2013 — 7 January: Monday
Dear Mama hits the big "96" today.1 I seem to have forgotten to buy her another helium-filled balloon. Again. Don't understand it. And, having checked my account (rich again!) I also conferred with Uncle ERNIE who tells me he's boosting another £25 in my direction later this month. Ev'ry little helps.
Recall my spooky psychic ability to pick up mistakes in books back from the printer by opening them at random? I'm afraid it extends to displays of MP3 files in my WinAmp index. Having loaded a total of 39,986 tracks into WinAmp after my initial pass through subfolders "A" to "Z" (and I know I've yet to tackle the recently-disinterred "World" music tracks, among others) I spotted a duplicate on the first screen I examined. Still, the bulk of the clean-up exercise is now complete.
And my need for sleep is now (01:43) becoming urgent.
Resuming, shortly before...
... I go offline while upgrading my WinSCP web server access tool, why on Earth do you suppose Win8 suddenly decides to hang its "Homegroup" control on my nearly pristine desktop? I only want stuff on my desktop that I put there, thanks all the same. Of course, when I come to capture the left-hand half of my desktop...
... I see that "Homegroup" has oozed back under its stone2 somewhere in the primordial swamp where it habitually lurks. The joys of Windows, heh? Oh well. Better load some breakfast before my next little supplies foray. I've been waiting for the "back-to-school" hordes of Chelsea tractors etc to disperse first.
A painless upgrade to WinSCP 5.1.3 — well done, Martin.
Good grief!
Lunchtime? Again? Already? What's going on? All I've been doing is arranging for my car to see its doctor (this Friday) for a "guaranteed unnecessary" minor operation while I wait. And dispersing another few MP3s ripped from compilation CDs into the semi-chaos of my 'library' of same, where they better belong. Eliminating 38 duplicates along the way. I've also just given in and re-closed my patio door. It's all very well enjoying fresh air, but the gap was lowering the living room ambient just a little too far (below 20C) for sedentary comfort.
Right! Talk to me about lunch, David. How about one of those nice brown bread rolls with a thick smear of my newly-bought smoked venison pâté with redcurrant and port? Sounds good to me. Particularly with extra redcurrant jelly. Go for it. Knock yourself out :-)
Resuming "work"
<Sigh>
I could make a case for there having been some criminally-negligent meta-tagging going on in some of the free data bases dotted around the Web. Example: a confusion between Jeffrey Foucault's "Ghost Repeater" and Richard James' "I wait for your love". I mean... a Wisconsinonian country rocker and the Welsh founder member of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. Come on, how much more flaming disparate could two chaps be? How does that sort of confusion even happen?
More tea for my fevered brow, methinks. Quickly.
Late evening shock to the system
Someone needs to explain how it can possibly be 30 years since Andrew Powell did his Philharmonia Orchestra versions of the music of the Alan Parsons Project. It doesn't bear close scrutiny. Let alone thinking about. "I think I need" (in the words of the Hugh Grant character — just after the second wedding — in one of my favourite films) "to go and be where other people are not". No, wait, hang on, I'm already there :-)
And, for the nth time, iTunes has been tried, weighed, and found wanting. Off with its head! Nasty software.