Bread, Loved Ones and Keble Crackers

Bread

For the first time in a long time I baked my own bread the other day. Easy and the results are brilliant.

Loved Ones

Evelyn Waugh wrote a brilliant satire on the American Undertaker business called The Loved Ones many years ago.

Over the last year or so the 12 year olds on the radio and television have exterminated our friends and relatives in favour of LO.

If anyone is left to mourn my death, please call them friends and relatives.

Keble Crackers

A couple weeks ago a woman was interviewed on the Today programme on Radio 4 who was talking about the dumbing down of women in films. I was so shocked by this woman's appalling use of, like, language yeah, that I went to the Keble College, Oxford University, web site.

This woman is a senior academic and used to be a Professor of English at another University.

I wrote to the woman and asked her why on earth she spoke the way she did. I also asked if her students could understand her. Very direct of me I know.

To her credit she replied to my message. However, she tried to accuse me of confusing her language with her feminist message. My message missed its mark and she remained completely unbowed, I am afraid.

DW


Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Philosophy?

Is this philosophy? What follows is a variation on something you are almost certain to have seen before.

We’ll be fine but let’s knock these out, and to end a little [Redacted] Zen for you to ponder: If a dog barks in the woods and a tree falls on him, did someone clap their hands?

Source: http://molls.tumblr.com/

I like it anyway!

DW

Computing Top Tip

Let this be yet another one of my most valuable lifetime top tips.

Young Dima told me before I went to visit him in Bristol this week that his computer was running very slowly and that he needed to reinstall Windows. He asked me if he could have my old laptop.

When I got to his place I took a look at the computer and after a bit of digging and delving I realised that there was something starting up when the thing was booted that was going round and round in a loop for as much as 30 minutes. Dima knew the sloth but he never got to understand the reason behind it.

I identified vsmon.exe as the culprit and a simple search online showed that Zone Alarm Firewall software was the cause. To cut a long story short, we uninstalled and then reinstalled ZA Firewall software and bingo, problem solved.

The moral of the story is that it doesn’t take a lot to track down an error like this and the chances are that if your computer suffers, someone else has also already suffered from the same problem. That often means that a solution is also waiting for you. Reinstalling the software is just one option in the case of the well known vsmon.exe problem.

DW

Guantanamo Jamboree?

Now, I didn't SEE the news yesterday but am I right in thinking that the Ethiopian resident of the UK who was released from Guantanamo Bay detention centre was flown home in an RAF aeroplane and was accompanied by several immigration and foreign office staff?

If that is true, why did they do that?

I understand he is a free man and so could have been put on a scheduled airline and met at the gate at Heathrow ... he even went to RAF Northolt I think.

Then again, is this part of the boosting of the economy we need now? Increasing public spending so that someone else will benefit too?

DW