2011 — 20 August: Saturday
I don't know how he does it, but Brian Matthew seems to have an infinite supply of music1 I'm not aware of having heard before. Mind you, there's only a few minutes left this week. I'm off to a somewhat sluggish start.
Another enjoyable little video burst from Mark Kermode as he turns his attention to the worst five films of the year (so far).
Capitalism v Communism
One, of course, is a filthy system in which man exploits man, whereas, in the other, it's the other way round. Although my eye was initially caught by the front cover of Bloomberg Businessweek there's a much more alarming graphic to be found inside. Across the US on average, 23% of homes were in negative equity territory in March 2011:
Even more alarming was the fact that it was felt necessary to explain what that meant. There is still, says author Peter Coy, "a presumption that blood can be squeezed from a stone... Banks continue to insist that they will be able to collect full repayment of wacky mortgage loans that they should never have made in the first place."
Foobar2000
It's been quite some time since I last tried the Foobar2000 audio player. I remember I wasn't very enchanted by its media library at the time. It has come a long way, it seems. Or my level of impatient intolerance has been sorely tested and reset by various alternatives I've battled against since then. Very nice.
Post-prandial pondering
I don't know whether it's all the fine old music I've been listening to, or the late lunch that matched the chicken chips and peas I used to devour as a Saturday shopping treat in Alderley Edge before my late 1963 relocation to Harpenden, but memories started rattling around. For example, one of my Xmas presents2 in the mid-1960s was a Philips electronic construction kit, including no less than three separate transistors. Can it really be 40 years since the Intel 4004 microprocessor?
Plenty of food for thought in the article behind this chart:
Not so Ab Fab?
Keep taking the Tablets?
It's only a couple of months ago that HP was emailing me to tell me the myriad virtues of their new Tablet PC. Now what do I read?
At the same time H.P. said that it might spin off PCs, it killed off its tablet, the TouchPad, after just a few weeks on store shelves.
That's gotta smart, even if you are the world's largest technology company. Then there's the PlayBook from the BlackBerry chaps — you can check your corporate email with it providing your wireless connection is a BlackBerry phone. Then there's Motorola's Mobility division, with its Xoom tablet, which now belongs to Google. Hard to keep up. I still like my Android 3.2 Asus Transformer.