Lost Saturday...

Yesterday was weird. I slept until almost 11, when Drew called and reminded me I'd agreed to help mind the store. I'd assumed I would come in after lunch, but as it turned out, Drew was handling the store by himself and needed to go downtown and pick up mail, so would I please rouse myself now? I felt pretty perky as I quickly got dressed and drove down to the store.

Shortly after he got back - maybe and hour - I started feeling tired, and went home. By the time I got home, I didn't want to sleep anymore, but did lie down, finally falling asleep around 5 pm and waking around 9 pm.

Getting 4 hours of sleep at around that time is Not a Good Thing™. I ended up surfing the web while watching both Young Guns movies before finally going to sleep at 3 am.

Today, I've been up since 10 am and though I haven't been pushing myself, I did manage to clean up the kitchen and am currently slow-cooking some lamb and re-recording Farenheit 451 from the DVR to the VAIO upstairs. Just as an aside, I noticed today that there is a USB port on the back of the DVR, a model 522, and when you plug a cable into the receptacle, something happens inside the unit (something mechanical spins up; maybe a fan or a disk drive). Similarly, the DVR is recognized as a USB device on the VAIO, after which the computer goes into "please insert your driver disk" mode. As best as I can determine, the USB port is described as a "future" capability on the 522 (at least I haven't been able to find any drivers online, or even any mention of any, or really what the USB port is intended for).

One of the tangents I followed last night while looking for driver information was to de.lirio.us, which is an open source knockoff of a site called del.icio.us (and this is as good a place as any to hope that these two examples do not signal a stampede in the cute.domain.name.ending.in.us department). I had some trouble wrapping my mind around the point of the exercise, but it finally dawned on me: entries you make about various sites you've visited form a public web-based list of bookmarks. I get the feeling that, since everyone's list is public, one thing you can do is check out what it may be about a particular URL that causes people to include it in their lists as well as find new sites.

I seem to be yawning almost continuously right now, after sitting at my computer for about 45 minutes. Time to go do some checks.

Later. Maybe.

Cheers...

Language lessons...

Late Friday afternoon, you may recall, I gave the day up as a mediocre job and set off on the long trek to Feht's house at the Cat Creek Gap.

When I got there, we first spent some time in his basement office, where I had the opportunity to admire the computing iron put together for the father by his son, featuring an AMD processor running somewhere in the thin atmosphere above 2 GHz and cooled via a gizmo that delivers water to the CPU and the GPU. The whole getup, I am told, cost somewhere around $1200, which is truly a lot of money these days for a computer and 19-inch flat screen display.

Feht was in the middle of downloading and listening to a bunch of rock music, which he says he does from time to time in order to detect traces of musical brilliance. Of course, for him, that means something that might've been written by someone with some kind of music education - perhaps at a conservatory - with the ensuing result being that 99% of what he listens to he dismisses out of hand.

By way of example, he asked me to listen to an orchestrated version of something by Pink Floyd, I forget what it is. The music was pleasant enough (if unfamiliar), but within a few seconds, I got the feeling I was listening to elevator music. There was, to rob a line from Gertrude Stein, no "there" there.

Afterwards, we went upstairs for some conversation and dinner and then settled down to watch some of Feht's impressive collection of DVDs. It soon became evident the evening was turning out to be French night, as we watched two older French films, Le Magnifique, a 1973 film with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jacqueline Bisset, and the 1952 version of Fanfan la Tulipe with Gérard Philipe and Gina Lollobrigida.

I left for home after 10 pm and got home without incident, feeling pretty chipper.

* * *Earlier this evening, I napped - truly napped instead of slept - for about an hour. Right now, I need to go upstairs and shut down the VAIO; the movie I've been re-recording is over for sure, and the battery is overcharged.

Tomorrow, I shall endeavor to keep a nice, even, strain going through the day. And make that doctor's appointment.

Cheers...