2011 — 22 November: Tuesday
And so, once again, one gets a chance to think "Where was I when I heard that Kennedy had been shot?"1 I was in Wilmslow, but on the Alderley Edge side, staying with a family so I could attend my last term at Cheadle Hulme Grammar School before starting at a newly-established school in St Albans. Meanwhile, my parents had what I now realise is the ghastly task of sorting out our family's relocation2 down to Harpenden to enable Dad to commute into Moorgate each day.
I was able to confirm during yesterday's visit to dear Mama in the care-home that she no longer has any accessible memories of any of this period of her life. Weird.
G'night.
Winning Formulae?
I can readily disclose my complete lack of interest in fast cars whizzing around race circuits. But huge sums of money slosh around, seemingly to the benefit of a family named Ecclestone. Meanwhile, the chap who was chairman of Northern Rock hasn't done too badly, either. Source and disgusting snippets:
Ecclestone: In court a fortnight ago, her father, the Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone, revealed that the fact that his family's offshore trust, Bambino Holdings, was controlled by his ex-wife rather than himself could have saved him "in excess of £2bn" in tax. The name suggests that the trust could have something to do with supporting his daughter's attempt to follow the teachings of St Francis of Assisi.
Ridley: Having done his best to bankrupt the blood-sucking state, he returned to his family seat at Blagdon Hall, set in 15 square miles of farmland, where the Ridleys live — non-parasitically of course — on rents from their tenants, hand-outs from the Common Agricultural Policy and fees from the estate's opencast coal mines. No one has been uncouth enough to mention the idea that he might be surcharged for part of the £400m loss Northern Rock has inflicted on the parasitic taxpayer. It's not the 1% who have to carry the costs of their cock-ups.
Back to the Future
An amusing pair of postings in a Grauniad story about those whizzing neutrinos:
Today's delicious snippet from Chris Mullin's earlier diaries. Was it really 16 years ago?
Sensational news. Barings Bank has been bankrupted by a 28-year-old trader in its Singapore office. He allegedly ran up debts of more than £700,000,000 gambling in something called derivatives and none of his superiors noticed... TV news bulletins have been full of frantic scenes of demented young spivs, on seven-figure salaries, screaming at each other across the dealing floors. God help us all if we are at the mercy of these people. What a fragile flower capitalism is.
:-)
I'm now licking...
... my (leg) wounds after another, mostly successful, skirmish with my back garden brambles. This by way of light late afternoon relief after gallivanting around earlier3 and then trying one of my ripped video files out on Brian's PS3 and (Java) ps3mediaserver combination. I must say, it behaved impeccably.
Brian's solution (basically file streaming from a storage device, via a server, to a media player that handles transcoding and video scaling as needed) requires his PS3 and server to be online. The Netgear solution I'm about to try out (which is file access, not streaming) uses my network, but only needs the NAS to be online (which it is, 24x7, up in Peter's room). The media player does its thing and presents "domestic" style digital video and audio signals at its output sockets ready for plumbing into my existing A/V system.
Having scoffed my evening meal (I was hungry) here's this morning's little haul:
I was unaware that Mr Pretor-Pinney was a co-founder of "The Idler", but it makes sense.