2011 — 9 September: Friday
It's getting later than you think.1 But Stephen Hough's flying fingers on the BBC Radio 3 piano piece are lively enough. Carl Czerny — Variations Brillantes Op.14. Never heard of Czerny, never heard the 'Op.', but impressed.
One other amusement in last night's film. Watching the mighty Maurice J Minnifield reduced from running Cicely, Alaska, to cleaning up after violent crimes. You either know what I mean or you're one of those sad people (the vast majority) who fail to agree with me that "Northern Exposure" was about the best TV show ever produced. And, yes, that includes the unwatchable "The Wire", the high-pitched Mafia, the undertakers who kept seeing dead people, all of which strike me as horribly un-Life-affirming no matter how brilliantly scripted and shot. I begin to suspect the chart I generated here may quite accurately reflect my taste.
Breakfast! Now! I have many miles to go before I sleep.
Spurred on, mildly...
... by an offhand suggestion made by Zeno on his recent visit ("Why don't you just run it as a service on your BlackBeast?") I'm once again looking at XAMMP, which may (or may not) be the package of gorp Junior used when he set up a 'localhost' Apache system for me some years back on a PC that now lives under a different roof. It's really quite handy having your Intranet hosted on your main workhorse for quick tinkering purposes and I got quite used to the luxury. Now that I know just how little compute resource it soaks up2 I may well venture back down that path.
But not before lunch. I've just been out on a supplies run (being forced, for the first time ever, to park in what I think of as the overflow carpark at Waitrose). I still got through the checkout process without any queueing, however, as so few people seem to wish to do the "scan as you shop" lark. I don't understand the psychology of that, at all.
And not before a visit to dear Mama in the care-home, followed (with luck) by a reviving cuppa and biccie over with Roger & Eileen, who've now left bucket and spade mode and are once again running their gentle Tea Shoppe service for retired ex-IBM gentlefolk called Mounce.
I think I can define "doofus"!
All change
Linus uses Xfce?
The message of 11.10 seems pretty clear: Unity is here and you're either going to love it or leave it. While Unity is clearly improving — and getting faster — it remains a departure from the old GNOME interface that isn't going to please everyone. If all else fails you can always jump ship to the XFCE desktop, which now counts Linus himself as user.
So does Len :-)
Later that day
Having first caught up with the missing six minutes of last week's Kermode film review podcast — they refreshed the file on Monday, apparently, as the good doctor was indeed subjected to an editing mishap (as I theorised) — I'm now listening to the podcast from this afternoon that I missed while out and about in Winchester. I think I want to see "TrollHunter"!
At the same time I'm working my way systematically through all the DVD Profiler cover artwork that I downloaded, none of which is anything like the standard of any of my own scans, though all are described as high-resolution. Since you can easily replace their artwork with your own scans, and also lock them against being downgraded subsequently, that's my latest cunning plan: replace the downloaded images by my own. This will take a while as my scans are composite images of front and back whereas DVD Profiler uses two separate images. So there's a tad of rework needed on each one. <Sigh>
Junior called me earlier from a bus on his way home from work. He and Peter's g/f may yet show up sometime on Sunday to say "Hello". My email last night has had the intended effect :-)