2015 — 23 October: Friday
What with it being a Friday an' all, today seems like an excellent day for my next confession. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.1 But today, I have a more serious objective: I could do with a new tea caddy as the lid, not to mention the side seam, of my present one...
... has clearly seen better days since Christa bought it (or — given the naff "tin of chocolates" artwork on the side — more likely received it) as an Xmas item from St. Michael himself a couple of decades ago. What could possibly be more exciting than admiring all the pre-Xmas displays of the more modern Xmas tat from China that I predict will have sprung up around our fair city like bindweed by now?
Preparation...
... of my next crockpotted culinary concoction will, of course, have to take precedence. However, I've long reduced the vegetable slicing and dicing of that bit of "cuisine" to a fine art, so it won't keep me here for very much longer. Domestic god, me.
Unlike these clowns, who have also done a spot of confessing:
My late lunch...
... was only briefly interrupted by an invitation to return to my dental hygienist earlier than next December "as they'd had a couple of cancellations". I mildly pointed out that I'd been "hygienist-ed" just three weeks ago and would probably thus not pose much of a challenge to the lady with all her scrapy tools. (What do you want to be when you grow up, son? Not a hygienist, Dad!)
I similarly "passed" on the ...
... cheap'n'nasty enamelled and inevitably Chinese tin can I found (labelled "Tea" in a large, ugly font). Instead, I bought (for £1 more or £1 less2 than one such can) an "Ensemble de trois bocaux Clip Top Kilner" — three 0.5 litre Kilner jars. From the "Currys" end of the "PC World" superstore in Hedge End. I don't expect to be joining the Kilner Club any time soon.
While there, I browsed with increasing dismay through the "PC stuff" — about 99% of which is, of course, proudly upgradeable to Windows 10 and/or has a touch screen. No thanks. I admit I was mildly tempted by a Western Digital 5TB external drive but — having suffered horribly at the hands of a Seagate one a few months back — I moved quickly on. Next toys? I examined the entire range of "music streaming around the house" solutions, but was unconvinced that Bluetooth would reach everywhere I might wish it to. Nor was there over-much emphasis on what you might call interoperability, let alone the wrangling of my large collection of local digital music files rather than streaming music from all sorts of dubious Cloudy places via all sorts of dubious Cloudy services. 'Twas ever thus.
Finally, I strolled between the aisles of a vast array of large flat (and nowadays, curved) TVs, including a growing number of UltraHD 4K TVs. Their video playback was not as smooth as I, for one, might wish. Once burned, twice shy. Scant, to non-existent, detail on the currently-available sources of 4K material, too. But at least there was now little or no trace of any of those horrid 3D systems.
In other video-oriented news...
... I have been missing out on the delights of DVD Profiler — a nice way of browsing through my video library to select my next "victim" — since leaving it in the shards of my shattered Windows system back in February. I've since been assured it will run satisfactorily under WINE3 but, in the meantime, it seems that Kodi — which, until now, I've only used in audio-only mode — will also make a more than satisfactory method of just browsing4 my little DVD and Blu-ray collection.
Kodi can be 'fooled' by presenting it with a set of just your video titles (which I happen to have knocking around) and a corresponding set of dummy .avi files. A guru who's further along this particular Path to Nirvana asserts creation of such empty files is a simple piece of Pythonic snake charming that he's writing as I type. Kodi (bless it) is then apparently perfectly happy to venture far afield on your behalf, looking for, and fetching, all the associated artwork and information it can track down for each of your video titles. You can then browse through the database it populates. Neat.
Time I wasn't here, as I now need to be there. TTFN.
In between all the...
- disambiguating of some of my duplicate video titles that Brian's Python code has already been allowing me to do, and
- the stuffing of my face with the first tranche of today's delicious crockpot (plus all the less tasty but related clearing-up and chilling-down of the remnants), and
- the downloading of this week's dollop of BBC "Composer of the Week" programmes (because I liked a lot of Henry Cowell's music [but didn't previously know any of it])
... I've been feeling guilty about my dismissal of Laurie Taylor two days ago. I'd forgotten his occasional columns in "New Statesman" 25 years ago:
Ten years ago, there would have been a bit of a scandal over a university having links with someone like naughty Jack (Lyons). Nowadays, even philosophers, medieval historians and theologians can be found turning ethical somersaults in their endeavours to attract the attention of business and industry. Not easy in a place like York, where the only sizeable local business is devoted to nothing more intellectually resonant than the manufacture of Kit Kat, Aero, Toffee Crisp and Caramac.