2012 — 8 July: Sunday
If this weekend has a theme1 it might just be suboptimal software.
I'm perfectly aware of that old saw about a poor workman blaming his tools — less likely in my case since I can so rarely remember where I left them, of course — but, you know what?, I had that there "Media Monkey" in the back of my PC until quite early this morning. Not any more. Its hard-wired tendency to wrest control of every media file type going, and to re-associate itself with those I'd weaned it off, finally became just too irritating.
After Windows had done its so-called "uninstallation" — and, yes, I'd said remove all traces — my trusty CrapCleaner still took four separate Registry pot-shots to finish expunging it. Not that I'm entirely convinced it's gone. It had seemed to hold some initial promise as a means of generating HTML-based music lists, but the generated code it churned out2 was nearly as bad as that awesome garbage produced in earlier years, at least, by the "Word" software that some among my acquaintance (Big Bro for one) still seem to swear by (or at?).
Speaking of whom...
... he's intending to show up on my drive in "mid-morning" which may be why I'm up at this ungodly hour. And in dire need of another cuppa already. I still shudder to recall a mid-morning over 40 years ago when I'd been dragged along to Heathrow? Gatwick? both? (details mercifully fade), toting three cameras, to help him take his precious pics of essentially identical flying machines, probably with bracketed exposures. (Still, at least I'm not the one with a 70,000 slide collection, buried somewhere amidst his postage stamps. I grapple with a mere 61,324 (I've just checked) or so music files instead — we're completely unalike, self-evidently.)
I'm genuinely curious to see dear Mama's reaction to him. (And his to her, for that matter.)
In other...
... news, I have one volume of yesterday's trilogy still to read. It's easy to see the "Twiglet" influence at work, though I've made no attempt to track down her original fan fiction material. Besides, I've yet to listen to the latest Kermode film podcast — a one-hour Wimbledon special, I gather. And Junior, making another attempt to soak up any spare time, has recommended Suits to me.
Now here's a...
... fight I'd pay to watch — Murdoch v. Hubbard:
He's turned up, though arriving from Swindon, not the airport. I gather he got into the UK (though why they let him in is anybody's guess) last Wednesday. He's now intruding on my network, and eating into my broadband's download cap, no doubt. [Pause] But he made up for it by buying a late-ish lunch after a spot of PC (his) cleaning up and some file (his) rescuing. The sun is actually shining.
We've reached one of those amiable fraternal compromises: I'm letting him watch the Wimbledon tennis on hi-def providing I can have my choice of music playing. It's a final, or some such, and has now been going for nearly three hours. Is that good? Sounds to me almost as bad as cricket, though marginally more interesting than watching paint dry.