2014 — 29 May: Thursday
I'll be out in search of my next batch of root veggies1 within the hour. (I got there too late last time.) And I've cunningly lined up tea and a biccie over with Roger & Eileen this afternoon no matter what the skies choose to chuck down. (I didn't like facing the rain last week.) But first things before next things: a nice, hot cuppa.
In the absence...
... of its instruction manual, I'm engaged in a bit of a running battle with the satellite receiver... (one of the satellite receivers, actually) as I'm now officially fed up with it powering off at the stroke of midnight bang in the middle of my "Late Junction". This is a new (and undesirable) habit it's getting into. Turns out there's a power-off setting I'd left on 'DISABLE' and a switch-on time that I hadn't actually set to anything. Why it can't simply stay on all the time irritates me. Mildly. Experiments continue.
It used to switch itself on at 16:00 daily (but I wasn't using it at the time so I never took that much notice). It also seems to get confused should I ever request it to record a series (not something I've done since the [not very good] "Death comes to Pemberley" last Xmas).
Today's little lesson?
My grocer contains a (male) manager held (somewhat) in contempt by the customer-facing ladies. Why? He's a little chap who likes to "strut his stuff". Indeed, he it was who "strutted said stuff" a few months ago on the very day the latest set of DIY scanning tills were introduced by arbitrarily re-assigning three of the four ladies due to be trained in their use (and, by "use" I mean "debugging their user interface idiosyncracies") to standard till duties and leaving to be trained the one lady who promptly disappeared on maternity leave... taking her new expertise with her.
That would be why the only way to remove the duplicate cooking wine entry that today's lady accidentally rescanned for me (as part of the "age checking" routine that I had pro-actively called for) was to pay for the phantom extra bottle2 and then get an immediate refund on to my card at another till. Crazy! Either that, or (my theory) the programmer carelessly failed to allow a code path for the cancellation of an item that also required an age check. One might think such cancellations would be quite a common use case requirement among our younger teenage drinkers...
I am perfecting my patient-but-grumpy old man comedy routine. Is all retail programming this dim?
Am I feeling lucky?
I signed in, registered the OS itself, their web browser, and their AV product, to get this:
I don't use the web browser, and have no other Microsoft stuff on BlackBeast. Not their best customer, I guess.
Buried (very deeply) within...
... this (fatuous) piece of "research" on the "green benefits" of video streaming over disc viewing is this tiny little killer paragraph:
"Opportunites for future research"? Yeah, right! The higher-quality Blu-rays in my little set often approach 40 Mbps (and it shows, trust me). And the second viewing of a local disc has a negligible environmental effect (except on the logic of this report).
Mr Postie...
... handed over a mixed bag. This trio of (I suspect) fluffiness...
... and this duo of (I suspect) older John Huston scratchiness...
Guess which title features "Ilya Kuriakin"? It remains to be seen if any of them can wean me away from "Weeds" at the moment, however. I'm thinking: quite probably not.