2016 — 20 July: Wednesday
It was unpleasantly hot1 yesterday, so I've cancelled today's planned walk. Add to that a poor night's sleep and I'm feeling less than fully "chipper" right now. Of course, it's now currently overcast, with a slight breeze that I'm letting into the house to stir the dust around.
Big Bro...
... kindly gave me some thoughts, "in camera", that I'd requested. I've been vaguely contemplating updating my pixel-catching apparatus more than nine years after first dipping my toe into the world of the Digital SLR. It's a wry thought that just the 4GB Compact Flash memory card I use in the Canon EOS 400D cost over £128 back in the day. Its supplier, Jessops, has long vanished from the High Street. Still, I certainly see no reason to deviate from Canon, but simply hope to be able to carry across my two lenses — the image-stabilised 70-300mm f/4-5.6 zoom is particularly fine — to a new body with, I don't doubt, many more pixels to the square inch.
"Watch the birdie!"
Time to do something...
... about the deplorable state of Mrs Hubbard's cupboard. Toot, toot.
I dropped off...
... a copy of my entire Kodi installation to give Brian a reasonable amount of test data for his Python to encircle. It's also occurred to me that, now that the basic processing to turn data extracted from a SQLite DB into a 'molehole'-compliant set of web pages is more or less as refined and optimised (and parameterised, for that matter) as far as it can be... maybe it's now about time for me to brush up on my somewhat rusty knowledge of CSS. If I work at it, I'm pretty sure I could replace the current table-tag-heavy HTML.
I have a target size to aim for. When I simply bashed raw text in between cheap'n'cheerful <pre> and </pre> tags my pages were about as light-weight as they could get. But with each line of data now being splattered liberally with table tags they are a whole lot weightier. That offends me. The effect on Brian's Python is one change to one line of code, so he's not bothered.
As I suspected...
... Canon has not been sitting around idle since releasing the rather lovely EOS 400D on my birthday back in 2006! Here's a very worthwhile piece of comparison work by "CameraDecision":
Happily, the lens mounts are unchanged, so my existing wideangle and telephoto zoom can both move straight across. Big Bro would, I trust, approve.
Being unaware...
... that my preferred reading of earlier years (I was a long-time subscriber to New Statesman) even had a sister magazine (CityMetric) until mere minutes ago, I was delighted to find (probably a year after everyone else) a PDF file illustrating the "true size" of Africa in their list of "Most Popular" links.
Inspired, of course, by that wonderful episode in "The West Wing" wherein CJ gets her head done in by an inverted world map much like my "What's Up? South!" world map that's been hanging on the wall of my dining room for many years.
The striking photo...
... of Diane Arbus (taken in 1967 by Tod Papageorge) is one, I suspect, that its subject would thoroughly have approved of. I'd not seen it before. And Alex Mar's article is excellent, too. (Link.) Elsewhere, I had to search online to confirm this anecdote from Patricia Bosworth's 1984 biography of Diane Arbus since I culled2 my own copy after last mentioning it here in November 2009:
She spent a lot of time at Hubert's Freak Museum, which had been operating for more than 25 years at Broadway and 42nd Street. She always visited Professor Heckler, who ran the flea-circus concession there. Diane liked to sit with him while he fed his fleas. He would roll up his sleeves, pick the fleas with tweezers from their mother-of-pearl boxes, drop them on his forearm and let them eat their lunch while he read the newspaper.
I hadn't realised, by the way, that her ex-husband Allan Arbus played, among other things, the part of a psychiatrist in 12 episodes of the TV show M*A*S*H. (Now that's serious trivia!)
I have no intention of culling my two Arbus books, both bought in the early 1980s:
Horrid thought: it's been a very long time since my last visit to Zwemmers in Charing Cross Road...
Bermuda Square...
... is very witty. Seems I'm not the target demographic, but I gave up letting that sort of nonsense worry me years ago. Who could fail to love "Iris, an unabashedly sexual octopus and aspiring actress who loves the theater and Japanese tentacle porn"? (Link.)
Saints preserve us!
I've just watched BoJo's shameful session at the podium yesterday alongside the US Secretary of State. I would like to tell BoJo just where to stick his "obiter dicta". The man is a clown and, while there was a certain amount of schadenfreude in watching him, he has no place in guvmint and, I fear, our new PM should just put him out of the misery he so evidently doesn't feel.
CSS experiment
I've had a little tinker with my Kodi videos list. If you move the mouse pointer over the "list" data area here you'll get the idea. The original is still here for comparison.