2013 — 29 December: Sunday
Another delectably late kick-off1 on a sunny but even frostier morning. Thanks to a tip from Brian I've just snaffled one of the daily Kindle deals: "The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets" by Simon Singh. Bringing my Amazon UK total orders to 289 (apparently) so far this year. This is evidently a clear inversion of that neat little couplet:
I'm tired of books and still more tired of rhyme, But money gives me pleasure all the time.
Since last night, I now have another three episodes of "Green Wing" tucked under my belt (as it were) and am still delighted with it. I was also delighted to hear from a couple of my ex-colleagues (Paul[ine] and Brynja) though their news is by no means uniformly cheery. Life, heh? Not particularly mysterious, but sometimes rather brutal.
There are some smiles here. Mind the blowfly.
As I've mentioned...
... one of my (uniformly charming) third-line managers in IBM once found it necessary — in a meeting — to call me a nit-picking pedant. (I chose to regard this as a compliment on my attention to detail, but let that pass. Besides, he was a guitar-playing Christian with a PhD, so I wasn't particularly interested in his opinions.)
So what? Well, back in April 1991, which was a time when the nearest Microsoft's pathetic font-handling could get to anything even half-way reasonable was to load a set of pre-generated bitmaps of fonts that could be any size you liked (providing it was one of the sizes that had been pre-generated), I was enjoying the contrast of home computing life using my Acorn Archimedes A440 RISC OS PC, with its integrated, anti-aliased, scaleable, font manager. I was using it to do some very fine DTP work. Mostly for my own entertainment. I'd just been to the annual Acorn Computer Show and learned there that the Electronic Font Foundry had cooked up a version of Caslon.2 I ordered it.
Here's the salient part of a snail mail exchange that ensued:
Via the miracles of technology...
Click the pic to see the reply :-)
In a moment...
... of weakness last night I cracked, and scoffed two of the posh chocolate ginger biscuits Peter and Peter's g/f had popped into my Xmas stocking:
166 calories? Blimey! Tasty though.
From the...
... interview I unearthed yesterday with Barry Diller (who is, I notice, not to be found on IMDB):
This would have been 1988 or 1989.
From an online...
... mini-variant of one of my quirkier books — David Whiteland's charming "Book of Pages" — now out of print, apparently. Pity. Still, I'm pretty sure I gave a second copy of it to my chums Chris and Gill back in 2000.
Does this also apply to the AIs in the curious world of the "Culture"? If I ever succeed in finishing one of the all-too-many books by Iain M Banks I suppose I might find out. I'm not proud of being such a prejudiced dilettante...
Were you to ask me...
... what other book in my little library does Whiteland's resemble, I think it would be "Filipino Food" by Ed Badajos.
Only now available from auctions, it seems, and horribly expensive. I bought my copy as a student in Hatfield in 1972. Cost me £1-20 — tee-hee.
Nearly time I wasn't here, as I'm due over in Winklechestershire for a meal and a film this evening.