2011 — 9 October: Sunday

Recalling Virginia Ironside's wise and wonderfully witty book, I still find myself wondering1 — particularly early each new morning while the extremely unintelligent design of my lower back seems always to be at its finest — when everything's going to get "better". I expect the boy Dave nominally in charge of the UK has similar thoughts as he contemplates the chaos all around, and the sterling quality of his immediate set of fine political colleagues and cronies...

The thick clouds out there this morning at 09:14 are in stark contrast to last week's sub-tropical climate, though the glowing thing is trying quite hard. I shall simply turn up the volume of my ever-present musical accompaniment and enjoy my Sunday breakfast.

While leafing through...

... my treasured copy of Pete Loveday's marvellous "Russell: the saga of a peaceful man", I was delighted to discover his online gallery. I've filched, and re-typeset, the text from the front2 of one of his birthday cards...

Birthdays

... though I sadly note that my own evolution obviously still has some way to go. Right! Back to Amazon.

It's been fascinating to listen to this interview with Robbie Robertson.

Nothing I have read...

... so far today, in between harvesting a few more bunches of grapes and the last of the pears, has convinced me that it is ever going to be possible to defragment BlackBeast's system drive completely. But, nothing so far seems to suggest that there's actually a performance problem, either. For a while today there was (it claimed) just one fragmented file on it, but it's a doozy:

Fragments

I've decided I may as well revert to using the Win 7 system defrag tool on its default weekly schedule and just stop worrying about it — I'd been using Piriform's "Defraggler" manually for a couple of weeks. I don't doubt there's a science to this, but I do doubt the cost-benefit justification.

If I didn't know better, I'd say those pangs are hunger — it has, after all, recently gone 19:00 and I've just done the curtains and blinds round in what looks like pretty full-on twilight out there.

Nothing's perfect

But why does it have to be the episode "Nothing's perfect" — Season 4, episode 3 of Northern Exposure — that has a playback glitch? It stutters for a couple of minutes on both the Oppo Blu-ray and the Oppo DVD player. The DVD looks physically flawless, naturally. Most annoying.

  

Footnotes

1  As it rapidly approaches four years since Christa died. Not to mention my 60th year in this vale of tears :-)
2  I leave it as an exercise for the reader to discover the punchline sentiment printed inside the card in question.