Back home and my
first decent cup of tea in what seems like weeks, but was actually
just over two days!
And there is, as
everyone must admit, that other great aspect of being at home,
because there is nothing quite like sleeping in your own bed –
especially when you are studiously trying to ignore the fact that
various malignant microbes are infesting your bronchial tracts and
trying to create colonies in other sensitive parts of your body and
make their presence noisily evident.
This Sunday needs
me to be doing something mindlessly empty. And my task of choice is
putting all my new Christmas CDs from Toni, the 50 CD Deutsche
Harmonia Mundi box set of a selection of Baroque and Ancient Music
from the label on the hard disc of my computer. I am aware that, in
spite of my well-known love of electrical gadgets of all kinds, this
might appear as something more Luddite-like than I would like to
admit. I have recently (I know, I know) downloaded Spotify and found
out that they have a stupefying collection of classical music at
various clicks of the fingers. So why, you might ask, am I going
through the archaic, and to some of my friends, the insultingly
unintelligent approach of actually 'buying'? CDs and then making the
situation much worse by laboriously downloading the music on to the
hard disc of my computer?
I suppose my
attitude is a hang-over from the early days of my computer ownership
when I must have been one of the few people in the computer owning
universe to have the discs for all the programs on my machine,
including, of course, a growing pile of squashed cardboard boxes. My
music collection was similarly backed up by CDs, at least it was as
soon as CDs became the music system of choice. If I am brutally
honest I have to admit that my purchase of an early Philips portable
cassette player/recorder did allow me to add a tape version of
Beethoven's First and Eighth Symphonies to my collection of LPs, but
cassettes were always a fairly noisy alternative to a decent LP and
anything I recorded from the radio was merely the excuse to find a
budget LP version to replace it. So, although it might take some
searching, there is a physical backup for everything (mostly, I am
not absolutely perfect) that should have been bought.
Toni's IT course
encourages the students to find free-source versions of everything
that they need in IT terms and he has passed on his practical
knowledge to me – or at least I allow him to load up free-source
programs on the machine on which I am typing this.
There are
disadvantages, as I have found out. My years of using a Mac when
everyone else was using a PC have come back to me, when all the
programs which were supposed to work on both machines, did – but
only worked perfectly (at least for the state of computers at the
time) on PCs. Those days have now come again as the free versions of
programs do almost everything that the paid-for versions do. Almost.
And that 'almost' is the area of heartbreak and wasted time! Still,
I solider on and I have found 'ways' of using the free programs and
not quite losing out!
I wonder if it is
just coincidence, or vicious intent that so many simple finger moves
on the mouse pad on one system are slightly different or the opposite
on the other? As I am using both PC and Apple at the moment, it is
constantly frustrating to assume that something is going woefully
wrong until you realise that you are using four Apple fingers to do
something when you should be using three PC ones, and Apple's up is
PC's down!
So, I will continue
merrily to load up my CDs – especially as this computer has a hard
disc of 2TB, so I can load on and up with impunity and not take away
valuable space from other things.
I have now completed
by re-reading of The Portrait of Dorian Gray – there is so much to
be said for carrying a complete library with you on your smart phone
when dealing with family get-togethers. And looking at a smart phone
screen is so much more socially acceptable in company than reading a
book! Even if that is what you are actually doing rather than
checking your messages – and why, by the way, should checking your
messages be any more acceptable than reading? I thank god for the
lack of logic that allows me to read in any and all situations. And
long may such rudeness continue.
I have done no work
on my poem today, but the ones on my blog might be worth reading at
Give them a try and let me know what you think.
