2014 — 5 October: Sunday
There's generally a more pleasing ratio of music to talk1 earlier on a Sunday morning. Even a Wagner overture is can be tolerable before I venture out on to the web.
Exhausted by all my...
... successful energy supply tariff-switching yesterday evening, I somehow neglected to note — before tottering up the stairs to Bedfordshire — that a number of my pre-birthday video treats had all shown up on my front doorstep together while I'd been out bringing the One True Word of Windows 8.1 to Iris. The parcels also included this entertaining, and partly BBC-financed, title2...
... that Christa and I had borrowed from Brian a while back. (If seven and a half years ago constitutes "a while" these days. It probably does.) Clearly I'd failed to follow through on my original intention to order my own copy. But then the early days of retirement were, alas, quite largely taken up with the dear girl's final illness and numerous lesser things understandably fell, as it were, by the wayside. Bite me.
Never let it be said...
... that Belgian nuns are harmless:
I always enjoy...
... reading what Alan Bennett has to say about his work, and even he admitted quite recently that his new play was "just an excuse for the introductions with which they are generally accompanied". He's now compiled a poetry anthology, and I suspect the bulk of this Grauniad piece borrows from his own introduction to it. This tickled me:
That clarity should be penalised by critical neglect is perhaps unfair, though it's not every writer who welcomes critical attention. "I am more or less happy when being praised," wrote the politician Arthur Balfour, "not very comfortable when being abused, but I have moments of uneasiness when being explained." While Balfour was not a poet, few writers enjoy being grilled about their text, hoping that they've already made themselves clear, and if they haven't, that's a way of saying something, too. Posthumous commentary they can't do much about, but famished for subjects, some critics don't wait for death before hacking a chunk off their chosen prey and retiring to the academic undergrowth to chew it over.
Ain't that the truth.
Evidence...
... of my slowly-improving tessellation skills?
Yes. I know "real" tessellation has no gaps or overlaps. Bite me. Again.
It took several...
... re-boots and some process-killing and uninstalling, but every trace of McAfee is now expunged from Iris's pesky All-in-One PC. I've replaced it by the free AVG package. I also let the HP Support Assistant in on some of the updating action, with a new driver for the HD4900 (?) integrated graphics chip and a grab-bag of other updates (in addition to the pile that Microsoft piled on yesterday). We proved that the PC can control all aspects of her fancy new HP all-in-one printer, copier, scanner too. So I scanned the data sheet from an oscilloscope that was languishing in a cupboard upstairs and whizzed it over to Brian in case he's interested.
Audio and video is working fine. Flash is installed for her BBC iPlayer use. Her photos are all unzipped into a sensible folder structure. I've added both AdBlock and NoScript to her Firefox, and created a desktop shortcut to her most commonly-used data folder. Unpinned all the junk entries from her initially overly-cluttered Start screen. Reset the power saving options. But as to quite why Microsoft ever thought it was a good idea to have three separate Explorer access paths (via each of Libraries, Disk Folders, and the user's own folders) to precisely the same files puzzles me, now that I've seen first-hand how thoroughly it can puzzle a user. Still, with luck, that's my support technician rôle done and dusted for a bit.
Now back to my weekend. Hang on, where's the weekend gone? :-)
Stuart Maconie has just played a wonderful anecdote from Laurie Anderson about walking trails with her terrier Lola Belle, who belatedly realised that she was potential prey for turkey vultures. It had a serious sting in the tale.