2011 — 19 September: Monday
(Not) moving right along, I fear I can now confirm that1 there's not so much as a digital audio "peep" to be persuaded out of the upstairs Linux HP MPC via its external Audigy sound card. So it's just as well that the analogue output is perfectly satisfactory. It certainly makes track browsing and selection a great deal easier (with Banshee) than with the Roku's tiny two-line display.
Time (07:39) for a hot cuppa to dispel the cool cobwebs. And the residual aches from the shifting around of heavy armchairs up the stairs.
"Eye" see
Just like Christopher Hitchens, I, too, was a "mere sheltered schoolboy at the time":
... but couldn't fail to notice the exciting fact that the authorities were getting nervous. In spite of a BBC monopoly on the airwaves, the semi-official censorship of cinema and the theater, and the titanic, still-enduring prestige of Winston Churchill and the royal family, you could hear the noise of collapsing scenery as a whole parcel of scandals — sexual ones, property ones, espionage ones — started to unwrap at the same time. Private Eye, which could be bought inexpensively and smuggled under the jacket, was the ideal samizdat bulletin, where you could very often read next week's real news.
And I've now subscribed for many years. Not that the nature of the scandals seems to change much.
More supplies...
... safely gathered in, and little lunchtime expotitions already now pencilled in for Wednesday, as well as Thursday. (Tuesday, alas, is devoted to the replacement of the Yaris water pump.) So now I'm settling down to a serious spot of data cleansing. And catching up on some NPR "Wait, wait, don't tell me" comedy news quiz podcasts.
I really wish people wouldn't cold-call me by phone and then start telling porkies before I've even had a chance to say I'm not interested. Cue another cuppa. It's 16:15 and the data hill ahead still has more up than down to go, as it were.
I further really wish people wouldn't cold-call me by knocking on my door and then start telling porkies before I've even had a chance to say I'm not interested. It's 17:39 and I just took a little break from climbing that data hill by reminding myself how beautiful is the track "If it be your will" performed towards the end of Leonard Cohen's "Live in London" 2009 concert DVD by the sublime Webb sisters.
Come on. How can it possibly be 23:33 already?