Author Archives: essiep

Wanted: new teeth

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6°C. Dry, fresh with a light breeze, sun too.

Teeth: I need new ones. Mine are all broken and worn down. The edges of the breaks are quite sharp, you can feel it if you push your tongue against the shattered edges.
iPodding: I have* a pile of 24 CDs to convert in iTunes. It’s going so fast I can’t stop, half way now, can I last* the whole course before spinning out?.
That should say " iHave " and can " iLast "

Getting colder, I may have to switch on the heating tomorrow.

20 years on…

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9°C. Grey & still.

Preparing for Christmas, but my fizzy legs want to go cycling.
Remarkable: I found a Filofax diary from 20 years ago. Cuckoldry occurred then too, and in the same seasons. The web was waiting to be invented then so, I put lots of detail in ink instead of here on the ether. I was sensitised to rejection that year too, much is encoded in symbols. Even so, there are some that need to be lost to history. Those pages are more easily wiped than musings here in the interweb I’ll wager.
I will make a fire.
Kitchen stereo: Highest priority now is music in the kitchen, I hate cooking in silence. the original  iPod Bose dock thing is said to be unable to charge the newest iPods. Not clear whether this applies to my Classic. I have a better idea anyway: buy a pair of speakers & amp from Richer Sounds and plug in a charging base-dock thing- total cost is about the same but the spare FM tuner can be wired in too. The sound should be considerably better than any SoundDock.
Decided.

I need to launch some fireworks, but not to celebrate new year- I have other things in mind. Not yet had time to paint since we broke up for the holiday. Rats.

…The Poodles are well.

A normal Sunday

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12°C, light cloud. C=48 miles.

Good cycling conditions. Bed is built, and the washing machine arrives tomorrow. On a domestication roll. Better think about some Christmas shopping soon; it’s always plagued with anxiety about missing someone. Get a surplus in case.
The car alarm is going off for no good reason.

End of term

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9°C, Windy

End of term means looking forward to waking up in bed instead of waking up half-way through first lesson. Better not say that in front of the boss.
Carrying king-sized mattress out of the car to the house was fun in the wind today. The best technique was like a hermit-crab, or something. Bend the thing partly in half, then carry it on my back while I was too bent over. It worked. Tomorrow I can assemble.

Comic Strip

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 5°C, changing for the wetter.

No interruption: to my internet connection – surprise.
A cartoon strip comes with an Ikea flat-pack stool. Excellent finale!

The comic-strip above has all the essential elements of a story, characters introduced, scene setting, the bizarre central action of a man using stools as clogs, then the dramatic finale of him doing a head-plant into a fridge-freezer. Conflict is there in the scene where we are forbidden from painting pictures of the central hero character- the foot-stool.
While in Yantar:

The cat is sleeping.

High Bitrate

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5°C, dull.
iPod Sampling rate really does make a difference. In practice, it means that the Classic sounds better than the Nano because you can rip CDs at a high sampling rate and get better sound quality. There is plenty of space on the 120Gb drive to do that. I’m shopping around for a dock/player for it now, I neeeed music in the kitchen! Sound is so much part of the house’s atmosphere, along with smells- which reminds me- I bought wood for the open fire today, but with no music or TV downstairs, there is no real incentive ot spend time in that part of the house.
Soon grasshopper, soon.

Baader-Meinhof Complex

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8°C, heavy rain.

Baader Meinhof complex: Film |Guardian review: was unrelentingly grim last night at the new cinema in Derby. However, the cinema was very nice, comfortable seats ( for a long film) and the sound-quality was very nice. The film was obviously not digital, with scratches and holes- old stock it seemed. My impression is that it makes a good companion to Munich, which was set near the end of this story. Munich seemed a  warmer film. Meinhof had to loose her daughters in the story, but not enough was made of this thread for me. I’m not giving this an unreserved recommendation.

Cup of tea:The removal firm have arrived.
Firstly park the lorry, open the back and sit down for a cup of tea. British workmen.
I realised yesterday, I haven’t got any fireworks yet.

It’s a free country

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-2°C, clear & icy

Turned back: returned home this morning before arriving at work. I had to abandon the cycle ride, the ice was threatening to turn the world on its side and wallop my head. That can’t happen in the car, so I drove.

Web censorship: no, we don’t live in a free country. The whole Wikipedia fiasco is important not because the IPSs censored an image, it’s because they censored a web-page. that doesn’t happen widely outside China and North Korea. It’s the debate, ideas and beliefs that are important, we can manage without the stupid album art picture. This is important, the band concerned are not in my opinion, they are macho, arrogant rubbish. An acceptable compromise would be to censor the image, ISPs can do that, but they didn’t in this instance. They have since withdrawn the block.