2012 — 22 November: Thursday

A moment's contemplation1 suggests I'd better round up the Yaris, fit a saddle, and head on down to the General Store before the day is much older (and gets the chance to get any wilder). Thus the endless round kicks off again. Actually, it's not too grim out there at the moment, but the cheerful forecaster I heard in the wee small hours was basically talking about some milder variant of Ragnarok heading my way.

I've removed the most-recent hi-tech acquisition (the USB TV PVR dongle) in hopes that my annoying USB woes will disappear with it. I'm starting to believe one or two of my contacts are correct when they pour scorn on that interface. Useful though it is. The necessary cuppa will be drunk before the necessary supplies (including a new batch of crockpottery stuff) are, erm, supplied. It's just turned 08:06 and the guvmint apparently needs convincing (three defeats in the Lords may help a little) that secret hearings don't do much for open guvmint.

Yah think? [Pause] OK, phase 1 of the day's tasks completed. It's ironic to think that I nearly got collided with by another early bird in what was, essentially, an empty car park. Oh well, time for breakfast.

To see ourselves...

According to the Columbia Journalism Review (here), US commentators have been trying to explain (or, at least, describe) what's being going on / in the BBC and who Jimmy Savile was. (Example by Bill Keller here.) But that the best summary so far is that by Andrew O'Hagan in the London Review of Books. (Here.)

An unedifying tale, well told. Right! Time to stuff my little pot of crock with goodies for this evening's meal.

It seems I...

... was right about something being slightly awry in the Win8 Pro upgrade "add a free Media Centre pack" offer, in that the second Product Key that you receive direct from MS does indeed become your new Win8 Key, replacing the original one that they send you with the download. Embarrassingly for the Galactic HQ in Seattle, however, some rotten bounders have been using this entirely legitimate second Key as a way to activate (permanently) other copies of Win8 Pro obtained through less 'orthodox' channels.

Still, long ago Mr Gates said something to the effect that "If they're going to pirate stuff, I'd rather they pirated our stuff" as I'm sure he reckoned he could figure out some way of extracting revenue at some future point. Meanwhile, my removed TV PVR dongle (see above) has already been persuaded to bring some radio (albeit, currently silent) to Brian's Raspberry Pi within the space of not more than an hour of hackery. "It is," he says, "further than I've ever got with any previous such USB dongle on any of my Linux systems." I gather they generally return a null list of devices when asked to say what they make of such dongles and any software needed for them. This is therefore progress of a sort, I suppose.

Definitely time for a bite of lunch. The sun is shining, the wind isn't too bad. Where did Ragnarok go?

High-speed small balls

Last time I gave any thought to baseball — which was when I watched "Moneyball" — I don't believe I'd seen this lovely "What if?" from the XKCD chap on Relativistic baseball — the kind seen in the first "Twiglet" movie, come to think of it.

The icing on...

... this particular slice of long-awaited video "cake" — a gripping precursor to "West Wing" over two decades earlier — based on John Ehrlichman's novel2 The Company:

DVD

... was that none of Brenda's goon squad deemed it necessary to intercept the package and demand import tax, or VAT, and hence the associated £8 fee for collection of same. I don't know why it took so long to release this excellent TV series on DVD, and nor do I understand why so few people ever seem to have heard of it. I refuse to believe that anyone who watched it when it was first shown could have forgotten it. Mind you, I have to admit that Christa was always far more politically aware of what was going on in the world than I was. She opened my eyes (as it were) to many things over the years.

A tiny triumph, before I set off for the airport to collect young Mike. I've succeeded in persuading Win8 to do what I could never get Win7 to do: open a GIF file with the built-in Photo Viewer instead of a web browser. A small thing, I grant you, but a constant minor irritant (especially given that moving from a .jpg or .bmp file open in Photo Viewer I never had any issue with a .gif being opened, whereas opening a .gif first simply wouldn't invoke [or, more to the point, let me set] Photo Viewer as the default for that file type).

It's 16:45, so I'd better make a move.

My trusty Jane...

... (Austen) kept me company until Mike had been decanted from his flight, then it was into the maelstrom that is rush-hour traffic (with a 3-car bump on the big roundabout not helping much) to whizz him back up to Winchester. If this is commuting, you can stick it. Gawd knows what it's like on a Friday. It's now 20:55 and a bit wet and windy out there. But the crockpot was grand.

  

Footnotes

1  Of the deplorable state of the cupboard owned by Mrs Hubbard.
2  Not to be confused, of course, with Robert Littell's 2002 book of the same name.