2011 — 11 August: Thursday
The main reason for my visit to Brian yesterday afternoon was actually to scoop off from what is now his new XP PC the few items I'd overlooked (by the simple process of forgetting1 about stuff I'd left pinned to the XP desktop itself). The main such being a gigabyte or so in a folder labelled "Christapics". (Can you believe she died exactly 45 months ago? Amazing!)
Brian's already neatly lobotomised the PC into a multiple personality machine, so in cheeky virtual payment for it I've set him the challenge of turning my tiniest Asus netbook away from its current "Xandros-looks-almost-like-Windows-doesn't-it?" state into a far more useful LAMP + lightweight GUI to serve (if you'll forgive the pun) as my next Intranet webserver. That way I will be able to get my hands back on the quiet little HP MPC Ubuntu webserver currently humming away in the far corner of my living room and dedicate its next cyber life to something a bit more in line with its design purpose.
You can see it in audio action here, back in July 2008 (when I still had what some folk regarded as an over-complicated A/V system) ...
It was still a Vista Media PC then. Of course, web serving isn't particularly tasking, (let alone multitasking), and uses only about 1% of its capability. There's still a TV tuner and decent sound card in there somewhere just itching to entertain me. So currently I foresee it ending up in the reading room upstairs, possibly as a MythTV system, but there's no rush.
It's a cool, grey morning. Perfect for a chocolate-carrying visit to dear Mama at some point. Tea and breakfast would also be perfect soon as I'm feeling peckish. I actually listened to the 9 o'clock news to see if we still have a civilised country, safe to travel in.2 We appear to, if you can ever believe a politician speaking on national radio.
With another dollop...
... of my widower's mite transmuted into a food cupboard topup, I shall now go out on a little adventure.
Longish pause
And now relaxing jangled nerves with a fresh cuppa, at 17:18 or so. It's good to be back.
Only The Shadow knows...
... what evil lurks in the hearts of men, of course. I wonder if he knows where, on which shelf, I've put my copy of William Boyd's "Any Human Heart"? Today I picked up a half-price Blu-ray of a recent Channel 4 TV adaptation I was unaware of (what with not watching TV). As for "The Lady"... it was dear Mama's choice of weekly comic for many years (although latterly I started buying her an annual subscription to "The Oldie").
I remember she "met" a lady called Pearl Denison through The Lady's pages. Ms D (I'm sure she would have been a Mrs D at the time) had a rental holiday home on Shapinsay in Orkney; hence our 1959 summer holiday on that windy, wet, cold island while the rest of the UK endured drought and a heat wave.
I wonder if Big Bro recalls the dry stone wall he decided to build on a beach there? Or my Mars bar? I certainly remember seeing my first cormorant.
Oops
Has anyone seen our aircraft? "Range assets have lost telemetry with HTV2". (Link.)
Bet that cost a few bob.