Thursday, August 20, 2009
PC catches piglet flu
Surfing away on Chrome in the blogosphere yesterday and tried to visit a blog I have visted from time to time in the past. The address of what looks like a porn blog - of which I had no prior knowledge - appears in the address field and promptly vanishes again. PC - or at least the Chrome part of it - seizes up. Close Chrome and try again. Appears to start OK, but all sites unavailable. Close the PC and try again. No change. Close the PC and try again with that old product called Internet Explorer. Same sort of thing, in that it starts up OK, but cannot reach any sites. But then it kicks the recently installed BT Total Broadband Desktop (or some such) into life, which then proceeds to trundle through various diagnostic activities. And, lo and behold, after a while everything springs into life again. So plus marks to Internet Explorer for knowing about and firing up the BT Desktop and plus marks to the BT Desktop for sorting the problem out. As intended by the publishers of the thing, no need to talk to Bangalore on this occasion.
I wonder if the transient porn site was trying to have some improper relationship with the non-porn site I was trying to visit?
HSBC have redeemed themselves after my new credit card performance last week. New card turned up very promptly, perhaps in the morning of the third working day after the performance. And I managed to go through the activation sequence without accident and then went on to make a purchase. Which happened to include some kippers from Craster via Waitrose. Very nice they were too. Although we wonder where exactly in Craster they came from. Our recollection of Craster is that it is a fairly small village containing a tar covered smokery which was reported burnt down some years years ago. Where have they put something big enough to feed Waitrose? Do the things pass through Craster on their way down south? Rather like the cows that pass through Scotland on their way to our tables, thus entitling them to the moniker of Scotch beef.
Yesterday was the day of the last red cabbage from Exminster - where a neighbour appears to have got red fingers. BH delegating its preparation to me, I turned up a recipe in our trusty Radiation cook book. Fry some chopped bacon and onion in dripping while some other ingredients are being collected. Grate potato. Ounce of sugar. Couple of peeled apples. Half a finely sliced red cabbage. On my own initiative, I add a tomato and a half thoughtfully left out by the BH. Chopped. Maybe a pint of water. Stir the whole lot up and simmer for an hour so so. Not bad at all, although it might have been even better with a bit longer. The non cabbage ingredients would have had time to break down into a red goo. The recipe said that it would do well with fatty meat so we did it with toad in the hole, which we thought probably involved enough fat to qualify as all the fat in the sausages finds its way into the hole, rather than being poured off at the end of the cooking period. Spent the rest of the day feeling rather full.
Last activity of the day was attempting to buy an Arden edition of Troilus and Cressida against a shrink wrapped performance of the same at the Globe. In the course of which I make the interesting discovery that the only two hardback copies for sale in the Abebooks world were printed in 1935 or so and swung in at $140 or so. Sadly, I had to settle for one of the many paperback versions - which are OK but not so easy to handle. You have to hold them open rather than their staying open at the right page of their own accord. But they swung in at the more manageable $10 or so. Plus postage. Checking the Ardens I have already, I find that plenty of them were printed well before 1935 and that I paid nothing like $140 for any of them. Maybe I am sitting on paydirt, the word perhaps being appropriate to their somewhat scruffy condition.
# posted by Jim @ 6:18 AM 
