2012 — 15 July: Sunday
Today's intrepid trio of New Forest walkers1 won't be needing a packed lunch as it's a mere 5 miles. So, a leisurely cuppa before my breakfast while I ponder some of the thoughts my subconscious was obviously busy with overnight.
I'm not entirely happy with the Media Monkey HTML "reports" I generated yesterday for all my MP3 files here as they needed quite a lot of tinkering, during which I could have been doing something more enjoyable. So the ghost in my machine seems to think it may now be time to explore the spreadsheet output route. Of course, as I don't have Excel, this means I shall have to grapple with Office Libre's equivalent. And whether that can be persuaded to generate satisfactory output2 remains to be seen.
There's also the possibility of CSV files (though personally I prefer tab-separated as I can do more with those with less work). And my present Life is generally all about less work, trust me.
But Naomi, 'twas it...
... ever not thus? I doubt it. Source and snippet:
The New York Times business section on 12 July shows multiple exposes of systemic fraud throughout banks: banks colluding with other banks in manipulation of interest rates, regulators aware of systemic fraud, and key government officials (at least one banker who became the most key government official) aware of it and colluding as well. Fraud in banks has been understood conventionally and, I would say, messaged as a glitch. As in London Mayor Boris Johnson's full-throated defense of Barclay's leadership last week, bank fraud is portrayed as a case, when it surfaces, of a few "bad apples" gone astray.
Rotten fruit everywhere you look, heh? Weren't bank officials and doctors among the small set of chaps deemed of sufficient probity to witness your passport application at one time? And, you know what? I still can't take young Boris seriously in a serious, grown-up, job even though he obviously can.
Several hours and...
... a few miles later, I'm back at Technology Towers, having dodged the showers for a gentle amble around Winsor and Newbridge. Good to see, and catch up with, our elderly companion. A quick snack lunch, using those of the tomatoes that hadn't become completely discombobulated by freezing in my fridge, the chunk of cheddar that's lasted remarkably well, and the dregs of the Marmite from the (dreadful) squeezy bottle. Zero points for style, but I hate to waste food. I shall pig out on a whole grapefruit for 'pud'. I can be quite low maintenance at times.
Can BBC 6Music get any better than having Marianne Faithfull as a DJ for a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon? I rather doubt it. Time to re-read her 1994 autobio "Faithfull", I guess.
I don't make a habit...
... of collecting "Error 404 (page not found)" web pages — though some are undeniably amusing — but I stubbed my cyber toe against this one yesterday...
... while trying to access a Dropbox link that a chum had sent me to pick up a file from him ahead of our next lunch meeting. For probably obvious reasons it immediately brought to mind two things: the Robert Heinlein 1940 SF short story '..and he built a crooked house...' about a house constructed as a tesseract, and the front cover of my edition of Thomas Kuhn's rather turgid book. (Reminder here.) And, come to think of it, a similar (though more symmetric) image was used by HP many years ago for a programmable calculator advert. Best not to go back there. The last thing I need is to re-awaken my somewhat obsessional interest with those fascinating devices.
These were two of my bibles at the time...
Try inverting that barely legible number 57738 57734 40 for a giggle.
It helps if you use a seven-segment font, of course.
I never thought...
... MediaMonkey would be so prissy3 as to stop me from exporting all my lovely MP3 file data in the format of an Excel spreadsheet just because it can't find Excel on my system. What's wrong with the 'calc' spreadsheet in LibreOffice 3.5.5 that I've downloaded and installed for just such files? I truly hate being second-guessed by programmers. I shall nibble away at this problem until I have solved it, or until the Heat Death of the Universe — whichever occurs first.
In fact, the HTML export of a spreadsheet into which I've just loaded a comma-separated test file doesn't look too bad at all. Watch this space. Meanwhile, it's 21:01, my evening meal is a partially-digested pleasant memory, and I think it's now time to change my mode of entertainment.