2011 — 18 November: Friday

My subconscious1 told me to get up an hour or so ago. One Amazon order for a similar Netgear device to the one I borrowed from Len yesterday (at a price moderated by a very welcome recent birthday gift voucher from my cousins in Birmingham) and a couple of overnight emails have all opened up some interesting lines of inquiry on more uses I ought to be able to make with both it and my Oppo Blu-ray player. DLNA demands investigation.

I can foresee the relocation of both the Asus Eee Linux server and the Terastation NAS back upstairs2 to free up the two network slots I'll need down here in the living room. The current priority, however, is simply another cuppa. It's 07:33 and is starting to lighten up out there.

Yesterday evening's lightening up involved re-acquainting myself with Peter Tilbury's "It takes a worried man..." — a wry comedy I haven't seen since its original transmission by Thames in 1981. Excellent comic dialogue. Even better than "Shelley".

Odd

I didn't regain my accustomed gigabit network speed twixt BlackBeast and the NAS (in its new location) until I plumbed in the until-now-unused second gigabit switch upstairs. All is now (10:24) sweetness and relatively high-speed electron transfers once again. Time for "lemonses" and then a little pootle out, methinks.

Milestone?

On my return, just a few minutes ago, I note the Yaris asserts it has clocked up 30,009 miles (though it had accumulated 14 of those when it first arrived on our drive just over four years ago). It still strikes me as a little weird that Christa, who bought it for me, never actually sat in it.

I wouldn't have thought that Branagh and Mayo could discuss Colin Clark's week with Marilyn Monroe on the set of "The Prince and the Showgirl" in the mid-1950s without mentioning that he was the younger brother of Alan Clark... but they did. [Pause] Later, Dr Kermode waxed very entertainingly and mostly positively about Twiglet #4a (unlike, for example, the ghastly review I read by Bradshaw in the Grauniad). I was interested to hear him admit to tears at three points (Kermode, that is... not Bradshaw). At least three out of four Mounce nieces were looking forward to it, too.

Where's all the spam gone?

For the last several days, the volume of spam email has been very dramatically reduced. I don't miss it. And it gives me more time to read the Handbrake documentation. [Pause] Knew it was too good to be true — three or so hours later the spam tap is (as it were) turned back on.

  

Footnotes

1  Which seems to have been busy overnight.
2  Done, accompanied by a certain amount of dusting. If dust truly is mostly human skin I must be in a state of constant erosion.