2012 — 19 February: Sunday
An overnight email1 tells tall tales of a fishy massacre ("frenzy"; his word) somewhere offshore from Auckland (I gather). He always did enjoy fiddling with his maggots. I remember one memorable tobacco tin of the things that (when opened after some long while) was disgustingly packed with the flies that they had metamorphosed into before dying. Not my sport / hobby / whatever at all.
Last night's clear sky has become this morning's frosty start. It's 07:54 and a cuppa is fast becoming very necessary. To be followed by brekkie and the packing of a lunch for our walk.
I don't know...
... which is the better mental workout for a Sunday morning:
- a burst of Sudoku,
- assembling my lunch, or
- logging on to three different online banks, each with its own unmemorable user interface, to check and transfer funds as needed to keep a care-home roof over dear Mama's head for another four weeks.
All the while hoping, of course, that the temperature will continue to climb. It's only reached +2C so far (at 09:42) but the sunshine is blazing away out there. I live in hope.
And return...
... chilled pretty much to the bone at times, after 6.4 miles strolling around Horsebridge starting from the now-defunct John of Gaunt pub. We have temporarily exchanged 'hit man' movies. I've lent Mike the excellent "The American" and he's foisted "Kill List" on me, though he only assessed it at 3/10. I think he has the better deal.
It's 15:06 and the fluffy white things are still evident up there with bits of blue poking through. Only +6C though.
Live and learn
Having been asked to download a video file to see if I could then transcode it (with HandBrake) I truncated the task when I realised it was going to take over three hours just to transfer the 1.2GB file onto my system in the first place. Firefox is not — it turns out — the sort of wimpy browser that lets a little thing like a complete PC system restart get in the way of it singlemindedly completing such a download once you've kicked it off. Oh, no. First, you have to spot the fact that the 'download' is actually still beavering away quietly in the background (by eventually noticing a tiny sliver of colour making its way very very [very] slowly across the width of the browser icon on the taskbar).
Only then, by explicitly calling up the download window, can you actually club the task permanently into submission.
"Kill List", by the way, looks like utter tripe. I gave up very quickly.