2011 — 24 July: Sunday
Odd, isn't it?1 Some days seem to start earlier than others. Today, for example — not wanting to be late for Brian, who's taking me to a car boot sale and calling here at 08:00 — my subconscious alarm clock (the only sort I use nowadays) decided to go off at 03:00 or so and leave me wide awake.
I've long since learned that trying to sleep while wide awake is basically a non-starter. <Sigh>
Still, there's a whole set of night owl radio programmes I haven't heard for quite some time. And (curiously) much lower volumes of spam email than during daylight hours. Besides, I'm alone in the house so there's no worry about waking up anyone else. And Victoria Coren is on good form:
There is a certain kind of intelligent and well-meaning person who will happily attack the latest star, hit show or bestseller as mindless drivel, bums on seats at the expense of excellence — but who would never say: "Everyone's stupid, I have no respect for my fellow man, the masses are ignorant. I hope nobody votes at the next election; I myself am campaigning for a dictatorship."
Rhetorical question?
"What," he said, "is a young person, just starting out in life, trying to do the right thing, supposed to think when he sees a politician fiddling the expenses system, a banker raking off millions without deserving it, or a press baron abusing the trust of ordinary people?"
"I'll have me some of that," Mr Miliband. (Link.)
Crikey. BBC 6Music really does have an incredible archive available to it. They have just played a very pared-back 1971 "Peel session" version of Led Z's "Black Dog". Amazing. And (in response to an email from NZ a few hours ago telling me of a school there that's now insisting on its Year 9 pupils being equipped with iPad2s) I found this take on Apple's philosophy interesting.
Hah! Guess who overslept? Tee-hee.
Somewhat later...
... that day. I was genuinely surprised by how enjoyable and interesting my introduction to the black economy of "Booting" turned out to be. I picked up 10 DVDs and four books for less than £15. And I helped Brian to choose 18 DVDs (2x to 4x more than his 'usual' score, he tells me). Here's my moving visual haul:
But the books, as it were, took the biscuit. The first-edition hardback of "Phantasia" by Alan Aldridge.2 (Dedicated, inter alia, to Hieronymus Bosch and the Bash Street Kids.) And for 50p (haggled up, by me, from 30p) neat hardback reprints of "The little world of Don Camillo" (Giovanni Guareschi), "A year of space" (Eric Linklater), and "Instead of a letter" (Diana Athill). You could have knocked me down with the proverbial feather.
It's 16:38 and I must admit I'm drooping a little.
My game of musical...
... graphics cards has been continuing apace. The displaced baby ATI Radeon HD4350 is now showing me a nice, crisp full-resolution 24" screen of Ubuntu 11.04 re-installing itself on the HP MPC Core2 Duo PC. I decided a complete re-install was preferable to faffing around with the hybrid Ubuntu / Xubuntu system I'd settled on in the immediate aftermath of the failure to get the Unity interface up and running (which happened, of course, after I loaded a new proprietary ATI driver for the previous underpowered little card that was fitted ab initio).
Ever since I accidentally kicked the DVD tray while it was open (several years ago now) on this PC there's been an interesting tussle (a bit like the one Arkwright the grocer used to enjoy with his cash till in "Open all hours") to remove the boot CDROM before rebooting. And now my lovely new Unity desktop has just invited me to download the FGLRX graphics driver for 3D-accelerated proprietary graphics. This, of course, is where things all went horribly pear-shaped last time round. I'm assuming a much newer, oomphier, graphics card will sail through this process without deep-sixing Unity...
Well, it took 45 seconds to restart, and Unity is still smiling at me. Looks good so far. It's 19:01 — I shall celebrate with a cuppa.