2013 — 11 May: Saturday

My furry friend Boris (he shares joint four-legged custody of Len with his brother Ivan) must clearly be suffering from the carers' depression1 that GPs are now being warned to watch out for as he's just spent his first night on the tiles. Len has yet to uncover his escape tunnel.

All that "quantitative easing"...

... pumped into the economy by printing digital money and thereby diminishing — further — the residual value of the small heap of the 'real' stuff in my jamjar under the bed has apparently failed to fill a £25,000,000,000 capital shortfall shared by UK banks if the "new, improved" Prudential Regulation Authority is to be believed. Still, newly downgraded to "junk bond" status Co-Op is already on the case:

We do acknowledge like the rest of our banking sector peers, the need to strengthen our capital position in light of the broader economic downturn and the pending introduction of enhanced regulatory requirements and we have a clear plan to drive this forward throughout the coming months.

Rupert Neate and Jill Treanor in Grauniad


That's OK then. Move along. Nuffin' to see here. Go make some breakfast and another cuppa.

Life's too short...

... to tussle with Win8Pro's warped ideas of how to behave with an unswitched-on third desktop screen (that happens to be a bit bigger than the average screen, and live at the other end of the living room). Today's misadventure happened when I inadvertently stabbed the "off" button on BlackBeast instead of the DVD eject button on the external drive that sits (clarification: sat) atop it.

I was able (clarification: I thought I would be able) to recover by selecting "Cancel" when various running applications lined up in a row and said "Waiting for Shut down". My Firefox web browser, however, was too quick off the starting block, got itself confused, and disappeared in a sulk (I eventually discovered) on said unswitched-on third desktop screen without a polite word of warning.

The sulk persisted through both a reboot, and a PC shutdown, before it belatedly occurred to me to switch on the Kuro plasma screen there to reveal (after the initial green screen of failure while an initial HDCP protocol handshake signally failed to signal things were OK — everything normal there) the hiding browser (and email) screen. Still, at least it had remembered to use the correct resolution.

I'm off out...

... for an evening of video entertainment on a large screen a few miles away. Just as well; I was getting a bit bored filling the last of the current set of eight CaseLogic folders with my CDs. 1,552 and counting.

  

Footnote

1  About 7,000,000 people in the UK are currently providing unpaid care and "saving" £119,000,000,000 per year so that mysterious public purse can afford a couple of new aircraft carriers and tax concessions to the greedy few. The chairwoman of the Royal College of GPs suggests that keeping carers well enough to keep on caring could save even more money. (Link.)