2011 — 12 January: Wednesday
A wandering PC1 that leaves me wondering. KB976902 seems to be important — "Install this update to enable future updates to install successfully on all editions of Windows 7... This update may be required before selected future updates can be installed. After you install this item, it cannot be removed." — agreed?
So why wasn't it preselected like the other two on this moist and uniformly grey-looking morning? Still, it all seems to have worked. Tea, Mrs Landingham. I need tea.
This is seriously cool.
Back to Earth
Having broken my fast, I have several pairs of letters I now need to draft on behalf of dear Mama. One each for if I can get her to sign and if I can't. This also means biting the bullet and installing OpenOffice on BlackBeast. And Java, of course. [Pause] Well that only failed when, having created an Oracle account as part of the registration, my invitation to sign in to it failed with an invalid login despite my using precisely the details I'd just supplied. It's a shame, but it seems I won't therefore get a flood of marketing material.
The music goes round and round in my head
There's a nice piece on the late Shel(don) Silverstein here. His album "Freakin' at the Freakers' Ball" is a particular favourite of mine. I love "The Man Who Got No Sign", not least for the way he uses a koto (and rips off a Japanese nursery2 melody).
What a difference a day makes...
I found a list of eleven novels in which, essentially, only one day elapses. It would take me a bit longer than eleven days to read them, however, as I have long regarded the first one on the list as unreadable. (Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.) The deputy head of my grammar school — who on one occasion described me in one of her annual reports as regarding myself as "God's gift to education" — was firmly convinced that Ulysses was a masterpiece. I profoundly disagree.
Judging by the symptoms — shakiness, blurry vision, and a certain growing clumsiness3 — it looks as if I'd better head back to the pavilion for an early lunch. It's only 12:54 but the recent cuppa failed to help. Pity. I'd just started stripping down the hi-fi to reposition the A/V shelf as I'm getting increasingly tired of the way I have to angle some of the remotes to get them to "register". All is not quite silence hereabouts, however, as I can still rely on the iMac's built-in speakers when playing the 91.9 days worth of MP3 files.
Mr Postie left me with news that my electricity supplier is now switched, but there's been an (unspecified) delay with the gas chaps.
Somewhat later
I'm not very keen on busy motorways at dusk in heavy rain. Mind you, I'm not very keen on rice pudding, either, but at least I have a fighting chance of keeping that out of my life.4 Dear Mama was dozing on her bed this afternoon so was — it turns out to be possible — even less tightly-coupled to reality than "usual".5
I realise "it's bein' so cheerful as keeps me goin'" but, I have to admit, there are, from time to time, just occasionally, days when my life-long policy of finding amusement wherever I can falters a tiny little bit. But that's nothing the next cuppa won't put right. Besides, I have a hi-fi system to rebuild. Turns out a chap cannot subsist entirely on an audio diet from the iMac's built-in speakers. They lack a certain "oomph" in the, erm, "oomph" department. And Mike lent me a USB stick with some video pixels on, too. (It's really neat being able to watch a TV show from a USB stick plugged into the Oppo Blu-ray player. Before you know it, I'll give in and start streaming video around just like everyone else. Child of the New Millennium, that's me. But I still draw the line at downloading one of these ridiculous "digital copies" on to my iPod. Running the 60" plasma screen keeps the room a lot warmer.)
Season of mists and mellow fruity coughs
The email from my son a few minutes ago suggests he's getting better. Clearly he and Peter's g/f have both been through recent viral conflicts. I've mildly suggested they keep their perishing bugs away from me until they've finished perishing. Even the care-home has installed a "hand sanitiser" at Reception though I've yet to see anyone use it. And I wouldn't like the job of explaining its use to dear Mama. It's 17:27 — time to do the curtains and blinds and then pop the kettle on.
Music restored. What's next, Mrs Landingham? Food? Right-oh. Blimey, when did it become 19:08?
The shower was made necessary by the work involved in shifting a set of boxes up into the loft. As was the next round of laundry. Still, it's probably a good idea to smell a bit better when lunching with a set of ex-colleagues in the IBM Clubhouse. Suddenly it's 21:35 and I think I shall relax for a bit.