…for me, at least. My friends Pierre and Linda are moving from their beautiful house in the mountains above Martigny. It’s for sale at http://www.swissmountainhouse.com/. Pierre is the only person I know who commuted to work by funicular railway.
Go on, you know you’d like a house like this… why not treat yourself?
(I’m really hoping somebody else I know will buy it, so I can visit it again!)
One of my favourite local restaurants has come up with a good way to decorate their ceiling. If you put a camera on the table pointing upwards, this is what you get:
Clearing out a filing cabinet today, we came across the documentation for an old Gateway machine. (Remember them? They were the Dell of the time.) It was actually rather a good 66 Mhz Pentium, which I bought in 1994, chiefly to write up my PhD thesis.
Amongst the documentation was an index card on which I’d written the IRQ settings and I/O addresses of all the peripheral cards – the sound card, the modem, the SCSI adaptor, the CD-ROM interface card… all of these settings I’d had to tweak by hand, usually by installing little jumper connectors on the cards themselves. You had to make sure no two devices were using the same settings; I’d disabled the joystick interface on the soundblaster card to reduce the likelihood of his happening. It’s all a procedure for which I feel very little nostalgia.
At the time, I really liked this big, clunky, noisy system, with its 15″ CRT monitor, but it cost me £2260.71 – well over £3000 quid in today’s money. Or, to put it another way, for the same price I could now buy three MacBook Airs.
I guess we have made some progress after all…
A confession. I’ve gone over to the dark side.
No, I’m not using Windows again – it’s not that bad. But I have started doing something which, until fairly recently, I considered far from commendable.
Yes, you’ve guessed it. I’ve started sending HTML-formatted email.
I used to be a purist. Email was for textual communication, and didn’t need frivolous formatting, so all my email programs were told in no uncertain terms that outgoing email should be plain text only. There were all those nasty privacy and security issues, especially in early versions of Outlook and Outlook Express. Javascript and ActiveX could be embedded in messages, exploiting security holes in the receiving mail program. Senders could include an image in an email which would be loaded when the message was viewed, meaning they could detect whether you’ve looked at it or not! Shocking, eh?
Well, maybe, but the security holes have largely been fixed, spam filters take out most of the stuff I would have worried about, notification systems are decidedly fallible and most email clients let you switch all these features off if you’re still concerned.
I really have no desire to change my background colours or embed YouTube videos in my messages. But in the end I decided that in the 21st century it was just plain silly not to be able to write sub-headings in bold or emphasise things with italics.
I was being a luddite. I was effectively insisting that all letters should be word-processed in a monospaced font because that had been good enough for typewriters. That wasn’t the way to make progress. I was using more sophisticated formatting in my instant messaging than in my carefully-composed emails! Yes, there are some potential issues, but denying myself from using italics was not the way to get those issues fixed. Anyway, the rest of the world was ignoring people like me. I’ve been getting an awful lot of formatted emails for an awfully long time, and never had any problems.
Actually, I would have made the switch earlier, but it’s only with the latest (Leopard) version that Apple’s Mail app – which I rather like – has really adopted HTML as its standard formatting – before that it could happily display incoming HTML but used richtext for outgoing compositions; something that not all other programs could read very well. Fortunately, any well-behaved email program will send a plain-text version of any message alongside a formatted one, so the important text should still get through.
Which means that if you wish to read my emails as if they came off a typewriter, you can still do so. I’m afraid neither the presence nor the absence of formatting is likely to improve the content!
Sorry things have been fairly quiet here of late. I’ve reached a sort of email event horizon where messages that require action or response are arriving faster than I can act or respond to them. After that you go into a kind of tailspin…
The quotation, by the way, is from C.S.Lewis. For your contemplation.
This post is here purely to help those who are Googling for a solution to this problem. Everyone else please ignore!
If you have an HP all-in-one 3300-series printer/copier/scanner, and it starts saying “Scanner error power off->power on”, but powering off and on doesn’t help, then you really need this page. Many thanks to all who posted there!
Basically, you power off the printer and unscrew the screw which allows you to remove the small piece of glass to the left of the main scanning glass.
Using some needle-nosed pliers through the opening, grasp the drive belt and use it to move the scanning head across from the right hand side of the scanning area to the left, until it’s right under the opening. At the bottom of the wide slot, there’s a mirror, and it gets fogged up with something.
Shine a good light in there and use dry Q-tips to give the mirror a good clean. Then reassemble everything and turn the printer back on. After a little warm-up, you should get the ‘Ready’ prompt again, and your heart will be filled with joy.
The whole process should only take about 5 mins. There may be other things which cause a ‘scanner error’, but this fixed it for me and, it would appear, for many others.
I wrote before about Garrison Keillor’s News from Lake Wobegon. This regular feature of his Prairie Home Companion show is available as a weekly podcast here.
The Jan 5th episode was a very good one, I think, and if you’re not familiar with GK’s genius, I recommend grabbing the MP3 file.
The most pessimistic official estimate for the total number of deaths that might have resulted from the Chernobyl disaster, both directly (56) and indirectly through the fallout in the surrounding area, is about 9000. That’s very large.
It’s also about the same as the number of people who die in Chinese coal mines every 18 months.
Harry Lamin, a British soldier in WW1, wrote letters back to his family at home. Now, exactly 90 years on, his grandson is publishing them as a blog, in real time. It’s been quiet for a couple of weeks because letters only come occasionally and the last one was on Dec 30th, 1917.
Now… as then, of course… nobody knows if he’s still alive.
It’s a brilliant idea. More information on CNN.
Ah, that’s nice… a Google search for ‘quentin’ has me back on page one again. Something that hasn’t happened for some time, mostly since that Tarantino fellow became rather popular.
It just goes to show that the level of ability one needs to achieve fame these days is just proportional to the popularity of one’s name!
🙂
I have a kind aunt who sends us a box of chocolates every Christmas, and they are much appreciated. But as I munched away tonight (with a reckless disregard for my waistline) I was troubled again by a question which has bothered me before. It’s this:
Why are there so many nutty ones in the box?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I like nuts. I like chocolate. I even quite like the combination. But the chocolates with almonds, walnuts, hazelnut praline or whatever are so clearly inferior to those based on fruit, caramel, coffee or liqueurs that I wonder why they always seem to form such a large part of the selection on offer. I would simply put this down to personal preference except that everybody else I’ve ever asked about this feels the same way!
So who is it who decides that so many of the chocolates in the average box should be nutty at the core? Are there hordes of secretive chocolate-nut lovers out there? Those who, on opening a new box, spurn the strawberries, but quiver with anticipation when contemplating the myriad delights that praline has bestowed upon us? Come out of the closet and let us know! You’re among friends here. Or are nutty chocolates much cheaper to manufacture? Perhaps it’s a conspiracy of nut-producers to dispose of nuts which for seem reason don’t make the grade elsewhere in unsweetened form?
Until this mystery is solved, I shall have to continue to be the noble husband, consuming chiefly those nut-based chocolates discarded by my beloved. It’s a tough job. All, however, is not lost, because I’ve discovered that Waitrose sell small tubs of delicious dark-chocolate-covered apricots, which go a long way to helping restore the balance of my carefully-controlled chocolate-based diet.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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