2014 — 10 October: Friday
Although I've enjoyed listening to my ever-growing collection of digital music on CDs since they were launched back in mid-1983, the physical bulk of a large library of the things started making unacceptable demands on the limited space available in our living room. The first technological fix for that was the cul-de-sac that minidiscs lured me into. I didn't start thinking about a home digital music server until just over a decade ago. At that point, having finally read the writing on the wall regarding the foolishness of trying to carry on in the Acorn RISC world1 I had been "enjoying" the "benefits" of my first-ever Windows PC at home for nearly a year. This, in turn, had opened up the possibility of ripping all my CDs (then all stored out of the way up in the loft) and enjoying once more a whole shed load of music at rather higher quality than I could get from my minidiscs.
Of course, I knew I first had a steep digital audio recording mountain to climb as I set about ripping all my CDs into mp3s. And, 29GB or so into the process (after passing the 20GB capacity of my little Creative hard disk MP3 'walkman'), one of the more pressing questions also became "now where do I keep all these damned MP3 files?" Well, I had a Tivo digital PVR that was just collecting dust.2 I figured if I couldn't turn a 50Mhz Linux PC with 135Gb of disk (which was basically all the Tivo was) into a reasonable music server I couldn't really be trying, could I? But after a month of struggling I was forced to concede defeat, remove the larger hard drive I'd fitted, lobotomise the box, and pass it along to a colleague.
I was reminded...
... of all this as I spent time earlier this evening (when not enjoying the superb Blu-ray of "The American President") expunging an unwanted and thoroughly unwelcome cheeky piece of games-tracking software ("Raptr desktop app") that I hadn't noticed had managed to sneak on to BlackBeast, most likely during the most recent refresh of the graphics card. Bloody programmers. It's now somewhat after 02:00 and I have another software-related mercy mission to perform soon after breakfast, so that had better be it for now.
Well...
... that was a neat trick: I've overslept, and should have been elsewhere about 15 minutes ago. Oops!
[Quite long Pause]
Which is why I've only now settled down to a late breakfast (not sure Steve Reich's "Clapping Music" was the most desirable accompaniment) after returning from said mission. Today, I accidentally discovered how to escape a full screen "Modern App" with a mouse. Until I put the Foxit PDF reader on her system, Iris had been stuck with the Win8 PDF App, which is a bit minimalist. Turns out, if you hover the mouse pointer at the top of the screen, a title bar slides down into view with both a 'minimise' and a 'close' control. Who gnu?
Well, I didn't, since the only Modern App I installed on my own system, very long ago now, was Stardock's "ModernMix" precisely to force Modern Apps into a 'normal' window with such vital controls re-instated. And I only put that on to run the "Weather" App. I also realised, as I was driving home, that my earworm was an Enya track (as used [and thus heard recently] in "L.A. Story"). It was one of those maddening "I know I know this... what the hell is it?" situations. So, after almost exactly seven years of driving, I find I can now ruminate thus while on autopilot.I suspect this is a Good Thing.
Am I alone...
... in thinking that the phrase "US officials admits (sic) that even intensified airstrikes may not be enough to save the city"
... is a weird use of the verb "save"? (In order to save the village, it was necessary to destroy the village.)
I'm ashamed to say...
... I have still not heard of the French chap who's just won this year's Nobel prize for literature. (Clue as to reason for my remark here.) Even more shame on moi. Particularly as, for all I know, there have been further French winners since then, too. Time for lemonses.
I also still don't know — this, despite tending the thing for the last seven years — the difference between "Essential Waitrose biological laundry tablets" and "Essential Waitrose biological automatic laundry tablets". They sure look identical to me. I drove home through the interesting flickering visual field that is my brain's way of complaining that it needs more rest, some lunch, and some downtime. I can do that. But I shall let the flickering subside before I reply to my optician's snailmail invitation to come in for my next check-up.
This will be...
... much more grimly entertaining. It's actually three separate Blu-rays, tagline "It's one killer collection", again from Mexico:
All squeezed into a single slimline case for a mere £11-26 which isn't too shabby. Indeed, at that price I wouldn't even mind if they were zone-locked. As it happens, they are not.
Early...
... in that initial burst of musical digitising (more than a decade ago) I realised — at around the 29GB point, see above — that I was going to be needing a more capacious storage system. Fast forward to late 2014. I've just inspected one of the NAS drives on which I hold all my current digital audio files of all formats in a RAID1 array.
Yikes!
Two contacts...
... with the care home today. A morning email said they are re-opening for visits tomorrow as the respiratory 'problem' seems a fairly standard virus (news of which doesn't encourage me to go). And I've just fielded a call this evening with news that dear Mama managed to crash her Zimmer frame into her bed last night, and was saved from a severe (and potentially serious) tumble only by an instinctive lunge on the part of the nurse who was with her. However, grabbing her arm to arrest her fall opened up her tissue-paper-thin skin. See what I mean about the perversity of the Universe? KBO