2011 — 12 September: Monday
The music on BBC Radio 3 this morning1 leads me to conclude the morning schedule has been subtly altered.2 I expect I'll survive. But what a shockingly late start to my day, heh? It's a good job I found both my 'alarums' clock and a fresh battery, yesterday, as I face an 'excursion' on Wednesday, it now being the season of MOTs and car services. The deal was that if I deliver the car at 07:00 (down in Millbrook) they will assign two chaps to work on it right away.
Almost like being a working stiff, getting up at that sort of time...
Alas, poor Jane...
I watched the Jane Austen bio last night once I had the house to myself. The only revelation in it was that "Duckface" was a great-niece (eight times removed) which is, on reflection, a pretty tenuous link.3 I could have done without the costumed "re-creations" of Jane's various family and friends. It struck me as an exercise in dumbing down, and an excuse to dress up. But then, I'm an old curmudgeon who knows less and less about more and more these days.
Helping me do battle with my ignorance as I sink further into my dotage, of course, has been "Private Eye"...
[Adam] Macqueen agrees. "The end of the Eye will come when all politicians clean up their acts, when the workings of Whitehall, the media, the justice system and everything in between become entirely transparent, when the British lose their sense of humour and rediscover the deference due to their elders and betters and a herd of Gloucestershire Old Spots fill our airspace. And even then, we'd probably still find some excuse to print a picture of Andrew Neil in a vest."
I could still be subscribing for a few months, then.
Pesky bits
Segment registers? Blimey, that takes me back nearly 35 years! They were the only way you could make a program jump of greater than 2K on the ICL 1500 Series. I love the idea of anyone being able to write "the x86 instruction set used by modern Intel and Intel-compatible processors" with a straight face. As if there's anything truly modern about that architecture. I don't doubt that Google changed that, in part by tapping the instruction set's rarely-used "segment registers". Me? I prefer the RISC approach. (Link.)
Although I managed...
... to crash on loading the one new Android app (an alternative file manager called "File Magic") I'd let Junior whop on to my Tablet PC yesterday (having first had to restrain his strong impulse to put on "Angry Birds") I was quite impressed to arrive home a couple of hours ago to find waiting for me an email that I'd actually watched being sent...
... almost entirely hands-free. At one point, Brian did have to poke the "Send" button on his Android phone but, apart from that, he'd merely fired up Vlingo and then spoken "Send email to David [pause] Hello David thank you for your email".
I was even more impressed by his next email. It contains the almost flawless ASCII excreted output, in neat tab-separated format, 99% ready for pasting into one of my molehole video lists, and taken straight from my DVD Profiler database XML file as digested by one of his Pythons.
Meanwhile, Len is (I hope satirically) suggesting I owe him £20 for the pair of CDs he ordered just by following the BBC link in a footnote. "Caveat emptor" say I.
[Pause]
Oh, dear. I seem to be suffering from what Len has. I just listened to one of the rescued NPR "All songs considered" podcasts and thus heard, for the first time, the 12-string guitar music of James Blackshaw, whose CD "Glass Bead Game" (not, I hope, as lengthy as the Herman Hesse title I can just about be seen clutching here) is now on its way down the Amazon. But, this reminded me of the first 12-string guitar music I ever heard, which was on Paul Brett's album "Earth Birth" in 1977 or thereabouts. That's now available as an MP3 download, and is playing as I type.
It's 18:15 and time to initiate the "think about an evening meal" process.
Later
I'd managed to forget how delightful the re-make of "Sabrina" is, even though Julia Ormond isn't Audrey Hepburn, any more than Harrison Ford is Humphrey Bogart. It makes for an amiable two hours.