Ruminations

Back in 1995 I bought Natalie Merchant's first solo album Tigerlily. Since then it has done extended duty in my car CD player and now has a new life in iTunes on my laptop.

Not many albums sound as good to me today as when I first bought them, which makes it all the more strange that I've never so much as looked for any of her newer work. A situation that I shall remedy right now.

If it should come to pass that you find yourself enjoying half a bottle of cab-sauv over dinner to the point that your eyes seem to be pointing in entirely different directions, and if you should then feel inclined to toss half a dozen of your razor sharp kitchen knives into the sink ready to do the dishes, and if you enjoy playing the piano unencumbered by Band-Aids, you should probably stop before plunging your hands into the hot water...

The 80GB hard drive that seemed inordinately capacious back in the old days of photos is no match for the world of video. One dose of evening news and an episode of Parkinson and 10GB was snaffled up in a moment.

I'm not very tidy with my disk space. I don't clean up my messes, I duplicate a bunch o'stuff and keep both copies, I download things and never get rid of them (even if they're crap). But now I had 5GB of Stargate to save and nowhere to put it. A disk spring-clean was in order.

A dip into iTunes found a selection of tracks I was unlikely to ever listen to. Trombone concertos, the free-to-download experimental vocal gymnast, all the stuff without discernible melody or rhythmn - 6GB cleaned up there. All the burn folders and ancient backups - 4GB. The fifteen copies of the bug database left over from 2005 - 2GB. Half an hour later there was nearly 20GB of fresh 'n' tidy new empty disk space.

It's soul cleansing - like loosing a whole lot of weight. Without giving up meat pies...

Just before the bus pulled away from this bus stop this evening on the way home from work, a couple of Japanese tourists asked the bus driver, in halting English, if the bus was going where they wanted to go.

There was a guy already on the bus who looked Japanese, but from his accent he'd been in Australia most of his life, and didn't know how to speak Japanese.

It made me wonder - how many white guys are there who've spent their entire life in Japan and don't know how to speak English?

In the light of the Elvis Festival in Parkes, NSW, it struck me that the Elvis impersonators are looking decidedly elderly...