2015 — 15 August: Saturday

A lovely piano variation on Pachelbel's "Canon" this morning, and still no sign of those floods. Indeed, the sun is shining. And Mr Super Duper keyboard's slightly revised USB3 port has worked / is working a treat. I like the distinctive sound of the keys with their "buckle spring" mechanism. It's both completely familiar (from 30 years ago) and yet wholly different from every previous home keyboard, except an Amstrad PPC512 "luggable" PC I found reduced somewhere, and briefly owned.1

It's cooler...

... fresher, and drier, this morning. A cuppa fixes some of that.

Surfing the web...

... fairly randomly has proved unrewarding this morning. No change there, then. I will leave others to find and lift the precise stone under which lurks a TV ad showing an actress and a glass of Australian wine that brings new meaning to the term "product placement".

I keep half an eye...

... on the availability of BIOS upgrades for BlackBeast Mk III's motherboard (which was a Revision 1.0 model). But the five upgrades that have come along seem to offer nothing that purports to fix anything that seems to be broken. "Leave well enough alone" will continue to be my guide.

A spot of...

... remedial rotation (to minimise coloured stripes caused by interaction between my scanner and the screen printing) and the (German) cover of this afternoon's Blu-ray delivery...

Disconnect BD

... from "Hot Shot Records" in Bremen is good to go.

Having discovered...

... that a TV satellite (?) channel called "SyFy" is filming a version of Arthur C Clarke's 1954 SF novel "Childhood's End" for showing this coming December, I plucked my 1966 Pan paperback...

Childhood's End book

... from the shelf, made a fresh cuppa, and settled down to re-read it. For — I'm pretty sure — only the second time in damn' near half a century. Most enjoyable. Parts of it reminded me of John Brunner's "The Long Result" (another excellent yarn). [Pause] Right; time for my evening meal. Rather past time, in fact. I'm starving. Again.

Taken unawares!

Having brushed the dust off the bit of my memory about how to re-install Dropbox on my Linux Mint 17.2 system, I've just discovered — in the folder "Camera Uploads" — a brief video clip of me...

inadvertent selfie

... caught in the act of discovering that I was being video-recorded by my own blasted oh-so-smart phone at the recent family gathering. My second inadvertent selfie. Two years ago, I captured a still photo of one of my feet.

  

Footnote

1  I used it (for a short time) as a replacement for the even crappier PC/XT "home terminal" with which IBM liked to extract unpaid overtime from some of us. When did that one fall by the wayside, I wonder? No complaints from me.