2012 — 5 May: Saturday
A minor 'murkle'1 this morning as, for the first time in a week, I haven't had to reboot the modem/router thingy to find out if the outside world is still, erm, outside. Not that I've bothered to look yet. The Beeb yet again played the opening to Janacek's "Sinfonietta" giving me cause to reflect yet again that it's rivalled for quality of start (and dreadful decline immediately thereafter) only by the opening to Richard Strauss' so-called tone poem "Also Sprach Zarathustra".
Or is that just me being grumpy on a grey and slightly moist morning? Probably.
I love this man!
Source, and two snippets. First, on CS Lewis:
What book had the greatest impact on you? What book made you want to write?
I don't know if any single book made me want to write. C.S. Lewis was the first writer to make me aware that somebody was writing the book I was reading — these
wonderful parenthetical asides to the reader. I would think: "When I am a writer, I shall do parenthetical asides. And footnotes. There will be footnotes. I wonder how
you do them? And italics. How do you make italics happen?"
And here he mentions one of Simon Garfield's books, and gives yet another excellent reason to excoriate Comic Sans:
My "make this last as long as you can" book is Just My Type: A Book About Fonts. It's illuminated a subject I thought I understood, but I didn't, and its chapter on the wrongnesses of Comic Sans came alive for me recently visiting a friend at a Florida retirement community, in which every name on every door was printed in Comic Sans. The elderly deserve more respect than that. Except for the lady I was visiting, widow of a comics artist. For her, it might have been appropriate.
Back to the real world, and a documentary about water supplies. By what criteria do you suppose we can justify our claim to be an intelligent species?
I like just...
... pottering around, though time does seem to disappear. We're about to plunge into the afternoon already, and I feel no sense of accomplishment. But the croissant was nice. [Pause] And the lunch. And now (14:02) it's not even raining. How's that for a Bank Holiday weekend?
There's a nice little sample available here (look under "Latest recordings") of the First Aria from Bach's Goldberg Variations. The people concerned in the recording are painstaking, to put it mildly.
My! That was quite a tasty concoction. Though I suspect you won't find it in any cookery book. It's 18:56 and a cuppa is well overdue.
When Len popped round...
... this afternoon (partly to lend me that high-resolution CD of "K2 HD" 100KHz and 24-bit music, partly to hear a little bit of a Bach cello CD recorded by the same folk I linked to above, and mostly to borrow my cute little sucker — which, amazingly, is already over five years old2 — to see if one would suit him and a continuing battle he faces with the hair of the cat[s] Boris and Ivan) we discussed (not for the first time) the various software and hardware solutions we've each tried over the years to manage and control playback of large numbers of digital music tracks.
Boris, by the way, is an ardent snooker fan:
He (Len, not Boris) still favours the Logitech Squeezebox approach (I've already tried and discarded that) pointing to a NAS box and/or Rhythmbox (or was it Banshee?) on Linux on a QuietPC. But he also showed me how easy it is to hook an external hard drive up to my Netgear media player and have it scan local USB media without involving the network at all.
Unlike the Panasonic Blu-ray player, the Netgear seems perfectly happy to continue feeding digital audio through its hdmi output even when the downstream HDCP-compliant screen is powered off (except for the obligatory hesitation while another protocol handshake occurs). So, at the moment, I've literally hung the 1TB drive that usually sticks to my Tablet PC into the front USB socket of the Netgear and am playing music files from that.
Fresh air'n'exercise tomorrow, if the feather warcast can be trusted.