2015 — 22 February: Sunday
It looks horribly frosty out there this morning.1 Jeeves! Tea! Now! — And don't you go forgetting to stew some more plums and blackcurrants for my cereal topping. I finished the last batch last night with my first scoops of that delicious icecream from Iris.
An item that...
... came to light2 was a business card I'd picked up at an internal-only IBM technology presentation in a secret basement of a Hursley Lab building more than a decade ago. The theme was what were then regarded as insanely high-resolution display screens for medical imaging technology:
It occurs to me that I'm now staring at 8.3M pixels on my cheap and cheerful 40" 4K Philips screen. It's also [one/multiples] cheaper than the bleeding-edge technology I saw in that basement. Nor does it demand four linked graphics adapter cards to drive the four quadrants of one screen. Granted, individual pixels on the IBM device were so small you needed a microscope to spot the dead ones, but that's swings and roundabouts. The March of Technology, heh?
Now, about that breakfast...
Christa shared...
... with Don Camillo an inordinate fondness for what I've always regarded as (frankly) intolerable salami. For breakfast. Just read the Wikipedia entry. Now comes this:
Picking up a salami, even the most guarded shopper might relax when they see rosemary extract on the ingredients list — but rosemary extracts are actually "clean-label" substitutes for the old guard of techie-sounding antioxidants (E300-21),
such as butylhydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylhydroxytoluene (BHT). Food manufacturers use them to slow down the rate at which foods go rancid, so extending their shelf life.
Rosemary extracts don't always have to carry an E number (E392), but the more poetic addition of "extract of rosemary" makes it sound like a lovingly made ingredient — especially if that salami is also labelled as natural or organic. And
the extract does have something to do with the herb, usually in its dried form. The herb's antioxidant chemicals are isolated in an extraction procedure that "deodorises" them, removing any rosemary taste and smell. Extraction is done by using
either carbon dioxide or chemical solvents — hexane (derived from the fractional distillation of petroleum), ethanol and acetone. Neutral-tasting rosemary extract is then sold to manufacturers, usually in the form of a brownish powder.
Its connection with the freshly cut, green and pungent herb we know and love is fairly remote.
Still hungry? [Pause] Until I "fixed" the sexed apostrophe I'd initially overlooked in Ms Blythman's use of the elided "don't", by the way, the copy I cut'n'pasted from the Grauniad web page ended up looking like this:
Here's an amusing, and informative, rant by John Walker on precisely this sort of character-mangling. It explains why he wrote his "Demoroniser" Perl script. It's also why I keep this web page of useful character codes and HTML symbols very close at hand.
While I was relocating...
... all the pieces of Swarovski crystal, such as this little tortoise...
... that I would happily buy for Christa (whenever she gave me half a chance) — but (until a few minutes ago) was blissfully unaware of how tricky they are to dust — I was also letting the Banshee media player loose on just the MP3s I've ripped from my own CDs (or, latterly, downloaded from Amazon). After first successfully telling it where to graze on which directory on NAS #2, of course. I have no idea why it couldn't find any artwork for just one of the 23 Ry Cooder albums it managed to find:
What the metatag?
That's not the full extent of my Ry Cooderness, of course. He crops up explicitly on two further collaborations, plus the Buena Vista Social Club, and on endless session recordings. Question is, how do I persuade Banshee to winkle these out for me? All I currently have is an alphabetised list, sorted by Artist, that is 53,724 items long.
And a large, empty space in the tum demanding to be filled. When did it become 14:17 I wonder? Clearly it must have been while I wasn't looking.
Somewhat later, and...
... having managed to hang, or crash, or spawn multiples instances of, or otherwise piss Banshee off to the point that it simply, erm, stopped — I've therefore switched my attention to the "Guayadeque" player. After a few exasperating stabs before I could convince it to accept that I wanted it to scan that same directory tree on my NAS — rather than simply dashing madly off in all directions to grab every Internet radio and music streaming service known to the yoof of today — it settled down to browse. When it had finished, I could see it had managed to find one album more than Banshee did in my little cache of Ry Cooder. But significantly less album artwork. Sadly, I think our nascent relationship is already doomed; why would I want a music player that performs an irritatingly extended cross-fade between albums?
And here I am, back in the arms of Decibel where I can't help noticing that I'm running 1.06 on Mint 17.1 but the latest version is 1.08 — and has been for over three years. Which is about how long it feels as if it's been raining today.
I try not...
... to miss each slender volume of this chap's verse as it shows up:
After all, why break a habit I established in February 1979 when I bought "Summer with Monika"?
I got a huge kick...
... out of this El Reg piece from which I've extracted one of the best comments I've seen recently:
Christa worked for a very similar-sounding translation company (it was definitely IT-challenged) and would have enjoyed it too.