First stop, liquor store. Next stop, Mars.

[reddragdiva]

• Ukrainian office politics gets serious.

• redcountess discovered a pile of Melbourne goth pics from 2000.

• Yep, Microsoft have still got it.

We went to Camden today to see faerierhona, who was lovely to catch up with. It was somewhat frightening to hear redcountess in call centre shop talk with Rhona.

Everything was shut: the Victoria Line (two buses to Camden), Bar Uno (we met at Starbucks), Cold Steel (no short labret bar for Liz), the Pembury (where we thought we'd find warmth), the train line home (after we'd bought tickets — they didn't shut the station or anything) ... then we couldn't get on the 30 bus because there were two prams already. Minicab home! Then two Chinese takeaways open every bank holiday except this one. Now awaiting the Chinese of last resort. CROSS FINGERS. I am chilled to the bone.

For Tuesday, Freda got a Kalbarri shirt, pinafore and toy dolphin from one grandmother, a baby's first book of bible stories and prayer book from another, new clothes from a third, a musical plastic computerised lamb thing for her to thump (the one present she was more interested in than the wrapping or the boxes ... it's the future: my daughter got a robot companion for Christmas. IT SAYS "I LOVE YOU") and interactive blocks (cheers to Fisher-Price's keen understanding of baby psychology!), a teddy bear and Kenya lion and tiger soft toys (and I can see where Weebl makes his bucks).

arkady got a (doll) head in a box, the special double DVD of Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds live concert, some anointing oil and marzipan fruits. redcountess got dollie rings, T-shirts and shoes, the DVD of Thin Lizzy Live and Dangerous, smelly girly stuff from one of my mothers and books Fire And Steam by Christian Wolmar and Liquor by Poppy Z. Brite. The lot of us got two Ikea toy rats from hairyears and an A4 photo printout of the gates of Crossbones Cemetery in Southwark from spikeylady.

And I got a book on starting my own cult and this year's best present evar, a cheap Chinese MP3 player! deathboy linked to a similar one which was sold out, so I got one which looks like a photocopy of a first-model iPod nano.

The player claims to do "MP4", but only does MP3, WMA and insanely crappy AMV format video. I rewrote that entry yesterday and searched the net for info — if you got one of these things, this is the easy pointy-clicky video converter, this is the command-line converter and this is how to convert changing the aspect ratio. Liz bought it because it claimed MP4; I would like the MPEG Licensing Authority to swing its massive Intellectual Property dick as an avenging hammer of trademark. Gah!

But I spent all day yesterday and today playing music over and over and over. Headphones (which are surprisingly good but not marked "L" and "R") in, Scientists first album playing. My MP3 is my new favourite toy. WIN.

Comments

[secretlondon.livejournal.com]

Today is supposed to be Open not Closed. Yesterday locally was open except for buses.

I've been excessively playing music as I have my 80GB music drive back as we discovered it was a cable problem when we rebuilt the shuttle at the weekend.

[pndc.livejournal.com]

I've dealt with the problem of not having a handy electron microscope to read the L and R printed on headphones in Flyspeck 3 by tying a figure-of-eight knot in the lead for the right headphone. This also causes the whole assembly to lean to the right, getting the wire into the correct pocket for my iPod...

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

They shut the train line *after* you bought tickets!? :¬0

Email them with a scan of your tickets and demand a refund. They can hardly refuse!

Still, other than that, it does sound as if your Xmas was fairly good all round. Yay!

[redcountess]

No, the station doors were open and there weren't any signs out the front that the trains weren't running on Boxing Day. So we bought tickets and went up the stairs to the platforms, only to see a sign on the platform displays stating the closure. We still plan to ring One and complain though.

[guerillamagilla.livejournal.com]

aww - robot love.

yay Scientists, you know they're playing here in Feb - Scientists are playing Blood Red River as support for Sonic Youth who are playing Daydream Nation.

[reddragdiva]

ARGH FUCK FUCK FUCK. Triffids in January, Scientists in February. FUCK.

[guerillamagilla.livejournal.com]

Triffids!? - um - he ded dude, that's like the Ramones doing a gig now.

[reddragdiva]

"Ladeez gennumen, Tommy! Marky! CJ!"

The remaining Triffids are doing a thing in January.

[wendolen.livejournal.com]

FYI -- mp4 is the file format iTunes rips CD tracks into. So that is a potentially useful compatibility for some people.

[reddragdiva]

That's the problem - it doesn't play that format at all, or any MPEG-4 format. The "MP4" marketing is in fact a complete lie.

[wendolen.livejournal.com]

Oh, I see. How lame!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

By all reasonable assessments, Vista seems to be more of a fuck-up than ME in a degree of magnitude.

[reddragdiva]

In this case I suspect the Microsoft way of doing things: their favourite embrace-and-extend tool is layer violation, and the easy way to do that is have the actual protocol (as opposed to the written one) be "whatever the code does." That's fine when Office n's incompatibility with Office n-1 is the desired behaviour, but in this case I think they've shot their foot off: WHS is descended from Windows 2003, which is in the XP line - and I suspect Vista's NTFS code is making files that are subtly different to what the 2003/XP NTFS code is expecting, leading to data corruption. There are ways around this, but they involve writing code sensibly with a keen sense of layering and proper documentation in the first place.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

*nods* It's not as if filesystem forks are some sort of "black magic" either and MS have been using them since 1993. Microsoft have been long aware of data loss issues that are possible with such things and it's, as you mention, a error on their corporate strategy, lack of coding and documentation that has led to this problem.

PS: Happy new year!

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Your useful edits to that article have been reverted, bah!

[reddragdiva]

The S1 MP3 article? Yeah, they were wrong - not all the fake "MP4" players are S1 MP3 players. The AMV article's going strong.

[reddragdiva]

And there's an even better MP4 playing article!

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

"...the only current MP to have appeared on Top of the Pops"

Well, there's a hideously difficult political trivia question all prepared :-)