2011 — 21 November: Monday
I shall aim for an early night, methinks.1 The yawn frequency is already high, and still increasing. G'night.
Monday morning
In the face of a depressingly well-argued piece like this, I keep thinking of that old saw: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be." And now the guvmint is yet again poised to solve the housing crisis,2 this time by 'shifting the "loan-to-value" ratio' which apparently means permitting loans of up to 95% of the "value" for first-time buyers. Though quite how "value" is assessed in a broken market isn't clear.
Who'd be a youngster these days, heh? Tea, Mrs Landingham. I need tea. [Pause] And I'd like the new CD by Kate Bush to be delivered, please, Mr Postie. Preferably before I visit the care-home.
Home again...
... in unpleasantly grey drizzle following, in no particular order, some further video file discussions3 with Len, a lunch (accompanied by Ms Bush and her 50 Words For Snow), and my latest visit to dear Mama. I need to sort out her Winter Fuel Payment as the guvmint is proposing to pay her £300 though I have a feeling they may not wish to given that she's no longer directly paying winter heating bills. But first Mr Pension Service needs to know her present circumstances, who I am, and what my relationship is to her. (I wonder if they'd accept "fraught"?) Fair enough. Another bit of bureaucracy to add to the pile. No rush. I'm retired, you know.
I left a DVD ripping away, as it were, on BlackBeast. The only way of further shaving bits off the elapsed time would be to copy a bunch of DVDs onto a hard drive before feeding them in a batch to Handbrake to rip to a second drive, hard drives being rather faster than even SATA DVD drives (I suspect). But since with the latest ripping parameters I'm already seeing well nigh 100% cpu on all six cores I'm not sure the time gained would outweigh the time spent on the initial copying, though that could certainly be a background task.
It's a fine thing...
... when the mere act of updating a chap's anti-viral signature files is enough to provoke a BSOD. Grrr. But the new Kate Bush CD is a lovely piece of work. I'm just coming to the end of my second complete 'listen'. She's one of a kind.
As is Jane Austen. Mind you, a chap can't spend his retirement re-reading nothing but Austen, can he? So I've just got the round tuit needed to tackle the third volume (chronologically, the earliest) of the excellent Chris Mullin diaries I mentioned here.