2012 — 10 December: Monday
This morning's excellent choice of "Advent calendar" music1 was the extraordinary third movement of Cantus Arcticus, "Concerto for birds and orchestra" Op.61 by a Finnish chap called Einojuhani Rautavaara, including tape recordings of the calls of migrating birds. It was awesome. I've delayed breakfast, in fact, while netting an MP3 version of it:
Right, on with the show. Toast? Cereal? Decisions, decisions.
Speaking of which, I just spurned Amazon's "today-only" offer of a half-price copy of Photoshop Elements 11 for two reasons.
- I couldn't add it to their basket alongside my 'qualifying purchase' of the MP3 download2 because they're forcing customers to buy MP3s by the one-click purchase system (which doesn't use their blasted basket) since they introduced their (completely useless to me) Cloud Player facility, and
- Ever since my not-that-ancient copy of Elements 5 died on me (on the spurious grounds that Adobe decided it was time I sent them some more money) I've learned to live without it.
Frankly, the only thing it had going for it was the surprisingly effective "Auto Image enhance" and I've long since learned how to tweak my images by other means. I have no need of its ability to move heads onto other bodies, reduce red-eye, or any of the other silly trickery introduced in the six releases I've skipped.
Now, what about breakfast? Made your mind up yet? No? Why doesn't that surprise me?
There are some downsides...
... that Life's missing instruction manual doesn't warn you about to coming off the production line with a mildly obsessive 'completer/finisher' personality combined with a chronic inability or unwillingness to make decisions. (Of course, some cruel folk — no names, dear Mama — always chose to attribute this to laziness. Or that "butterfly" mind. Have you seen how beautiful butterflies can be?) I think I'll have honey on toast... since that's made from nectar, is it not? Tell you what: let's make another cuppa while I decide. Good idea!
Good God! There's now a Folio Society edition of Asimov's Foundation novels. I'd already noted four years ago Paul Krugman's amusing admission of his wish to be a psycho-historian. Though I'd missed this snippet last week:
There are certain novels that can shape a teenage boy's life. For some, it's Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged; for others it's Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. As a widely quoted internet meme says, the
unrealistic fantasy world portrayed in one of those books can warp a young man's character forever; the other book is about orcs. But for me, of course, it was neither. My Book — the one that
has stayed with me for four-and-a-half decades — is Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, written when Asimov was barely out of his teens himself. I didn't grow up wanting to be a square-jawed
individualist or join a heroic quest; I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon, using my understanding of the mathematics of human behaviour to save civilisation.
OK, economics is a pretty poor substitute; I don't expect to be making recorded appearances in the Time Vault a century or two from now. But I tried.
Didn't we all feel that way? :-)
Meanwhile, a sharp-eyed reader of yesterday's jotting — probably while drinking his Mazawattee coffee — reminded me, correctly, that his friend Andrew Morley's book of "Street Jewellery" contains (on page 127) a nice image of an enamel sign advertising Mazawattee tea:
I hate people with such good memories. [Pause] I must get out more; the last time I attended a workshop in Soho it was all about Dreamweaver...
Paid for by IBM, though.
Four years have now passed...
... since I visited this "Top 1000 books" list, and it remains depressingly slow to improve, as it were. Though the entry at #12 is a bit mysterious.
It seems plausible...
... to suppose that it always gets as dark, as early, at this horrid time of year. All I can say is it's mighty dreary. What my chum Val must think, living and working in Stockholm, makes me shudder. No matter. Walkies tomorrow, assuming there's any daylight, followed by a meal and film evening. I've been making some inroads today into the MP3 tagging, interspersed with a few other things. I note (for example) Carter Burwell's scores for the Twiglit films (as opposed to the soundtrack 'pop' albums) are now available, so I have snaffled the first and found it quite enjoyable. Not as enjoyable, though, as this morning's amazing Arctic concerto.
[Long pause]
Well, I've now finished artists beginning with the letter "A", and all 1,914 tracks are present, correct, counted, and accounted for. I shall load them back into a freshly emptied iTunes and see what sort of mess results this time. In other news, it's 20:34 and jolly cold out there.
[Pause, while iTunes digests.]
OK, make that 1,832 tracks or 5.4 days (the rest will be misc bits of artwork, playlists, and gawd knows what else. But the ineffable "Sort Artist" field (not, perish the thought, to be confused with/by the "Sort Artist" column function!) is still causing some screw-ups, despite the fact that it's completely and insistently invisible to both Windows Explorer and to the "Edit Metadata" facility of my CD ripping software suite. It's obviously there somewhere however, and since it can be / is selected and sorted on by iTunes it perturbs my nice alpha sorting in much the same way that Pluto upsets the orbit of Neptune. Even if it's no longer a planet.
This is starting to act to the detriment of my sanity... Winamp imports (and reports) the same number of tracks, a lot more quickly, sorts them just as fast, and shows none of the sorting perturbation ills to which iTunes seems incurably prone. Bye, bye, iTunes. Yet again.
I used to think...
... I was grumpy. Then I discovered Richard Stallman's "Political Notes". Life's too short to stay that angry. He's none too keen on Amazon, either. Or Ubuntu and its "spyware".