2015 — 12 June: Friday
That ancient little bundle of high energy and dynamism1 emailed me overnight to describe some parts of his intended itinerary for his visit to our Benighted Kingdom next month. As usual, just reading it is quite enough to exhaust me. Air shows hither and yon? Check. Visits hither and yon to friends holding even more dubious political views than him? Check. Stamp auction? Check. Yet further acquisitions...
... of miniature diecast heavier-than-air flying machines? Check. New suitcase for this haul? Probably check.
Passing thought: Does NZ not have its own indigenous miniature diecast heavier-than-air flying machines manufacturing facility? Not even drones? Just askin'.
Meanwhile...
... there's some more immediate Mother Hubbard cupboard stuffing to be done ahead of the upcoming weekend lest I fail to keep body and soul together. I suppose I'd better lay in some more booze, too. (Not for me, I hasten to add.)
Domestic God, that's me :-)
Given...
... the extremely limited use I make of it — compared to my Android Tablet PC (which gets a daily workout) — I'm always a little bemused to see my HTC One 'smartphone' (their description, not mine) manage to find 254 apps to optimise in the wake of its most recent System Update.2 It got pretty warm and managed to eat its way through 20% of its battery capacity. My Tablet (now on Android 5.1) did (I presume) a corresponding updaty thing yesterday evening, a lot more speedily. And when my two Synology NAS boxes (Linux systems) refreshed themselves yesterday they both quietly recovered their former ability to spin down the hard drives after 30 minutes or so of no activity. Just sayin'.
Now that I've shopped...
... and having enjoyed a cinnamon bun to keep me going (before setting out), I shall now drop in some 'proper' breakfast. Then it will be back to exploring more of Banshee's capabilities. Unless anything more interesting shows up. Having lost my previous Windows-based ways of keeping (vague) track of my music collection I suspect playlists might offer some help in that regard. Junior mentioned (again) his wish to set up a VPN 'twixt he and me so he can access my music. He wasn't forthcoming on any benefits to me of having such an arrangement. Still, he's stopped nagging me to rip all my classical music CDs. It didn't sound as if they have much spare listening time...
Pleased to see this appreciation of Jenny Diski on the other side of the pond. (Link.)
Why is it...
... that every digital music organiser known to (this) man across three PC platforms (I'm not about to try Android) consists always and only of a subset of the facilities I actually want? Now that I've got that off my chest, it turns out Banshee3 isn't actually too bad. Providing you know what you're looking for and what you called it and where you filed it. No change there, then.
The score (as it were) so far. 55,914 "songs" playing (apparently) for 290.9 days and my current choice is from BBC Hereford and Worcester. A two hour "Jazz with John Hellings" programme majoring on Alex Welsh from a 1966 "Jazz 625" BBC2 TV programme. I actually went along to a couple of Alex Welsh concerts over 40 years ago. I'm getting old, Christa!
I've just received...
... the re-issued share certificates for the 35 lost sheep that I couldn't lay my hands on. But I don't particularly feel like dealing with the BP registrar just yet, however. Time for lunch, methinks. Then I have an afternoon tea'n'biccie rendezvous across the village. I've washed the car's see-through bits (they get amazingly dusty when the poor thing's forced to sit out on the drive) and topped up the level of the squirty fluid washer thingy. That should guarantee rain. Hah! A few drops have started falling as I type.
Tipped off...
... by Eileen to the fact that Henry Marsh had been the guest in this month's "Book Club" I've just snaffled a download and listened, entranced, for 25 minutes or so. On NHS management, for example:
... measuring outcome, I mean, it's a big discussion, isn't it? Publishing surgical mortality figures... I've got no dispute with transparency at all, but it's all being driven by the cardio-thoracic surgeons... where it's life or death is an easy outcome to measure. The outcome in my speciality — which is admittedly a very small one — is very very difficult, even more so since in my opinion, and in most of our opinions, death is often a good outcome. There are worse things than death.
Lovely chap.
In my more...
... rational moments, I think I'm prepared to concede that I have an insanely large amount of music. Bite me. I've always preferred to live my life to a musical soundtrack. And 50% of my parents understood that.