Author: frizzyLogic

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Hanging out the washing

hanging out the washing

News just in – the washing machine’s finally given up the ghost. Sigh. An expected bereavement but sad none the less. The economics of laundrettes clearly dictate a new machine will be cheaper than feeding the voracious slots of commercial washing appliances for any length of time, so a new machine has been ordered. Thank goodness for the never-never, that’s what I say. Oh, and the peerless John Lewis without which life might not be worth living.

The above is F hanging out her own washing while condoling on my loss and sheroically offering the services of her own machine while I wait (a week) for the new one. Hurrah.

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More red, green and white

red green and white too

In some lights London looks almost continental European, ancient architecture decaying in a genteel manner under a Mediterranean sun. But of course it isn’t, it’s merely a boarded-up shop in Willesden.

bathroom discount shop

I am also red, green, white and decaying, but in this case also tired and shriveled.

wrinkled and tired

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Small niggly things

On the plus side: I’ve worked out a way of having the icons I want at the top of the stacks in the mac dock, inspired by a recent post on lifehacker.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get the suggested method of adding drawer overlay icons to work. So after a bit of googling I downloaded the freeware programme Micon, made a new folder called “0000” in each stacked folder which had the usual blank folder icon, ensured all folders were arranged by name and then replaced each blank 0000 icon by an appropriate informative icon.

Voila.

dock icons

It required a restart, btw, to get the new icons to appear in the dock.

So that’s good. The default behaviour of the stack icons has been pissing me off for ages.

On the annoyingly-neither-here-nor-there side: the “post del.icio.us links to blog” thingy isn’t working. Hasn’t been for weeks. So I reactivated the sidebar feed after deciding that my public links are so for a reason – because I hope they’ll be useful or interesting to other people.

But. Butbutbutbutbut. What’s with the encoding issue? why does a perfectly ordinary, run-of-the-mill and obviously frequently-employed in the circumstances ” get rendered as & quot ; (without the spaces)? I changed the output encoding of the feed from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 but that hasn’t made the slightest difference. And I know bugger all about encoding anyway.

So that’s annoying because a problem, which is inexplicable in the first place (why should the del.iciou.us thing stop working anyway?) has been addressed, although not entirely surmounted since there are still not blog posts, and that partial solution contains another annoyance.

Bah.

The last niggle is also in the annoyingly-neither-here-nor-there side: the internet connection. After the modem fritzed I was lucky enough to get hold of another. I can now surf, tethered by an ethernet cable to the replacement ADSL modem in question. However, try what I may, I cannot get the modem to talk to the airport.

Both are old models of their kind, both now discontinued. But I know for a fact that they used to converse merrily. The sound of their chatter filled the house, more or less, apart from the upstairs room at the back. I know this because this is the model of modem I had before the previous model of modem which recently fritzed.

But what is the problem, you might cry. You have the internets. You are, at this very moment, demonstrating that fact by adding more crud to them. Well yes indeed. However I may be all right, but the Spawn are not. Gone is their independent access to the iTunes store, cheat sites for console games, facebook, club penguin, the BBC iPlayer and no doubt sundry other destinations. So my poor pooter is much in demand and has become the focus of sundry disputes.

I have, in my efforts to resolve this problem, updated the firmware of the modem, downdated the firmware of the airport, downloaded the pre-Leopard version of the airport admin utility for graphite and snow so I can continue to talk to the downdated airport. I have a feeling that the solution to the problem may be hinted at somewhere in this page but I can’t actually understand it.

In a previous life I would have thought fuck it and bought a single replacement for both knackered-but-not-yet-dead items, but in this life it’s not an option. So if anyone knows how to make a D-Link DSL-300G+ ADSL modem connect to an apple AirPort Extreme Snow to give lovely wi-fi yumminess I’d be hugely grateful if they’d let me know the secret. In words of one syllable that I can understand. With illustrations. Please.

Sigh.

UPDATE: It works! It works!! It works!!! I don’t know who Rod Hagen is, but I think I love him and want to have his babies. Not only is his avatar a small white puppy, he also, back in 2003, posted crystal-clear, step-by-step instructions on how to make a 300G talk to an AirPort Extreme. Dear Rod Hagan, you have made two boys (and their mother) very happy. Thank you.

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Warm, not to say hot, weather

We all respond in our different ways.

SecondSpawn wraps himself up in a blanket and retreats to the sofa. He’s gone down with some virus/bacteria infection which has given him a fever and rubbed the lining of his throat red-raw removing the ability to swallow and talk much.

FirstSpawn requests deodorant, chocolate-scented, and pooh-poohs (I use the expression advisedly) my suggestion that regular, frequent and thorough attention to personal hygiene is more effective, cheaper and would prevent the danger of attack by frustrated and therefore enraged chocolate-seeking bees.

I step out with a pair of scissors into the area behind the house inaccurately known as the “garden”, that word containing as it does the implication of cultivation. The fact that I can’t actually find the rosemary bush I am seeking to snip (and I must make it clear that this is a very very very small garden) may indicate the level of lack of human intervention in the burgeoning plant life.

Where I thought the rosemary bush once grew was instead a curtain of young saplings with leaves liberally sprinkled with vile and vicious alien creatures. And to make matters worse they were fornicating with abandon.

propagation

Well, abandon in two senses perhaps. While the male clung on and intermittently shook his booty manically side-to-side like the rattle of an excited snake the female strolled around apparently oblivious to theĀ  proceedings.

I needed the rosemary to flavour a roast which is of course the most sensible thing to eat in midsummer.

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Three not so little maids

and not a drop to drink

This was just too good to miss. Three women, dressed identically, sashaying along the Holloway Road last night. It almost made the three and a half hours it took to drop FirstSpawn off at his party worth while.

Almost.

After all in that same amount of time we could have got to vast swathes of coastline, put our feet in the sea and quaffed a refreshing drink rather than worn ourselves ragged navigating across London without the Victoria line.

The whole of London smells of shit.

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Wet cement

wet cement

What an unusual piece of graffiti. Wet cement, water still pooled in surface irregularities, the foundation of what will be a wall between the street and a generously-proportioned front garden of a large house in a genteel suburb of north London.

Who, I wonder, and why. Wikipedia tells me the second phase of the offensive began on 5 May 1968 so it’s nearly exactly 40 years ago. As well as being long ago it was also far away. There is no Vietnamese community in the area that I am aware of.

Perhaps there is some modern British signification attached to the phrase of which I am ignorant. Maybe it is a reference to recent political events in the USA.

wet cement too

Or perhaps I should just stop worrying about the words and take it at face value.

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Browning

questing

I realised today I could quite happily spend the rest of my life taking pictures of cut flowers. Just as long as they weren’t perfect, of course, and were in F’s kitchen where the light, as you can see, is of a luminous (that’ll be because it’s light – ed) beauty that I haven’t seen anywhere else. Although my bedroom comes close-ish on a good day. Something to do with north-facing-ness apparently.

Maybe I need to turn my bedroom into a studio full of huge bunches of flowers and spend my days moving gently among them as the fibres of their beings unwind.