2011 — 15 January: Saturday
The merest of placeholders1 as I'm in need of more sleep.
Yet another grey, wet...
... start to the day. How nice. It's 09:17 and looking very drab out there. [Pause] Judging by the way bits of cloud are scudding quickly across from the south things may yet change. It's already a little brighter. If I were, I might know what that meant. I shall break my fast and venture gently out into cyberspace, with my reliable "Sounds of the 60s" accompaniment.
Poor, delusional PM
For many years I've felt that the only political leader worth having is someone who genuinely has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into office. Almost by definition (in my Good Book) anyone who wants the job is probably certifiable. Imagine how happy I am to see this:
OMG, not HMG, it seems :-)
Time for "lemonses"?
Just finished hoovering up an interesting batch of BBC podcasts while listening to the "spy cruise" feature. War and rumours of war. I prefer Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's chats about films any day.
I love the BBC's classification of this post as relating to "sourround sound" (sic).
It's gone (if possible) even greyer out there, and drizzly. That must be why the Waitrose car park was so busy. But I got back in time to catch a bit of Arvo Pärt before heading for the cheerier sounds of the News Quiz. I find Henning Wehn very funny.
Rats!
It's just as well I seem to have given up watching broadcast TV as it looks as if I'm going to have to make some room in my schedule to start listening to "Dr K" and Mr Mayo. It's a pity you can't speed-listen2 to audio in the way you can speed-read. My little batch3 of podcasts has just added over three days of listening to my stored total, dammit. And Kermode's first "breathless rant" (a trademark, I gather) was spent trashing the remake I mentioned here.
Meanwhile, I'm keeping BlackBeast quite busy for an hour backing up all my MP3s (approx 230GB) to the external SATA drive. It's doing so at just over 60 MB/second which is a jolly sight quicker than my previous attempt to back up, using an external USB2 drive. Mind you, Win7 was also compressing (or, at least, attempting to compress) the MP3s, which wasn't helping speed things along. It's using less than 10% CPU but does seem to have commandeered about 1.4GB of physical RAM on top of the normal working set. The six cores are running at 22C, the three internal disk drives at 29C and the eSata drive has crept up to 40C.
The day (at 15:26) remains horribly dull grey out there.
Image resizer
Ironically, I was completely unaware of the XP Powertoy that offered this facility. I was browsing through an elderly pile of bookmarks and (re)-found "GilsMethod", which led me painlessly here.
I've just tried it out on the (originally 4MB) poster you can find by clicking on this:
One click, job done. Easy peasy.
More here on 3D printing.
And more gadgetry:
The darling of the show, though, may have been the new Motorola Atrix... But the twist is the accompanying laptop. It's beautiful — like a black MacBook Air — incredibly sleek, thin and light (2.4 pounds). But it has no processor, storage or memory of its own. Instead, you snap the phone into the laptop... It's like putting the brain into Frankenstein's monster. Suddenly, whatever was on the phone's screen now fills the laptop's screen, giving you much more real estate, plus a trackpad and full keyboard. You can attach an external hard drive and mouse, if you like. The phone provides the processor, memory, Internet connection and, of course, all your photos, videos, music and files.
I love the bit about "putting the brain into Frankenstein's monster".
Paper bill
I still remember a Giles cartoon (I'm almost certain from 1959) that showed Lord Beaverbrook being marched off to the Tower of London by some Beefeaters in the wake of the assertion by The Duke of Edinburgh that "The 'Express' is a bloody awful newspaper." Lord B is comforting himself with the thought that at least he must read it to know that. Compare and contrast Roy Greenslade's analysis here of the recent history of libel payments, settlements, and apologies. And now, of course, the Express has removed itself from the Press Complaints Commission.
I'm listening to Aaron Sorkin speaking from the Phoenix cinema during the 8th October 2010 podcast of Kermode and Mayo. He suggests "The Social Network" was following Kurosawa's Rashomon. [Pause] A new TV series, a film, and a Broadway production coming up. Amazing chap.