2011 — 9 July: Saturday
As far as I can tell, and with the notable exceptions of my CD-ripping and home accounting abilities, the "new" BlackBeast is now doing everything the "old" one could do. I have a lot less clutter loaded on it (again) and it does seem to be a little more sprightly. I was particularly pleased (having first done fruitless battle yet again with the dreadful HP web site in search of 64-bit drivers for my still-going-strong LaserJet 1320 only to arrive at a page offering them that said they weren't available) when it turned out that the simple act of connecting the printer and switching it on1 immediately provoked a Microsoft-mediated driver download and took about two minutes to get the thing ready to print.
It's 09:40 with some sun and some remarkably dirty-looking grey clouds. Ever onward.
[Pause]
Now, at 11:17, my first system image is safely tucked away on the Terastation NAS. While reading about Win7's interesting abilities in this area I learned, for example, that this image file is largely hardware independent, and could be restored to a different PC without re-installing, updating, and activating the OS and without re-installing, and reconfiguring, all my applications. Pretty cool.
Heard recently
In the programme on Chinese humour:
If I die in a car collision, I'd like it to be with a cement lorry. That way, I get an instant statue.
Not bad. Chinese punning was equated with 3D chess.
An almost unbelievable...
... 21 years ago, I started watching "Northern Exposure" — and even wrote, twice, to Channel 4 to encourage them to keep buying and showing it. I was somewhat smitten by the actress Janine Turner (first encountered in Garry Marshall's 1982 comedy "Young Doctors in Love" on an ancient LaserDisc) and utterly beguiled by the sparkling writing and excellent music.2
Today's delivery is a nice piece of hokum, partly facilitated by some IBM-enabled CGI, in which she also appears:
It's been raining. I trust it gets that all done before tomorrow because a walk beckons. "Plenty of showers" says Mr BBC.
An equally unbelievable...
... 39 years ago, I bought, read, and very much enjoyed "Anita" — the collection by Keith Roberts of his delicious stories of a delectable witch that had appeared sporadically in "Science Fantasy" magazine in the 1960s. Not knowing at the time that "Only fools lend books", I lent my American paperback copy (bought, inevitably, in "Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed" in Soho) to my roommate while I was in student 'digs' in Hatfield. Of course, that was the last I saw of it. Today, AbeBooks (which I didn't realise was now a subsidiary of Amazon) has come to the rescue. Furthermore, the 1990 hardback edition I've just ordered includes a previously uncollected story.
Everything comes to he who waits, as Dad used to say.
What goes around
I suspect that any UK politician still insane, dim, or corrupt enough to even hint at thinking of suggesting that the fragrant mogul Rupert Murdoch and his stinking media empire is fit to run the UK's satellite broadcasting can kiss re-election prospects goodbye :-)
Back in September 1992, Tory minister David Mellor resigned in the wake of revelations about an affair. I personally couldn't have cared less about the chap's private life, then or now, but he's beautifully redeemed himself with this one article. Source and snippet:
A ruthless businessman makes loadsamoney out of an enterprise whose success turns out to be largely based on criminal activity. The police don't want to know, and the wheels of illegality are oiled by payments to corrupt officers. The politicians fawn over our ruthless friend because they are too scared to take him on. Al Capone's Chicago or Rupert Murdoch's London? Hard to tell, isn't it?