Oh, my achin' fingers...

[alexpgp]

Work continues to arrive, which is helping to offset the giant hole created by the Kazakhstan gig falling through. Now if only I could figure out a way - short of outright refusal to accept work in the first place - to keep assignments from destroying weekends!

* * *The semi-gloss paint applied to the ceiling tends to highlight every little overhead flaw (and in a 30-year old house, there are plenty of those to go around, though not enough to call it a pattern), so the guy we've engaged to help us spent the day applying texture to the newly painted ceiling. By the end of the day, it looked reasonable, but we're still going to put a satin finish on the ceiling over the weekend.

* * *There's a new free iTunes app from TV.com that purports to let you watch various TV shows on your iPhone or iPod Touch. I installed the thing and it pretty much works as advertised, except there isn't much available to see (unless you are a MacGuyver fan, apparently). (Actually, if memory serves, they offer full episodes of several shows, including CSI and NCIS.)

Watching an entire "hour-long" program involves loading six separate segments, which isn't the smoothest procedure in the world, but then again, you are getting more than what you've paid for (which is nothing).

* * *A certain Philip Pullman - a children's author in the UK - wrote a piece that appeared at the TimesOnline today, titled Malevolent voices that despise our freedoms. The piece was written to mark something called the Convention on Modern Liberty, and by the time I ran across the link in my RSS reader, at around 11 am MT this morning, the URL returned a "404 - File not found" message. (As I write this, the page is still gone.)

Fortunately, I was able to scrounge a copy from the Google cache, and it's a pretty sobering read. A sample:

And the new laws whisper:
We do not want to hear you talking about truth
Truth is a friend of yours, not a friend of ours
We have a better friend called hearsay, who is a witness we can always rely on
We do not want to hear you talking about innocence
Innocent means guilty of things not yet done
We do not want to hear you talking about the right to silence
You need to be told what silence means: it means guilt
We do not want to hear you talking about justice
Justice is whatever we want to do to you
And nothing else

I have to admit to a twinge of curiosity as to why the page "disappeared." I'm sure there's a perfectly innocent explanation.

Cheers...