2011 — 27 January: Thursday

Happy birthday (old) Big Bro down there in sunny Brunei still (I believe). Having decided¹ that I'm such a fussy eater I'm difficult² to cook for, my host and hostess for lunch today have (I gather) arranged a little pub outing. Let's just hope I can get there without physical contact with another Mercedes for the sake of my nerves.

As my chum across the road has remarked, "Mercedes drivers are a better class of vandal, at ASDA they just drive away".³

It's just on freezing outside, but reasonably dry and very grey. The barometer is quite high again. Bach and Scarlatti and tea have all been working their morning magic. It's now 08:51 and thoughts are drifting vaguely towards breakfast.

Always good to see...

... the Establishment supply of black ink is holding up:

Covering up the cracks

Unsee less for yourself, in the official PDF file. (Link.) Page 15 (there's a fragment visible if you click the pic above) is such a fine example of the art of censorship that the only thing to stand fair comparison with it is one of Yossarian's fictional mail-censoring efforts in "Catch-22". Glorious stuff (and nonsense).

Many years ago...

... while on holiday in Guernsey I armed myself with a useful book called "How to work for a jerk" because, at the time (in IBM) that was the situation I found myself in. I could have made good use of the same book a decade and a half earlier when I decided to leave the UK aircraft industry and move into computing. One of the aircraft I had spent several months working on was the Nimrod. Today's story removes any lingering doubts about the wisdom⁴ of my choice, made in 1973. (Source.)
(More here, too.)

I'd better start getting ready for my little lunchtime expotition. It's 10:53 and almost imperceptibly brighter. Still mid-winter, of course.

A few hours later...

... I'm back from my outing, replete with a very decent pub lunch and bearing a mixture of musical goodies to try out. I've offloaded one of my two replacement DVD copies of "Inception" and will be fascinated to hear what they make of it. I have also reminded myself of what I don't like about the southbound A34 as it joins the motorway when it's rush hour traffic. But nobody hooted or flashed, which I take to be a good sign. Nor did I pick up any further unauthorised Toyota body mods. It's now 20:28 and I've got some serious relaxing to do.

Sometimes it's what I do best, which is just as well...

Recent incoming

Mr Postie left these for me in the last day or two...

... and Junior tells me he and Peter's g/f intend to descend to whisk me out to watch "The King's Speech" this weekend, though I may yet have to clear a corner somewhere for them to sleep, which will be an interesting exercise. He, too, is thinking tablet-oriented thoughts so it will be good to compare notes so far.

Footnotes

¹  How unwell they know me even after quarter of a century.
²  Not true. I long ago decided that if someone is kind enough to cook for me, the least I can do is eat what's put in front of me. True, there was one incident, many years ago, involving a vegetarian lasagne and the now-estranged wife of an ex-colleague, but time has healed most of the memory.
³  We parted with our nice white third Honda shortly after having both the driver and passenger doors repaired following a similar incident in the Asda car park. A lady driving her husband's company car without too much practice with its power steering had twice sideswiped us in her attempts to make her getaway. The three of us were inside the store browsing the shelves and got a horrid shock on our return to the poor, battered remnant of our family chariot. Still, at least the miscreant contacted us via the tannoy system, and the repairs were all covered by hubby's insurance.
⁴  My apprentice training officer (one of the biggest jerks I've met, even today) in Hatfield called me many different kinds of idiot during my joyous exit interview. However, his confident predictions of the job security I was leaving behind were overturned within just a month or so of my departure. And, for all that I tease Big Bro on occasion, let's remember that he, too, left Hatfield (in 1970) to carve a much more successful career in the New Zealand heavier-than-air transport industry. (He [still] knows relatively little about computers, though. But then, so do I.)