2014 — 28 April: Monday
How1 can you "catch up with every note" on the BBC's iPlayer when you already keep their radio 'on' pretty well 24x7? It's not as if that software magically makes more time available during the limited hours of consciousness, is it?
Don't mind me
I'm just disgruntled to find how tricky it is to play Blu-rays under Win8.1 Update 1 Media Center (sic) without further expenditure. Bad enough to have seen how primitive is the set of "application" software that was supplied by LG with their drive. The only thing I've currently not (yet) uninstalled is the little fella that checks on every Startup to see if there's been a firmware upgrade.2 Since the drive was manufactured all of two months ago that remains a possibility for a while. At least it's a lot quieter than its older cousin, and also is/seems now perfectly at home with CDs and DVDs.
I shall adopt the 'sour grapes' approach and stick to the Oppo player at the other end of the living room for the big-screen entertainment. The new keyboard (at twice the price of the BD drive) is a delight. Though I somehow doubt I'm stressing the ARM chip it contains.
I know I was a...
... precocious brat but, in the mid 1950s, I was still very largely unaware of — and consequently uninterested in — the sociology and class structures of the white collar world of the adults who seemed to make all the rules. Having just read this fine essay on "paper pushers"; source and snippet...
"In the case of the white-collar man," [C Wright Mills] writes, "the alienation of the wage-worker from the products of his work is carried one step nearer to its Kafka-like completion." And that alienation leads to a joyless life of frenetic consumption: "Being alienated from any product of his labor, and going year after year through the same paper routine, he turns his leisure all the more frenziedly to the ersatz diversion that is sold him, and partakes of the synthetic excitement that neither eases nor releases. He is bored at work and restless at play, and this terrible alternation wears him out."
... I find it impossible to believe that Jack Diamond's witty and insightful screenplay...
... for the 1960 Billy Wilder film The Apartment, which I picked up in Cambridge in May 1971, had been uninformed by awareness of C Wright Mills' book.
Having recently read...
... the fascinating (and plausible-sounding) update on Julian Jaynes's theories of consciousness 'evolving' from a bicameral (schizophrenic) mind, this piece by the sister of a schizophrenic paints an equally plausible but vastly different picture. I'm left, you could say, in two minds. And no wiser.
[Pause, while I nip out {safely ahead of the rain} to pick up and deliver a prescription for an ailing chum, and then make and promptly devour a spot of well-earned lunch.]
Last time...
... I heard from the right wing nut job in charge of the loonies he was alerting me earnestly (until somebody told him I'd been boundary-changed out of Eastleigh and into Winchester for voting purposes, to try to help keep that fine city right-thinking, I don't doubt) "to what I see as a key threat to Eastleigh in 2013" — namely, being descended upon by 29,000,000 Romanians and Bulgarians after 1st January 2014. Now he simply wants to take the UK out of Europe.
I shall ignore his polemic piece of waste paper and turn my attention to another bit of my snailmail, instead...
Infinitely more entertaining, though dating back to 2008, at which time it evidently flew completely under my radar.
I've just solved...
... one of the remaining Mysteries of my Universe. My wondrous, all-singing, all-dancing, plays anything you throw into it, Oppo Blu-ray player had been completely failing to select a 4:3 aspect ratio output when contending with 4:3 input material. The picture was invariably being 'stretched' to full-width, making people shorter (and fatter) than is aesthetically desirable. Turns out I'd left its output resolution set on "Source Direct". The trick is to select "Auto" and rely on its intelligence, rather than my (demonstrated) lack of same, to do the right thing. Phew!