2011 — 19 June: Sunday
A sunny start1 though I'm feeling distinctly sluggish having woken twice during the night. These things happen in even the best-run households. It struck me that I hadn't yet identified the two latest Blu-rays I found in HMV last Tuesday. One is a very old favourite — I shall regard it as a Father's Day present:
That latest book on Jane Austen showed up on Friday, too, and is atop my current tottering bedside heap. I must say he's nailed "Emma" spot-on, and is now dealing with Elizabeth Bennett. One of the books that Michelle returned to me yesterday from the set she'd borrowed from her grandmother's house while helping to clear it out last July was the copy of "Pride and Prejudice" that set me on the slippery slope towards full-blown Janeism in late 2004. As I said at the time:
Meanwhile, a shocking confession to make. Having watched, and enjoyed, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Sense and Sensibility, I finally grabbed a spare copy of Pride and Prejudice while up in the Midlands a week ago last Friday (on a mercy errand to vacuum clean my mad aunt's house and redeliver the once-unwanted microwave cooker to Mum) and, six pages in, sought permission to borrow it. Our battered copies of the Austen oeuvre, which were all Christa's from her university studies, had migrated to Mum and thence to her newspaper delivery girl.
Well, guess what? I loved it, and polished it off in between episodes of the delicious BBC TV production from 1995 which, with Colin Firth emerging in a wet shirt from a lake, apparently sets girlish pulses aflutter. I last tried the lady when I was about ten, and had (naturally) been put off for the next forty-some years as a consequence. What we do to our kids by way of a literary education in this country passes all understanding.
Time for a spot of breakfast before my next data-spelunking adventure.
If the gathering clouds...
... are any guide, I think I made the right call in ducking out of a walk today. I've brought the Gateway XP machine back online to spelunk in some ancient email caves. It's time I sorted out the archive before equally ancient hard drives decide to call it a day. Incidentally, when I asked Mrs Google about "spelunking" (just for fun) I found she'd rounded up some entertaining images, some more wholesome than others. Try it at your own risk.
It's noon and Cerys has just finished playing some excellent music, as usual. Including Eduardo Niebla. I've also made a start on a set of graphic novels Peter brought home to store in 'his' room here. "Freakangels" is a new one on me. Warren Ellis et al. Pretty good so far.
Mid-afternoon MP3 blues
There's something odd about my MP3 files. And I don't mean anything about my musical taste. When loading the contents of my music subfolders into WinAmp, quite a few of the tracks show up as duplicates despite there not being any physical duplicate entries in the folders.
As I don't much care for the WinAmp user interface (nor that of MediaMonkey, nor iTunes, nor Windows Media Player, for that matter) I've been trying out a neat, light-weight MP3 player ("PlayPad") from a software house based in Canberra. I rather hoped (since I do like its interface) that it wouldn't suffer from the same "ghost duplicate tracks" problem. However, it, too, has been throwing up ghost tracks. Even odder, whereas WinAmp will happily play them as separate tracks, PlayPad allows you to click from one to the next but carries on tunefully without skipping a virtual beat.
My forensic investigation will continue, but the musical background will now be whatever Jarvis decides to play.
It's amazing...
... just quite how much data accretes in odd corners of a variety of hard drives over the course of a decade or more. Still, the Buffalo NAS is forcing me to be a bit more disciplined if I'm not to waste still more of my life looking in place A for data hiding in place Z. Such good fun.
It's now 21:31, however, and I'm going to catch up with a few moving pixels.