2013 — 18 September: Wednesday

For by no means the first time1 BBC Radio 6Music has extended the boundary of my musical knowledge. And cost me another 89p. The pre-breakfast show chap played a song by a once-popular beat combo that (I thought) I recognised. After yesterday evening's "Freddie Mercury" tribute concert, I certainly recognised the voice of Seal. But it was not quite as I'd thought. Turns out (as everyone but me already knows) that Adamski and Seal wrote this initial version of "Killer" before Seal went on to perform his own version for his first album a year later.

And, because it's...

... just the crazy, madcap kind of completeist2 I am, I've just ordered a CD of "Volksbeat" by Nina Hagen to get my ears on another version. Better make some breakfast before I get too carried away. The weather is currently not inviting for today's planned walk, but there's still a couple of hours for it to brighten up.

Having first whizzed out on a tiny shopping trip it's now time to pack a lunch, and don my walking rags. The sun is actually shining, too. TTFN.

Battered but not beaten

I'm back at Technology Towers; the laundry is laundering; the bod is sluiced; the next cuppa downed; the rest of the lunch polished off, and the treatment of what, on closer inspection last night, turned out to be the verruca under my right foot is now under way... "bazuka that verruca" having (this morning) managed to snaffle a fresh tube of the magic gel that was less than five years past the expiry date of my last little batch.

I've been lent a variety of good audio/video stuff to keep my spirits up, and will report in due course. The sun managed to shine occasionally. The drizzle managed to stay away. And, yesterday afternoon, half my grape vine snapped its moorings and is now disgracefully draped across quite a lot of the concrete path in front of my kitchen window. Still, at least this solves the 'problem' of pruning the damn' thing. And I can now see out of the kitchen window too — which is an added bonus, I guess. Oh, and after briefly reviewing my data indexing strategy with my two techno-chums, I've decided to forego the dubious advantages of a web browsing history file that is re-indexed daily at the cost of one hour of extremely sluggish performance from my main data drive.

I'm therefore doing other things while the Copernic indexes are rebuilding, I hope, for the last time. I'm including all document and data files, all MP3s, and all emails. I can generally manage to find all the other stuff — photos, videos, entries in the browser history — without any great exertion or difficulty.

Here, puss, puss

A youngster from #5 has just (20:40) politely asked me to keep an eye out for his little sister's missing ginger kitten. I gather it made an unexpected dash for freedom. I'm happy to do so since I still remember being upset as a child each time my tortoise Ted3 would set off on his two-mile jaunt to a local farm he clearly preferred. We eventually decided he might just as well be allowed to stay there, as the heart of a tortoise wants what the heart of a tortoise wants, just like anyone else.

Did you know Hawkwind's "Assault and Battery, Part 1" has exactly the same four-note chord sequence as Roxy Music's "In every dream home, a heartache"?

Last time I needed...

... to unpack a .RAR archive I annoyingly picked up some malware (or, more accurately, some malware misguidedly tried to clamber aboard the Good Ship BlackBeast). That's what can happen when trying to find a free alternative to WinRAR. Happily, now that I've learned that my Linux Mint has built-in support for .RAR archives I've been unpacking the files on my Laptop PC and will then simply move the external drive I'm using over to my Win8 system. I freely admit that Linux gets some things more nearly right than Windows does.

I could even have done the unpacking on BlackBeast by running my VirtualBox Linux Mint system, but it gave me a chance to pick up the latest batch of Linux patches, and top up the battery's level of charge. Two birds with one stone, and all that.

  

Footnotes

1  Though, at least, the first time this morning.
2  As I was updating my little "list" of videos to reflect yesterday's spree in HMV, I had to smile (weakly) when noting that my LaserDisc copy (which then displaced my original VHS tape copy — of course) of "Some like it hot" had clocked in at £29-99 on 17 July 1992. Not that that was anything like the most I ever paid for a LaserDisc... I must be mad.
3  Himself, a replacement for the earlier trio of "Winkin", "Blinkin" and "Nod".