2014 — 16 April: Wednesday
Unless I miss my guess1 we've been very close to an overnight ground frost. Our fragrant young Furrin Secretary is busy speechifying about the Great Russian Bear encroaching on Ukraine's sovereignty. Why do I get the feeling he's writing verbal cheques that the UK cannot really afford to cash? Why, for that matter, do I find him so hard to take seriously?
I woke up...
... thinking how exasperating it can be to give friendly patient gentle advice and guidance (my goal) when (to take yesterday's lunchtime companion as my example) the advisee is unclear on, say, the difference between a CD and a DVD, and equally unclear on whether her AOL email is accessed from within her web browser (whatever that is), or where downloaded attachments — that (Allah be praised) she knows ought not to be blindly clicked on — get put. This is all in aid of moving her along from WinXP sooner rather than (too) later...
Today's...
... lunchtime companion, by contrast, is far more likely to be the one giving me grief about my recent skirmish with Win8.1 Update 1 as he clearly felt I'd unfairly maligned Linux yesterday. At least he was suitably shocked to hear of a mutual chum also now taking that Update 1 Leap of Faith. Meanwhile, on reading through the small print that accompanied my draft will (for which I've already paid) I was amazed to discover that the partners in the solicitor's office have no qualms about charging (currently) what seems to me the outrageous hourly rate2 of £210.
In the words of the immortal Yosser Hughes: "I cud do that. Gissa job!" (Not that I want one. I'm enjoying being paid my deferred salary for pottering around.)
Speaking of jobs, it's now ...
... eight years since I heard my IBM job was on the march to India. Here's an email I sent to Carol over in New York at the time:
Did you know you could buy the services of two or more Indian Davids for one incarnation of the genuine article? We have made the mistake of saying we have 37 extra person's worth of Java work to do beyond the current plan and have been told by some doubtless macho senior exec that, although he wants all that extra good work, he can make no extra money available for same. Hence the genius idea to trade off further UK jobs against Indian ones.
My next task is to devise an imaginative exit strategy that will permit me to start picking up my IBM pension (not that it's terribly heavy) and stop going into the Lab. Preferably at about the same time, of course. Timing is, as ever, everything.
This was two months before we got the diagnosis of Christa's (second) cancer and the surgery that turned both our lives upside-down. In the face of that, IBM's resistance to the idea of my early departure evaporated.
Today's word?
It has to be the Portuguese saudade, surely? (Link.)
I have to wonder what's so satisfying about being able to fill in several hundred gaps in the "Date bought" and "Price paid" fields of my video database. Must be that damnable OCD harmonising with the "completer/finisher" aspect of my malformed personality. It's obviously time for my next cuppa.
(Partial) victory...
... is mine. The vast bureaucracy of "The Pru" is the next one to concede defeat, and register me as dear Mama's attorney etc. etc. with concomitant change of her snail mail address. Though I fail to see why they "would be grateful" for the address of her care home. I hope they're not still thinking of selling her anything. Still, two down, only four to go (one of whom — Brenda's gang of thugs — has steadfastly ignored my initial salvo).
Watching Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Beta strutting...
... its funky stuff this afternoon has revived my curiosity regarding what, if anything, keeps me on the Windows platform. If DVDProfiler is, indeed, the only native application then the sooner I complete the editing of my video master data file (and let Brian's Python parsing skills loose on it) the better. Mind you, I've never yet succeeded in running any of my flatbed scanners under Linux, which is not something I'm prepared to accept. I think just about all my other applications are pretty well catered for, one way and/or several others.
Patiently sunning themselves...
... on my front doorstep awaiting my return from a delicious steak'n'kidney pie — an occasionally welcome relief from my more usual healthy salad — in "The Wheatsheaf" were these lumps of potential entertainment:
I've already been tipped off (by the world's Greatest Living Fan) that this season of "Californication" features Tim Minchin. I look forward to it.
Little boxes, little boxes...
A chap on the radio has just said the average age of a first-time house-buyer is now 37 or 38. Looking back to April 1976 (when we moved into our little [but initially vast-seeming] 3-bed semi in Old Windsor), I was not yet 25. Quite a difference. The topic is low-energy microhomes. Fascinating.