No gods, no kings, no billionaires
To cheer myself up this evening, I’m catching up on some of the non-important tasks on my to-do list. So far, I’ve added images to my “quick reviews” section, that take you to Amazon.co.uk. It’s useful not just for buying the book (should you want to), but it also gives you quick access to other people’s reviews on Amazon.
Also on the menu for this evening are some new quick reviews, some more tweaking of Paint Shop Pro scripts. I might even make a start on my “favourite music” list…
Crap, I think I’ve lost my mobile phone. It’s possible that I left it at work, but I’m fairly sure I put it in my pocket. The more likely explanation is that it fell out of my pocket while I was on the bus home. I’ve grown so used to wearing cargo trousers with large side pockets, that I’ve forgotten how shallow the pockets in my summer chinos are.
What a crap end to a crap day.
One of the many, many things on my ever-growing to-do list is to process all of our photos from Rome this year. (By “process” I mean digital processing. We have a number of manual steps and Photoshop batch jobs we use on all our digital images to generate medium-sized images and thumbnails, and to sort them into date-indexed folders.) But in the meantime, here’s a quick glimpse of one of my favourites…
We bought a new scanner today, an Epson Perfection 1660. We got it from PC World for £119, which is actually less than you would pay at most web shops. Not that I knew that before I went in to the shop. I went along to PC without having done my on-line reasearch to find out what the state of the scanner market is. A foolish move.
But on the other hand, I’m not a professional photographer or a graphic artist, so my needs are pretty basic. In the end, I chose the Epson for the following reasons:
As expected, the software that comes bundled with the scanner is rubbish, but that’s okay because all I need is the basic drivers. I’ll be using Paint Shop Pro 8 for everything else. (More about PSP 8 some other time. I’ve only started working with it, but already I can tell I’m going to love it. It’s slower than 7, and it’s a bit of a resource hog, but being able to write scripts for it makes up for a lot.)
I’ve been selected for Jury Service at the High Court, starting 25th June.
Apparently, just because I’ve been selected doesn’t mean that I will actually have to sit on a jury. The court calls up a pool of jurors, and then selects individuals from this pool on the day a trial starts. So there’s a chance I’ll just be sitting around, waiting to be called. Or I may end up making a decision about someone’s innocence or guilt. Who knows. It might be interesting.
I was over in Glasgow today, on Philip’s stag party. After some warm-up drinks at the Hogshead pub, we went bowling. I’m blaming my poor scores on a mixture of alcohol and an over-enthusiastic throw in the first frame, which hurt my thumb. After that, my I couldn’t find a comfortable grip any more. The thumb is still swollen and ouchie.
After bowling we went for dinner at TGI Friday’s, where we ate an obscene amount of food at obscene prices. I came home soon afterwards, before they progressed to the strip club. Noisy Rangers supporters were screaming aggressive sectarian football chants all the way back, and smoking. The lone conductor never stood a chance of subduing them, but kudos to her for trying anyway.