2015 — 4 November: Wednesday
My morning banana — a recently re-discovered food group — goes well with the good ol' morning cuppa while I contemplate optimal sequencing of today's adventures.
Having now tried...
... Kodi in its rôle (for me) purely as a "video collection browser" I already have a couple of ideas to discuss on today's walk — assuming the rain promised "in the south" holds off long enough. Fun though the visual browsing of my collection is, there's — as ever — a degree of awkwardness associated with wrangling a large collection. The fact that Kodi's interface is also predicated on the "10 foot distance" it assumes the user will sit from the display doesn't help as it makes for a "low-res" display when the currently bleary-eyed user is actually sitting about 18" from his PC display screen.
I'm a little dismayed, too, at the slight clunkiness of Kodi's approach to "data refreshing". Something I have to do quite a lot of at the moment while I seek to persuade it that what it thinks is the title I mean is not the title1 it's picked to display for me. [Pause] I think I shall break off, as it were, to see a grocer about some vegetables before the vultures of Chandler's Ford have had time to strip the shelves again.
Pah! The grocer never even bothered to put out his convenient sealed packs of root veg this morning. I thus wandered around picking up some stuff that would have amazed Christa, and that will ensure I spend a little culinary time well outside my normal comfort zone in the next few days.
Time for that walk. TTFN.
News and 'analysis'...
... of the revised (one year) proposal for data retention powers of our splendid guvmint is depressing. I wonder how dim terrorists and the like must be to do their bomb shopping on the Internet and make their appointments using email, Skype and mobile phones. If this is a tidying-up exercise being carried out on the 66 separate existing legislative powers, one wonders what "they" have been getting away with until now. Privacy seems to be a thing of the past.
Back to BBC Radio 3 and music.
Satire?
I hope so:
The old politics is dull, and what could be more exciting than electing a man who might declare war on the sea? His plans to build a giant wall sealing the US border with Mexico are entertaining, not least because it would be interesting to see a nation as heavily armed as America go into cocaine withdrawal. Somehow, I always imagine that Trump spends the evenings with his forehead pressed against the cold glass of an aquarium, talking telepathically to the tormented albino squid in which he has hidden his soul.
Heaven forbid...
... that I should ever tell anyone else how to write. That said, this "free writing tip" is better than many others I've seen.