2013 — 13 January: Sunday
My memory generally dredges up the sort of stuff that keeps me smiling within a few seconds. However, I've long known it cannot be trusted with vitally useful information (this morning's current example being the Sunday opening hours of my preferred food group supplier down the road) but one swiftly-typed search string later1 and I now know I have a good few minutes for brekkie and another cuppa (and a chance to find some socks) before I head out into the cool, dry, weak sunshine.
"All Good Things"...
... turned out to be such an interesting film that I went on to watch all the 'extras', though I didn't bother to re-watch with the commentary soundtrack. It was therefore nearly 02:30 before Bedfordshire finally claimed me. That's just one of the freedoms so great about being a retired chap. And I put the watching time to good parallel use, as I left a mammoth data backup job running. The only file out of 60,000 or so that glitched was a classical music 'm3u' playlist whose filename turned out to be too long2 for the destination device.
An erudite chum enlightens me:
You made a point about windows filenames being too long in your ¬blog. I hit this issue a while back and it is a typical microsoft cockup. The safe maximum (NTFS) is 255 characters plus the x: drive designator. However, NTFS internally can cope with longer filenames and there are ways of creating them — I think unpacking certain archive file types with already long filenames into a directory so that the total length > 255 chars will do it. The problem is that windows explorer can read and display these names but cannot create them, so if you use it to copy them the operation will fail, as will some other operations. Other software may succeed, fail or act bizarrely when presented with such filenames. I fell over it when I unpacked an archive of a book collection with deeply nested directory structures into a location already several directories deep. When I later tried to copy the result I got a slew of errors where I couldn't see what was failing because the name was too long to display properly in the error box.
So now I know. KBO.
I hafta say...
... BBC 6Music has been excelling itself so far today. Even for its usual high standards on a Sunday. It's jolly cold out there — just barely above 0C when I got back from my supplies run — but the Cupboard of Mrs Hubbard is slightly less empty, so I should be able to withstand a weather-based siege for a few days. It's already well into lunchtime territory, but I can't be bothered just yet. Not when there are a couple of gaps in my David Bowie tracks to be filled-in by some judiciously-chosen remastered3 downloads.
How on earth did I survive so long without "Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)" or "We are the Dead", for example? Beats me, chief. Not to mention the entire "Pin Ups" album. All long since cast adrift in their vinyl incarnations, of course. 30 years ago, in fact, when I sold off all my vinyl to various colleagues in the IBM Lab to help finance my acquisition of those then new-fangled CDs. When I ran out of suckers, Christa carted the remaining albums along to one of those second-hand shops that used to liven up the St. Mary's portion of Soton before Yuppie gentrification came along and ruined it. (Some might say "cleaned it up", I suppose.)
I now find, or...
... at least found at lunchtime, that a little bit of NPR can go rather a long way these days. Or is it just me becoming ever more of a curmudgeon? It's approaching 17:00 and the dim twilight suggests it's time for my curtains and blinds round. Meanwhile, with the central heating thermostat in the hallway on "20C" it's a bracing 19.9C here at the kernel of Technology Towers. Perhaps I should run on the spot for a while. Jarvis has been rabbiting on about Gurdjieff. I could wish he'd concentrate more on the music.
As I remarked to one of my lady friends while checking out the foodstuffs this morning: "I have to keep buying stuff because somebody in my house keeps eating it". Judging by the hollow feeling in the vicinity of the tum, I'm guessing that would be me. But then, it is now 19:01 or so. Where did I hide that stale crust?
I'm not repeating last night's mistake. I'm off to bed before the Chimes at Midnight. G'night.