2014 — 11 January: Saturday
It's looking reasonably promising — at this time of the year, "promising" merely means solid phase hydrated oxygen not being blown into our faces — for our planned walk a bit later this morning. I'm going to assume that the bright things1 dangling from my decorative Japanese cherry tree and the rim of the two bins are water rather than ice. Where are my boots?
The sun...
... has appeared, the breakfast has disappeared. Multiple layers of clothing have been donned. Time to go get me some fresh air...
[Six mile long pause]
And back, just in time to ponder why my (minimised) email client now wants to re-maximise on to the 60" Kuro plasma at the other end of the room rather than the nice convenient desktop 24" Dell it had been on when I minimised it before setting off on my walk. There's been no internet 'outage' for over 15 days, the Kuro isn't powered on. Perhaps my mistake was to switch off the two Dells? Blackbeast had also lost all its application thumbnails and resized a couple of applications I did leave running. All most odd.
Except that I'm contending with Windows, of course.
As an experiment...
... five years ago, I bought a copy of the Grauniad, but noted very little therein with the exception of a piece by Sara Maitland on her literal quest for peace and quiet. I subsequently bought her book. The only other writing I know her for is the short story "Moss Witch" that I heard Hannah Gordon reading as part of a national short story competition four years ago. Today, Maitland is back with a new book. Whether she's developed her arguments in favour of the solitary life any further, I don't know.
I've lived alone, of course, since Christa died. But I take some care not to isolate myself. No man is an island, etc etc
For my future reference
I've just confirmed that the new Oppo can indeed be changed from one Blu-ray Zone to another (and back) by switching it on, without a disc inserted, and using the following six-key press sequence, in fairly quick succession, on the remote control:
Dimmer, Dimmer, Dimmer, Mute, "n", power off
where "n" is either 1, 2, or 3 for Zones "A", "B", or "C". I've also confirmed that it will not play a Blu-ray that doesn't match the Zone it is set to. Fair enough. Multi-region DVD playing capability seems (as before, on my earlier BDP-83) to come along for the ride automagically.
The only video file type it won't play is an ISO (a feature that was removed, I gather, at the explicit request of Hollywood), though it also fails to recognise an Ogg Vorbis audio soundtrack embedded in an mp4 format video file. Other than that, it's loaded for bear and good to go (as it were).
Mad, profligate...
... chap that I am, I've just taken a gamble on three potentially-interesting titles for my future entertainment: Better than sex (2003), Burning Man (2011), and a short-lived TV series, The Unusuals. Fingers crossed.