2013 — 31 May: Friday
I think I shall stop wondering how it can possibly be teetering on the brink of June already.1 I shall also — in light of this from a chum who doubtless fears for my sanity — waste no more time beyond briefly considering the possibility that said chum may have been the most recent updater less than 48 hours ago.
After all, with a visit pending from the young man whose own "origin of life" I have no doubt about, why ponder any more deeply or more widely? I'm already over the disappointment of last night's distinctly ropey centenary performance of Stravinsky's "Sacre"... Ever onward.
Try as I might...
... and I've been trying mightily until I've found it a mite trying, I seem unable to persuade the Kindle App on my Android Tablet PC to show any interest in downloading my latest acquisitions. They got to the "real" Kindle easily enough, were also easily downloadable from the mysterious Cloud (or "Archive") to the Kindle for PC program on BlackBeast, but have stubbornly refused to go near the Tablet. It's starting to irritate me.
Perhaps a breath of fresh air will give me some thoughts on a new line of attack? [Pause] Failing that, it also helps if you "Manage your Kindle" from the Amazon page, force downloads to your Android device, and remember to press the refresh icon on the damned thing. I've also found out how to delete all the unwanted "furrin" dictionaries. Easy peasy.
Time...
... for tea, while pondering this. Source and snippet:
He proposes to validate what we already know — those of us who wear wristwatches, cross the days off our calendars, mourn the past, pray for the future, feel in our bones the march of time or the flow of time. We unphilosophical naïfs, that is — known for short as the "man on the street."
Well, I don't know about the "praying" but I can vouch for the old bones. And the philosophical naivety :-)
"Everybody knows" that...
... it's dangerous to leave a loose satellite cable dangling unconnected as surplus cosmic rays doubtless spray out of the thing all over the far end of my living room causing havoc with the wallpaper (which, in my case, I 'ave not got) and the tropical fish (which, ditto). So, having so (excuse the pun) signally failed to persuade any of my FreeSat boxes to play nice with it — the other end is attached to the Sky minidish but I've re-aligned that to pick up my 24x7 NPR digital radio feed from 13°E — I decided to browse around Mr Maplin's cheerful cave to see what I could find.
For less than some of my chums spend on a couple of bottles of (admittedly, good) wine I picked up an IceCrypt S1500C (no, it's a new one on me, too) and shall be hooking it up after the kiddiewinks have returned to their Den of Iniquity in the Smoke. Meanwhile, I'd really better fix the hole in my tum before mentioning anything else. It's already 13:58 and I'm a mite famished. Very nice weather out there, I must say.
Pregnant pause
Or (of course!) I can simply grab a light, hot, meal and then struggle my way through Yet Another Ghastly User Interface. Result? Having plumbed in
Eutelsat 13B Transponder 111 10.722 GHz Horizontal 29.9 MSymbol Audio PID 1208
Or, at least, as much of it as it seemed willing to permit, and then kicked off an automated search, there — in the middle of about 550 radio channels — is good ol' NPR Worldwide and Diane Rehm coming in loud and clear a mere 229 entries down the list... just in time to hear about all these ricin letters flying around in the US of A.
And, even better, the hdmi audio signal doesn't insist the Kuro Plasma screen has to be on. Though I'm actually quite content to use the analogue audio feed. It's only a (mostly speech) radio station, after all's said and done. But it's still very nice to have it back.
Anything else?
Well, following tea and a snaffled Danish pastry with R&E, plus tales of Ivan's latest trick...
In the kitchen just now when Ivan struts in, jumps on the counter, sticks his paw in the dishwasher tablet box, hooks out a tablet, picks it up in his mouth by the corner of the packet, struts back to the top of the stairs, drops it and gives it an almighty belt with his paw — immediately setting out in pursuit down the stairs.
... I can report that I also succumbed (predictably) to the following morsels of minor-league temptation in the "other" Waterstone's:
Here's my first...
... published poppy photo of this year...
... I was out in the you-should-excuse-the-term "garden" wreaking havoc with my giant scissors on both the sycamore and oak that had immigrated without permission into my bog garden and were already both nearly as tall as me. Shelagh had warned me to deal with them before they got their green cards; she'd spotted them yesterday evening while digging up a few samples of a new blue flower that has sprung up for the first time this year. In both the front and back flora spaces. In vast numbers.
Could they be triffids?