2012 — 30 July: Monday
The central heating clicked on at some point overnight.1 But it's sunny now. I shall nip out for some supplies before I (or they) get too much older. Following yesterday's archaeological excavations in my fridge, however, I shan't be bothering with Thousand Island gunk. Or not for a few years, at least.
I quite like dogs, though I slightly prefer cats. However, I have no liking at all for the moronic owners of the former species; they really shouldn't allow their pets to defecate on my drive and just, as it were, walk away from — and leave me to deal with — the problem. That sours the milk of human kindness pretty quickly.
As for why Mr Postie felt unable to pop a slim Amazon package containing a CD...
... (that I'd bought just for the title track) through my letterbox on Saturday, who can fathom it? Nor why "competitors" is now "competers" on BBC 6Music. Missed that memo.
Audible post-lunch thoughts
As I've mentioned elsewhere, I have something of a hill to climb with some aspects of my audio collection. Speech items on cassette and minidisc are one hillock, and music minidiscs I laboriously dubbed from tapes that I originally laboriously dubbed from my vinyl albums are the other. As I worked my way through a small set of the latter this morning, I several times found myself on the verge of downloading MP3 equivalents just to simplify things.
Until such time as the BBC sorts out its own archives, of course, there's not even that solution for the spoken material.
The recent guest (Tim Key) on Radcliffe & Maconie mentioned his enthusiasm for Gogol's short story "The Overcoat". I'm ashamed to say I'd never read this wonderful little tale until just a few minutes ago. Its style also reminded me of the Bozman quote I put here. In the meantime I successfully (on only my third attempt) pre-ordered (and was thus treated to a second free track from) the David Byrne and St. Vincent collaboration I mentioned here.
This was in between fielding a call for help from a chap whose email application has 'stopped working', and a phishing expedition from an Indian-accented lady doing what sounded like a spot of opportunistic ambulance chasing. Time for my next cuppa, I suspect.
When I destroyed...
... BlackBeast's previous six-core AMD processor and gave it an Intel heart transplant at the end of 2011, I didn't immediately go on to re-install my Omnipage 18 OCR program because (a) I then had no current need for it, and (b) its 'Nuance Cloud' storage facility had left me both annoyed and unimpressed.
I've just confirmed that I'm still registered as a legit user, so I've now put the code back on, but this time without cluttering things up with the accompanying nuisance facility. All seems fine.2 At this rate, I shall soon earn my evening meal.
As of 23:12 I see the BBC's latest feather warcast is now showing rather more rain, and for rather longer tomorrow, than was the case when I checked earlier. We were tentatively planning our next walk and I've been forbidden to moan about the weather. But then, as I won't be walking in the rain, I won't need to, will I? I expect dear Mama will therefore be getting her next visit instead.
Gideon Coe has just played a sequence of Pink Floyd tracks from a live session 44 years ago. A couple were recordings made off-air by listeners and would otherwise have been completely lost. Amazing.