2015 — 15 December: Tuesday
Sleep having decided to flee quite early this morning1 I've now polished off yesterday's "Thing Explainer" (and enjoyed it). There was a brief vogue, early in my time as an IBM writer, for the use of a somewhat-similar restricted vocabulary. I believe the rationale was to make life easier for IBM translators; it certainly wasn't to make life more interesting for our hapless audience. Ways in which writers were supposed to write were (it seemed) always ordained by non-writers higher up the Corporate pecking order. Perhaps "blessed" would be more accurate.
I ignored this in much the same way I refused to take on board the Chicago Style manual. (My defence was the unusually positive Readers' Comments feedback my work received. After all, we were supposed to be metamorphosing into a market-driven outfit, were we not?)
I never did find out...
... where some of the Corporate craziness originated. At one point, for example, the peons were divided into "signature" workers (which included their first line of managers) and "non-signature" workers.2 A "signature" worker was of higher value, and lower pay grade, as his or her work could be "signed" and seen by the customer. One would not necessarily have been wrong in re-designating this binary division as that between worker bees and drones. Certainly, the array of managers clustering in orbit around the Corporate HQ (or do I mean "hive"?) was known informally as the "big gray cloud" (NB American spelling) and tended to buzz around a lot.
Best avoided, too.
A drop of...
... morning moisture is insufficient to deter my walk, though we may yet regret it.
And back, somewhat...
... rained on, and slightly puzzled by the appearance of another unwelcome warning signal from the Mazda. This one, it turns out, means something is awry with the Lane Departure Warning System:
I recall reading that rain obscuring the several cameras dotted around the car may lie at the root of this problem. Having previously set LDWS to "rumble" at me (to imitate the sound of crossing a lane marker) instead of unhelpfully beeping, I have now simply disabled the system (as one does, of course). Probably not what the design engineer had in mind. Who knows?
B&W
Isn't this a fabulous image? (Link.)
Having finished...
... my lunch, my laundry, and the last of the "easy" video data entry, I'm now finally in a position — when not distracted by the rain — to reload all the 'data stubs' I've been creating into Kodi. This time, there's a good chance of it now finding the correct associated material for each title. Of course, that still leaves me with all the "difficult" videos3 — I currently have precisely 500 DVDs (almost all recorded off-air; many with more than one item on them) that cannot be precisely matched to existing entries in either of the online TV or Movie DBs that Kodi uses to do its data-scraping.
A typical example: the GBS play "You never can tell" made by the BBC in 1972, directed by James Cellan Jones, and featuring Robert Powell, Kika Markham, Patrick Magee, Judy Parfitt, Cyril Cusack, Warren Clarke... It's an easily-overlooked bonus item on the same DVD as "Mrs Warren's Profession" in the set of BBC classics I mentioned last Sunday. Jolly good job I'm not the least bit obsessive about any of this, isn't it?
Are you obsessive?
Nine years since I checked this out :-)
Someone mentions your favorite hobby, astronomy. You:
It takes all sorts, of course.
Memo to self...
... for the next time I bang my head against a brick wall looking for it, and end up asking Mrs Google to search the documentation for me:
To exit Kodi's default FULLSCREEN mode and constrain it to a window, just toggle with the "backslash" key. Simples!
<Sigh>
It turns out, predictably enough, that to polish off the latest set of subtle video and film title errors and date errors — all of which delight in persuading Kodi to pick up the 'wrong' item from my POV — that have crawled out of the woodwork requires a careful set of sessions swapping between browsing IMDB and then going back into Kodi edit sessions. I'm getting too old, and too tired tonight, for any more of this sh1t for the time being. How about simply watching something instead?!