2015 — 21 June: Sunday
An unsunny start1 to summer. Although it's brightened up, somewhat, both by my initial cuppa and the arrival (yesterday) of the latest Taschen catalogue. I didn't manage to make time for that until I'd sent the batch of share certificates on their final journey. I'm apparently enough of a customer for Benedikt Taschen to regard me still to be a worthwhile investment for the "real" printed thing. Likewise the "Bibliophile" folk, though I can see three or four of their lower-rent tabloid catalogues still unopened from where I sit.
I may be...
... both a widower and an orphan — no "may" about it, in truth — but in this Götterdämmerung phase of my mostly unWagnerian2 life I find the prospect of having a bit more spare cash (thank you, Mother!) than I ever did when I actually needed the stuff still to be a curious concept. Judging by one of his recent emails, Big Bro (six years further up the creek than me) finds himself afloat in a similar boat:
... frankly the lower risk investments (Government guaranteed) seem to be fine as we approach years when we don't need to buy 'stuff' unless things break! A nonsense scenario when you look at when folk actually need money... we need it when growing a family... and when that is all over we finally see some of the stuff!
Quite so, Bro. We neither of us expected any sort of windfall as dear Mama seemed set fair to outlive both of us — and (more worryingly) her entire remaining bag of gold — as she continued to "live" (totally unaware) in the care-home. That place (despite my coming to hate visiting it) took jolly good care of her, in a way that I could never have managed. I had a hard enough time in 2007 looking after Christa in her final months, and she somehow remained cheerful, smiling, and fully compos mentis3 until she was within a few hours of her death. An amazing woman, whom Peter and I still miss every day...
But dear Mama was equally remarkable in her way, as I have only slowly come to realise. Life's a bit funny like that :-)
Meanwhile...
... I sense (with my Spidey powers) a growing need to do something about breakfast.
Hear, hear!
There's an interesting set of comments to an El Reg article on what used to be called "home taping". Remember? That activity that was "killing music"? I've done an awful lot of media/format shifting since 1971 and my first Sony cassette radio/recorder.
"I can't explain"
How can that track by The Who possibly be coming up to 50 years old this year? Amazing. And it reminds me: last night I also filled in a minor gap by downloading a 1999 remastered release of the venerable (1971) David Bowie album "The Man Who Sold the World" to replace...
... my minidisc transcription of the cassette tape I made from my original vinyl lp. And I'd bought that from a little "record buying club" I found among some of my new colleagues4 (programming lecturers) at ICL Radley House in Ealing Broadway back in February 1974. I was there for a three-week stint during my first month working at ICL Beaumont. My job was to sit in on customer classroom lectures and quietly soak up the mysteries of ICL 1900 Series mainframe low-level programming so I could then regurgitate it in the form of the self-teach training package that became my first book a year later.
One of the reasons I have for lamenting the demise of minidiscs can be deduced, I think, from my typeset label. Eight lps squeezed on to a single, eminently portable, optical disc. What's bad about that? Yet another fine example of a cul-de-sac technology from Sony, alas.
After another small skirmish...
... with "Inkscape" I've reworked my A/V system diagrams. Just don't mention the broken arrows! A couple of tiny glitches in the process of moving from scaleable vector graphic, through PNG, to GIF. Not apparent when examined in Inkscape (of course). But also not quite enough to tip me back into the arms of Microsoft.
[Pause for thought]
Of course, if I simply display the SVG file, in Inkscape, at 100% scale and capture a screenshot of the image, the resulting saved PNG file can be very easily popped into the GIMP, auto-cropped, and exported as a GIF. In about five seconds flat. Amusingly, this is pretty much how I ended up producing these GIFs when working under Windows. Plus ça change. But no more broken arrows, though both image files are now precisely one pixel wider. Wondrous are the ways of software.
Mercy me! It's already time for tea (the northern term for an evening meal).