2011 — 3 September: Saturday
A much earlier start1 so I can catch up with a podcast or three while settling down with a cuppa to help me 'DVD Profile' films starting with the letter "P". Jim Broadbent was the guest (up in the Shetlands) for Mark Kermode's filmic chatting. Followed by Simon Armitage.
Taking a breakfast break, I note a nice piece in the Grauniad on the work of that excellent biographer Fiona MacCarthy. In passing, I'd add Paul Laity's profile of her does nothing to enhance the late Bernard Levin's reputation, in my opinion. (Link.)
It had momentarily become quite a sunny morning, but not any more. At 09:19 the clouds have returned. I've just re-downloaded the latest Kermode podcast in case it was my copy that got truncated at the end of the discussion about "Kill List" rather than the BBC's MP3 editing mishap. I'm about to tackle my 'Pink Floyd' DVDs. The DVD total now profiled has just reached 2,428. A case could be made, I suspect, for getting rid of some of them. Maybe I should formulate my own "cull list"?
Having had...
... Smoke City's "Underwater love" rattling around my brain for two days, and having belatedly realised that I never did get the round tuit needed to index2 all my music tracks (32,000+) properly (by which I mean rather than just the albums that contain them) I've just proved that Ampache on my tiny little new server can help me track down the track, as it were. A manual binary chop on the 650 screens of the full track listing took me about three minutes to pinpoint the album — CD1 of "Into the blue", as it happens. About the same time as the track plays for, of course!
I need my next cuppa.
Having been prompted...
.... by Len to download last night's "Wogan on Wodehouse", and played it perfectly satisfactorily in Windows Media Player (after retrieving the necessary 30-day licence), I wondered what would happen if I opened the .wmv file in my preferred Open Source VLC player. Psychedelic kaleidoscopic display of coloured patches followed by crash and burn of the player. Isn't DRM wonderful? Quite why they want to protect such a low-resolution programme in the first place beats me. After all, if I'd wanted to rip it off, I could have recorded it off-air in standard or high-def at the time of transmission and probably managed to squeeze it on to a DVD one way or another...
Still, the soundtrack (which is now safely nestled on a minidisc) kept me entertained while I finished DVD Profilering the letter "P". I reckon it's time I had some lunch.
Afternoon insights
I've been browsing the "help" information. You know what they say... when all else fails, read the manual. So, now that I've (belatedly) discovered the existence of a "Repair profile database" facility lurking under:
Tools ==> Options ==> Utilities
and just finished running it, I blush to admit (belatedly) I'm now prepared to withdraw about 99.5% of all the swear words I've unleashed in the direction of an unknown programmer or two in the last several days. I shall reserve the final 0.5% for some of the illiterate people who've so kindly shared their idiosyncratic spellynge and worse with the rest of the DVD Profiler world. I'm sure, once I've finished this initial batch of data entry I will find something else to write about :-)
Off into the letter "Q" go I. The only "Q" title I've put in so far is to note the copy of The Quiller Memorandum that I recorded while Christa and I watched it after our last-ever shopping trip to Oxford nearly five years ago!
How it can already be that long ago nearly blows my mind. (But then it's never taken much to do that.)
My new métier...
... seems to be the stewing of fruit. I now know there's such a thing as a Shropshire prune as I've just spent the bulk of Peter Gabriel's CD "Passion: sources" taking the stones out of a batch. More mundane folk probably refer to the things as damsons, but who am I to argue with Wilkin and Sons Ltd and the fruits of the Tiptree estate? The wild batch I scoffed with vanilla icecream yesterday don't appear to have killed me, yet. This lot are rather less sour, so I shan't be adding any sugar.