2012 — 10 September: Monday
Glumly contemplating the hollow shell1 in my kitchen, I can easily predict a round of "Hunger Games" in my near-term future unless I nip out to my grocer. (Mike liked the film last night but despised the amount of hand-held camera work, by the way.) I am now well into book two of the trilogy, but can't say it's the most congenially soothing bedtime reading. And, speaking of panem et circenses, I gather the festive spasms in our own "Capitol" have finally drawn to a close. I've managed to dodge almost all coverage of the 'sport' and listened to just a few of the Prom concerts.
Just call me "Curmudgeon."
We've arranged to rendezvous later this morning for our next walk. It will be cooler and damper than last week's, which I'm hoping will discourage further blisters. I have a sheet of moleskin on order but will have to improvise until it arrives. (Been there, done that.)
Buried in...
... this interesting 'Chronicle' essay by David Halperin is an amusingly paradoxical assertion: "Sometimes I think homosexuality is wasted on gay people." (Link.)
[Pause]
The morning clouds and drizzle don't bode too well, but there are always cobwebs to be blown away, and fresh air helps that process. Let's see if I can scrape together a packed lunch to help keep (blistered) body and (battered) soul2 together :-)
Sitrep
The blister covering did its job, the car was still unvandalised after our six mile loop near Old Alresford, and we got back ahead of anything more serious than a few blasts of drizzle. So now (14:27), having just lunched and cuppa-ed, I'm free to contemplate the rest of the day — starting, naturally, with the afternoon. That supplies shopping isn't going to do itself, is it? I also just downloaded the David Byrne / St. Vincent collaboration that I ordered a while back. They could have done a better job (any job at all, in fact) on the MP3 meta-tagging.
While I was...
... gallivanting around in the Hampshire countryside, it seems poor old 'molehole' was off the air for a while. I can't do anything about this, of course, as the server lives in Texas amidst (I suspect) many hundreds of others, and I have not the first clue about any form of remote admin (or even if that is countenanced) by the particular ISP (chosen by my son, who also — bless 'im — pays their hosting fees). Sorry about that.
As it happens, a mildly geeky morning is on the cards tomorrow. I've enlisted Brian's help to give the Wee Whitey web server a wash'n'brush-up with the latest build of the LTS Ubuntu server. As I'm no longer using this dinky netbook to serve music or photos I can also unhook the 1TB drive (which I have my beady eyes on for another task) and substitute a little 4GB USB stick just to hold the 12,000 or so web pages that I host internally. The 1TB drive will do very nicely when locally attached to the Netgear media player which has an annoying habit of finding lots of shares on my network without useful content. By simply pointing it to the local USB drive that will become a non-issue.
If they only knew...
... the low regard I have for the concept of doing my banking on a mobile phone...
... they might change their marketing tune. These are the bozos who require me to have a mobile just so I can be sent secure text message codes confirming transactions. I would feel a great deal more charitably inclined toward them if they paid a decent rate of interest on what little savings I have, instead of pestering me to pay them several pounds a month for a current account stuffed full of (to me) worthless benefits.
Later
Book 2 of the Hunger Games trilogy done with, book 3 well under way. Excellent stuff :-)