2011 — 30 August: Tuesday
Back to a grey start1 but it will have no effect on my supplies chores (someone around here keeps eating me out of house and home, and he seems to prefer fresh stuff, too). There's time first, of course, for the cuppa that wakes me up properly.
I shall also be picking up that little white server and installing it "for real" later this morning. I've been thinking where best to keep it, but the shelf in Peter's room right by the ADSL modem seems as good as any. The Asus device is silent, as is the Buffalo NAS Terastation that's already up there.
Turns out that having all my DVD cover artwork neatly filed in that "rainbow" of folders makes it a doddle to whizz my way through it entering each of the multi-digit EAN numbers and letting DVD Profiler do all the rest of the work. I'm now half way through the second folder and "Bob Roberts" will be the next title processed. I'm already starting to see some of the advantages (in terms of cross-linked data) in this smart data base approach2 compared with my primitive hand-rolled system. The result will all be up on the web, outside the firewall, when I've finished.
It's 08:20 and breakfast sounds like a good idea.
While I fully agree...
... that Concorde was nothing but an expensive flying white elephant, that didn't mean Christa and I weren't thrilled to see and hear the beautiful thing thundering low over our house in Old Windsor back in the 1970s. (There's a nice essay on the relevant sunk cost fallacy here.)
Hard to disagree with this, too :-)
The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.
But when you consider what else floats...
Well, that was easy...
And here (if I got all the settings right) are my first few hundred DVD titles as hosted online. Not too shabby. Definitely time for my "lemonses" cuppa and something dunkable. Next task: re-instate the little white server for my nefarious inner web and music "while I work" :-)
Done.
Lunch, Mrs Landingham? It is 12:54, after all.
Since man cannot live...
... by DVD profiling alone, I took myself (on a whim, as it were) into Eastleigh for a little light mooching around. I was after some more chocs for dear Mama. I also needed a birthday card for a chum, and to confirm that a newly-established payment had been made into my little piggy bank (with its old-fashioned passbook system).
I was delighted to be able to achieve a Chris Mullin hat-trick. He's been publishing his (excellent) diaries somewhat non-chronologically. I got what should be volume #2 ("A View fom the Foothills" covering 1999 to 2005) back in April 2009, volume #3 ("Decline & Fall" dealing with 2005 to 2010) duly appeared in September 2010, and I've just picked up volume #1 ("A Walk-On Part") which fills us in on his exploits of parliamentary derring-do between 1994 and 1999.
Typical sample, plucked at random:
The regime is after Ken Livingstone for claiming that the Shadow Cabinet elections were rigged. He's right, of course, but unfortunately he chose to unburden himself to readers of the Mail on Sunday. Irene Adams has been wheeled out to deny that she was leaned upon to stand down. Everywhere the sound of cocks crowing. If Ken is to be deselected, a show trial will have to be organised. Witnesses will have to be intimidated. Perjury will have to be concocted. I foresee months of warfare ahead. The Tories must be relishing the prospect. Is Blair really as insecure and petty as Kinnock, after all?
What a cracking example of a rhetorical question... right, back to my self-imposed task. 579 titles down, rather more still to go. Perhaps a cuppa would help?
Remind me why...
... I do all this stuff? I've reached the end of titles beginning with the letter "E", arriving at 919 discs logged so far. Just don't ask me why "Dress to kill" could only be traced under the original title "Perfume" and thus rather destroys the neat array under letter "D"! Good job it's only a mild obsession. It's 21:03 and I demand a tea break. I know my rights.