2013 — 10 September: Tuesday
After yesterday evening's splendid birthday Indian meal1 we toddled back to Mike's to watch his new Blu-ray of the equally splendid "Sense and Sensibility" — the 1995 Ang Lee version that I initially bought in New York on LaserDisc. I confess, when I arrived back at Tech Towers in the wee small hours I immediately spent 30 minutes combing through the 648 titles on offer in Amazon's current "2 for £10" deal to try to find something else to add to my own replacement copy of S&S and eventually alighted on "Copying Beethoven". Ed Harris (whom I watched in "The Abyss" a week or so ago) as Ludwig van B? I shall watch with wonder...
Tea, breakfast, and a tad of further supplies, in that order, should see much of the currently sunny morning accounted for. What a fascinating life, heh? :-)
Made slightly more fascinating...
... by the increased idling speed of the Yaris since its service, and (probably a Good Thing) by its more sprightly brake responsiveness. Already put to good use when one of the local idiot Mercedes oncoming drivers rounded a local blind bend, at some speed, and annoyingly occupying half of "my" lane as he was dodging the brambles on his side by two metres or so. Had I not slowed as I habitually do at that bend he could have had blue paint streaks down the side of his white bully boy vehicle. I do sometimes wonder what people think the white line painted down the middle of the road is for. Xmas decoration?
On top of which...
... I had already failed, yesterday afternoon, to deduce the "Butcher Bay Post" tabloid-style punning headline...
From the Sub-lime to the Riddick ewe-less
...from the clues supplied by my ex-ICL Mensan chum Ian, who incorrectly (for once) assumed I was familiar with the Chronicles of someone (or something?) called Riddick. I shall hang my head in shame. And entertain myself with the evolutionary case for great fiction. Source and snippet:
In addition to travelogues, stories also offer nuanced thought maps. An imaginative foray into another person's mind can foster both empathy and self-awareness. This heightened emotional intelligence might, in turn, prove useful when forming friendships, sniffing out duplicity, or partaking in the elaborate psychological dance of courtship ... which brings us back to the second Darwinian evolutionary imperative: Getting laid.
So that's what it's all about! I often wondered.
I find myself...
... increasingly at odds with some (most?) aspects of this Brave New Digital World. All I wanted to do (on this occasion) was transfer the Amazon Kindle ebook2 files I've bought into my Calibre library. Not even because I need to, more because I see no good reason why I shouldn't be able to. The DeDRM plugin works fine, but Amazon went to considerable trouble to hide the files from me... and I have enough trouble finding files at the best of times.
Case in point: I've already misplaced a set of six David Sedaris downloads, as I quickly discovered (on trying to search for them) that when I last re-built the Copernic desktop search index I (probably foolishly) decided not to re-index all the MP3 files to save space. I shall fix this in the next day or so — assuming MicroSpit's next batch of security patches3 and bug "fixes" doesn't total poor old BlackBeast — as Copernic are just about to release Version 4 upon a grateful world, and I've already pre-ordered it (a fun process with French web forms, initially).
Well, two reboots and 100MB or so later, it still seems to be running... And I've also been heartened by potentially good news from two of my potentially poorly good friends, and much refreshed by a couple of mugs of tea and some strange chocolate and cranberry biccies with Roger & Eileen. Tonight's curry is now quietly digesting, too. This is all goodness.
As, too, is the belated realisation that finding a small set of audio files is a whole lot easier if someone round here doesn't tuck them away in a tree structure supposedly only used for video files. Doh!
Typical
No sooner have you finished re-generating the Copernic index than you get your new serial key for the new Version 4 and a new download link. Earwiggo again.