2011 — 29 January: Saturday
Just a placeholder for now1 — I'm on the point of calling it a day for today. G'night.
Sleep having been...
... put to flight,2 very effectively, by the small pile of invoices and insurance documents flung on to my doormat by Mr Postie this morning, I shall finish my cuppa, listen to the dying echoes of "Sounds of the 60s", and then attend to business. It's cold and grey ("dour" in my neighbour's word) but dry.
Pleasure before business. A programme about letters to JD Salinger, while I read a couple of interviews with two immensely attractive actresses, (Julianne Moore and Natascha McElhone) both of whom have known loss and have very interesting things to say about it. Plus — more mundanely — I have some plums to be stewed for my next bowl (bowel?) of cereal :-)
Snail mails
I was in no hurry to open the mail as I (correctly) predicted the two items from dear Mama's care home would be the latest invoice and notice of their annual price hike. Much as I might sympathise with their wage, salary, and utility charges increases, and the inflation they mention (RPI at 4.8%, CPI at 3.7%) I acidly note that neither dear Mama's pension, nor her savings interest rate, has so much as twitched in an upward direction.
The two items from the replacement car hire folk merely confirm all the telephone and email exchanges. And item #5 is a little something from Mr ERNIE. It's a pity he doesn't twitch his warrant in an upward direction.
Barometer high, but nutrition level low. Time for lunch.
Emulation, by another name
An interesting piece on the new release ("Impersonator", in its latest incarnation) from CodeWeavers, with a throwaway sentence that creased me up. Snippet and source:
Not being a company with unlimited resources, though, CodeWeavers needs to be picky about what Windows apps into which it pours its engineering time. "Our officially supported list still includes the big hitters like Microsoft Office and some of the others," Parshall said, "but we're taking some of them off, like Lotus Notes. I hate to say it, but who cares about Lotus Notes anymore?"
As a hapless end-user (unconsulted, of course) I personally found Notes to be a loathsome piece of software for which Gerstner overpaid by several billion dollars just before Java came along. But what do I know? :-)
As a snapper up of unconsidered...
... trifles, I love this sort of factoid:
For starters, forget about PCs. For every desktop computer, there are 10 mobile devices. Around the world, mobile phones outnumber toothbrushes two-to-one.
And while confirming Old Bill (and his "Winter's Tale") as the origin of my phrase (thank you, Mrs Google) I found this interesting blog. Not to mention this delicious mini-rant.
Strictly for the "boids"
Back in 1982 (for a mere £25) I bought Christa a huge, one-volume reproduction copy of Audubon's water-colour paintings for his monumental "The Birds of America". It was a reprint from a 1966 edition and contains 431 of the 433 paintings. I was thus fascinated to read this fascinating tale of upper-crust cultural vandalism. We always referred to birds as "dickie boids" in homage to my parents and to the memorable concierge in the Mel Brooks film "The Producers".
A first edition fetched £7,321,250 at Sotheby's recently. (Source.)
A for Android (revisited)
I've been thinking again about that Amazon Kindle e-text device. Given that Amazon makes the software available across platforms regardless of you owning one of their Kindle devices, I wonder how long I will be able to resist...?
Having admired Mrs Brian's smartphone screen recently, I can see that the Android platform (as above) is a real possibility.
Man the barricades!
I am to be descended upon in about two hours, it seems. And have also been threatened by a pancake breakfast tomorrow. That leaves me about 110 minutes between now and then (as it were) to clear some sleeping space for the pair of them, get to his room's thermostatic valve, and generally tidy up. There goes my early evening. Mind you, it's already 18:12 — one (I) can so easily lose track of time while doing whatever it is that I do when I'm not doing whatever else it is that I do. Or don't, as the case may, or may not, be.
I have been descended on. It's now 22:31 and the place seems to be a whirlwind of activity.