2013 — 30 June: Sunday
How can it already be halfway through the year?1 Amazing.
I've long had...
... a (possibly unhealthy) interest in printing machinery. (Recall that John Bull printing outfit I mentioned a while ago.) So when my eye was caught by the name "Adana" in a beautifully-written essay, how could I resist? It's a name from my past. I lingered long over the adverts I saw for their miniature table-top model as a kid. Probably in "Meccano" magazine. The Adana came, it seems, from Twickenham, but one of the models I'd not heard about is now to be found in a Hong Kong community centre 'museum':
Along a narrow raised platform, two Heidelberg printers lie on their backs like overturned beetles. Their knobs and arms poke stiffly into the air, the greased black shells silent and still. Around the corner, the rest of the Wai Che company sits under lights on a separate platform. Held up by their original rusty tables, covered in a fine layer of machinery dust, sit the Blueprinting Machine, the Eyelet Machine, the Hand-Press Printing Machine, the Lead Sheet Cutter, and the Electrical Long-Reach Stapler. The Adana Thermograph originally came from Twickenham, England, at least according to the plaque; it was used to emboss business cards by flash-melting white powder. A conveyor grille over the top once sucked the powdered cards inside and spit them out again, gleaming, tattooed with raised type. A cardboard box nearby is full of brass tacks.
The piece here, by Ronnie Bray, has more. Possibly too much more for some tastes, but I still find it fascinating.
Breakfast today is the final cinnamon2 and raisin hot cross bun I discovered shivering on the neglected "quick freeze" shelf of my freezer yesterday. I'm pretty sure it's from this year. Very tasty, too, with a generous amount of low-sugar orange marmalade.
Its author...
... describes the list here as very boring. He's quite wrong, of course. And I'm pleased to note that the Zeroth Law has also now made it into the Encyclopedia.
It doesn't generally take...
... me very long to tot up my assets. In general, I find that by applying Micawber's Principle to my economic life things usually seem to work well. Which is perhaps why I remain utterly bemused, disgusted, and even aghast at the tales of greedy boardrooms here.
"How much is 'enough'?" is a question that never seems to get asked as I remind myself, yet again, of what JK Galbraith said, years ago: The salary of the chief executive of the large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
Triggered by yet another unwanted and unwelcome 'beep, beep' SMS from my ISP imploring me to take advantage of £6 worth of something or other, I've just called my landline from my mobile to reassure the bozos that, yes, my mobile is still in the land of the living — though barely. I wonder how much 'credit' remains in its little purse?
That was an unpleasant...
... "first" for me. Somehow (and all I'd done beforehand was refresh the level of my LibreOffice application) my Xara artworks program decided its installation folder was now damaged, and all it would do was display Error code -6 and suggest I reinstall it. And contact "Support" if that didn't fix things. All once again seems to be well, and I even promptly updated the code after its initial installation from my CDROM. But it's still disquieting when it happens, as it clearly shows how fragile all these bytes are.
Light begins to dawn. I've just had to re-enter the registration key for the DTP program I rarely run these days. I suspect the Acronis image of the system disk may have misplaced a few key Registry entries when popping that image on to the new SSD. More plausible alternative theory: some of my applications were locked to a specific hard drive ID, though that doesn't explain why Xara had been running OK with the SSD in place.