boxed set finished …

Posted 30 January 2006 By mac and has 4 comments.

we finished our West Wing boxed set last night.

I do have [cough] series 7 up to date, but it was in AVI files that someone had kindly sent me on DVDs, and we really don’t like watching television up here in the study, and have no means at the moment of putting computery stuff through a television.

so I set to tonight to transfer the AVIs onto a DVD format that would play downstairs. Some googling informed that I could do it with Toast, which is great – I got Toast. but oh my word, isn’t it *slow* to do this …

despite much chivvying along, this usually quite nippy dual 2.5Ghz Mac took bloody ages to do the first three, to the point where we were reduced to watching *something else* while we consumed supper (goulash, since you ask).

at 10 p.m., I popped in here to see if the DVD was written; it was, I tested it on this machine and it was fine, so whipped it downstairs to the televisual stack to try. And it worked there too – how we managed to watch just *one* episode I have no idea. Currently converting and burning the next three.

I’m going to miss it *so* much when it’s over.

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more assimilation

By mac and has 2 comments.

well, we took ourselves off to see Ming Campbell speak at the Bristol City ground on Friday night. He had a nasty cough, and looked tired but, as I suspected, he has my vote for Libdem leader. I’ve never liked Sim Hughes, and I don’t know anything about Chris Who?ne.

we had an e-mail from one of the local LD suspects this morning mentioning – yet again – the local area annual dinner on Saturday. We’ve decided to go, so I mailed him back and copied it to the indefatigable Angela, with the prediction that she would be around within the hour to collect the £31.00 it would cost for two tickets.

I did her an injustice – it took her 2.5 hours :) And I found myself volunteering to help set up on Saturday afternoon …

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this year’s anniversary weekend is sorted

By mac and has 3 comments.

we got married on 29 May 1999, and we always have a long weekend away around then to celebrate.

Paul Buchanan, one of the members of the incomparable Blue Nile, is playing solo in Glasgow on 26/27/28 May. Flights from Bristol to Glasgow that weekend will cost about a hundred quid.

tickets go on sale on Friday. Guess who’s buying a brace?

*bounce*

[edited to change our wedding date to the right one - thanks, timill]

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books read 2006

Posted 28 January 2006 By mac and has 2 comments.

I should have posted this last weekend, but managed not to get round to it – mea culpa.

Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories

perlmonger bought me this last October, and it’s been sitting on the “to read” heap for ages, while I ploughed through other stuff. I love Alan Bennett – his writing, and his plays, and his monologues, and I was looking forward to this enormously. And most of it I enjoyed enormously, although I found myself flagging a bit about two thirds of the way through, when he was writing about art – a subject on which I am, I fear, a bit of a philistine. But it was mostly joyous stuff, and vintage Bennett, and I could hear him in my head reading the passages to me.

but the trouble is that I’ve heard him parodied too much (albeit affectionately) by Dead Ringers, and when you’re actually reading Bennett writing about Dame Thora, you just expect a pot of Earl Grey and a macaroon to feature in the proceedings. Still well worth a read, mind you.

after that, I mopped up Cat Confidential by Vicky Halls, which we acquired as part of Waterstones 3 for 2 offer – a marketing strategy on their part which is causing us to run out of wall space for books even sooner than anticipated.

there wasn’t much in there that was surprising – after all, we run our own feline research station here (although who is studying whom is difficult to say …) – but there were a few points which made me go “oh, I never knew that!”. Written in a very chatty style, I enjoyed it as light reading, and mopped it up over last weekend.

now having a bit of fiction, reading Jenny Maxwell’s blacksmith trilogy – haven’t read them for years, as the first in the set went missing, but I picked up a copy from Amazon marketplace last year.

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GIP

Posted 25 January 2006 By mac and has 6 comments.

what took me so long?

aw …

By mac and has 10 comments.

yesterday was a particularly nasty day – I can’t remember the last time a client e-mail reduced me to tears (of rage, mostly).

we were making chicken and lentils for supper, and discovered we were out of lemons, so perlmonger manfully volunteered to pop up to the off licence and get some (we have a very civilised off licence in the village).

and bless him, he bore home a bottle of one of my absolute, uncheap, favourite wines – Cloudy Bay, *straight out of their chill cabinet*, so I could drink it straight away.

[mwah]

that, the aforementioned lentils, and a couple of episodes of West Wing made things a little brighter. Although I’ll have to deal with it today somehow.

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it just gets better and better

Posted 24 January 2006 By mac and has 1 comment.

The police and security services are to be given access to advanced travel details on more than 40 million passengers a year who travel on domestic flights and ferries within Britain under legislation to be announced tomorrow…

…It is expected that airlines will have to provide the personal online details of all passengers as they book seats and subsequently check in at the airport. There are discussions with the travel industry over what documents passengers will have to show before they can board a flight in Britain.

more on this from the Guardian.

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aaargh

Posted 23 January 2006 By mac and has no comments yet.

there’s a ghost in my scanner – it just started warming up ALL ON ITS OWN.

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the DAB radio

By mac and has 3 comments.

so we bought the radio yesterday, after months and months of dithering …

we had a Psion Wavefinder at one point – in fact, we still do, somewhere; must dig it out. It worked ok for a while, if you ignore the horrible things it did the XP machine to which it was attached and then, one day, the BBC MUX disappeared. Even adding a loft aerial didn’t fix it. And as that was all we wanted it for, it came down off the wall and was put away Somewhere Safe.

as we were in John Lewis yesterday, we went and had another prod and poke at them. Our current clock radio in the bedroom, bought to replace one so old that I suspect its valves had finally perished, never really endeared itself to us. Its aerial was insufficient for a clear signal, and so it crackled a bit. Its LCD was too bright. Its sound was horrible.

so we spoke to the Nice Man at JL, and he demonstrated various things, and we came home with one of these – a Pure Tempus-1. And very nice it is too.

one of the nicest things about it is that you set the time *and* the station for the alarm, so we can wake to, e.g., the dulcet tones of Patricia Hewitt, or Hazel Blears, but we can go to sleep with Radio 3. We tried this out last night, and set it running for Andy Kershaw. This was delightful, and then when Composer of the Week came on at midnight, we were presented with Sibelius.

now I *like* Sibelius. And they started with Finlandia, which was wonderful, as always. But after that they played “Kullervo and his sister”, which was, shall we say, a tad operatic for inducing slumber. But still – nice radio.

all in all – very pleased with it. Ninety nine of your earth pounds well spent, I think. Now, if I can only find a way to get one running in the kitchen …

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farewell to the West Wing

By mac and has 3 comments.

so, to nobody’s surprise, I suspect, here’s the confirmation from the Washington Post that series 7 will be the last.

[don't read the link if you haven't caught up with series 6 - there be some mild spoilers there]

I think it’s as well – although Sorkin didn’t set out for it to be that way, it was about Barlet’s presidency just as much as his staff, and for me it simply wouldn’t work with another president.

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