2011 — 22 January: Saturday
By some mysterious process1 it's managed to sneak round to 00:59 and I intend to head up to my bed "real soon now". I've just checked outside. The car is once again frosted up and the porch thermo suggests -3C as a nice round number. I've been pondering a Xerox 7600 flatbed scanner as I'd quite enjoy getting my hands on some decent OCR software once again. Haven't had any since I moved off the Acorn platform. I'm a bit dubious about the fact that it's only a USB 1.1 device as that could put quite a crimp in scanning speeds.
Wonder if I'll stay awake until the end of Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto? G'night.
I did
But a decent amount of sleep has intervened. It's a mere -1.5C out there but grey and dull at 08:29. I shall simply dial up the volume of all the glorious 60s music pouring out of BBC Radio 2 for the next 90 minutes or so.
Mummers
Until this morning, my little music library included precisely one track ("Lorca and the Orange Tree") by The Mummers, and that was on "The Word's" free compilation CD in July 2009. Clicking here has just allowed me to snaffle the whole of their first album, quite legally. Thanks, Grauniad!
This chap's often worth a look. (Link.) [Pause] Brian M's just played the theme to that dreadful tosh "Man in a Suitcase". Why do I know it so well so many years later? [Pause] And here's a nice article on Patti Smith. (Link.)
Pins and needles
Comment is largely superfluous. Source and snippet:
The sole American manufacturer of an anesthetic widely used in lethal injections said Friday that it would no longer produce the drug, a move likely to
delay more executions and force states to adopt new drug combinations.
The manufacturer, Hospira Inc., of Lake Forest, Ill., had originally planned to resume production of the drug, sodium thiopental, this winter at a plant
in Italy, giving state corrections departments hope that the scarcity that began last fall would ease.
But the Italian authorities said they would not permit export of the drug if it might be used for capital punishment. Hospira said in a statement Friday
that its aim was to serve medical customers, but that "we could not prevent the drug from being diverted to departments of corrections" and the company
did not want to expose itself to liability in Italy.
Gotta love our cousins' facility with euphemisms. Mind you, I suspect there are enough chemists, amateur and otherwise, to cook up something. Could be a business opportunity, perhaps?
With the newly-stuffed crockpot embarking on its thermal journey in plenty of time for tonight's feeding frenzy I can now do whatever it is I do on a reasonably bright, cold, Saturday in mid-winter. Like, for example, noting that I am one month older than the world's first business computer.2 An interesting museum, by the sound of it. (Source.)
Semi-random browsing...
... dredges up this amusing gem:
Comparing history with the present is intriguing even if not relevant to the issues of the time. The computer and print room occupied about 300 square yards. To have achieved the power of a modern laptop would have required 10-storey buildings throughout the square mile of the City of London. But knowing what was to come would have been of no concern. It would not even have been demoralising. It was irrelevant. There was work to do...
Programmers were on their own. They had half a sheet of machine code instructions and ready access to the engineers. Who could ask for anything more?
Who indeed?
I don't know if news itself is getting more bizarre, or if it's just the choices made by BBC news editors. For example, Lord Lloyd Webber selling his wine collection in Hong Kong for $5,600,000 after deciding he wouldn't live long enough to drink it all himself... (Sauce.)
After lunch...
... and while listening to The Mummers, what better than to re-acquaint myself with the always delightful material here?
Or to continue to ponder what I could possibly do with one of these?
Or to record the three new deliveries (the fourth — an earlier Chris Morris piece — obviously managed to avoid detection by my foolproof artwork scanning process several years ago. Like "Four Lions", it's packaged as a miniature hardback and doesn't lend itself to my "standard" filing system3):
It's 17:52 and the crockpot is making its presence delightfully obvious. I've just stewed my last batch of plums for my next dollop of breakfast cereal, too. Talk about domestic god! Mind you, I've also been swearing at the iMac — the operating system is not quite as clever as we're told to think it is.
How did it suddenly become 23:48? I'm off to bed. G'night.