards tears and self-loathing. And, as a Scot, I can confidently state that both become extremely tedious extremely quickly.