2011 — 27 August: Saturday
I suspect all hobbies1 end up having a "down" side. Certainly those that involve collections of stuff and the OCD needed to maintain any sort of lowered level of entropy do. Take, for random example, a set of podcast files. Or a set of CDs (all ripped to MP3 files, organised and backed-up), DVDs and Blu-rays with artwork filed2 (and scanned, of course) separately for reasons of storage space. Or a set of home-recorded audio minidiscs, or tape cassettes. Or even, heaven forbid, a library of books and magazines of many diverse sorts and sizes, vaguely representing some of the transient interests of that "butterfly" mind that now-mindless dear Mama was always happy to denigrate.
Then there's the issue of the maintenance of some sort of catalogue3 lest as many as one of these items goes astray at any point for any reason... What did we do before computers came along? I don't say "personal" computers because (until I got my first home PC in 1985) I've already admitted that some of this endless tracking was assisted by — shall we say? — spare capacity on a machine or two owned by an employer or two. It wasn't just me, of course. Back in 1969 the computer facilities at IBM's Hursley Lab were already under attack:
... there has been a noticeable increase recently in the number of persons using computer facilities for unauthorised private use. Examples of this have been gramophone record inventories, shopping lists, computer generated pictures, nursery school notices, to name but a few. The Computer facilities at Hursley cost the Laboratory a considerable amount of real money. Disciplinary action will be initiated by the Computer Centre on any future occurrences of such misuse of our facilities.
On balance, I shall merely continue to thank Allah that (unlike my brother) I don't feel even the slightest compulsion to contend with 70,000+ photographic slides of aircraft or tiny bits of second-hand perforated paper with traces of human DNA on the non-printed side. How crazy can one family be?
Breakfast, Mrs Landingham?
Back in February I read...
... Jaron Lanier's book "You are not a gadget". This week there's a nice little essay by him here. Though it won't tempt me to re-subscribe to the "New Statesman".
CSI Chandler's Ford (podcast division)
Mid-afternoon finds me wafting a bee as gently out of my kitchen as I can, as I make yet another drink to keep me sustained. I'm about half-way through that set of recovered podcasts. About 95% of them turned out to have working ID3 meta-tags that enable me to sort them out. The rest involve more forensic examination, which is posh talk for listening to them. (Not that that's a foolproof method of identification, and it usually yields little or nothing by way of carbon-dating either.)
Pausing briefly (in some amazement to see that it's already 18:31) I got not-quite-directly here from a fleeting trail caught on one of the NPR podcasts. Always good to see ourselves through another's eyes.
It seems...
... the only way to break out beyond the confines of my Tablet PC's little (is 16GB little?) SD card may have to be to "root" the Pad. Obviously, the designers never really thought anyone would be stupid enough to want to hook up a dinky little 1TB drive and expect to be able to persuade some of the supplied apps to make themselves at home with such a capacious playing field. Still, at least I've found myself a much better variation on the awful (supplied) Gallery App for viewing all my DVD cover artwork. "QuickPic" by name and, it seems, Japanese by nature. Include and exclude folders at will, and choose your preferred sorting sequences.
And here are the two latest additions to the artwork library. Thanks, Mr Postie:
"Girlfriends" is based on a book by Alain de Botton, and "Hanna" is directed by the chap who made the 2005 version of P&P.