Don't Leave The Light On Baby
Mar. 30th, 2006 02:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksProof, if proof be needed, that the male sex is not suited to multi-tasking was available in my kitchen a few minutes ago when, while putting the washing on and making a mug of coffee, I attempted to pour Tesco's Super Biological White Washing-Up Powder into the coffee cup and milk into the washing machine. Not wise.
I've got a couple of days holiday. Hooray. I actually stayed in bed until 7.45am this morning, which seemed like mid-afternoon to me (the equivalent of a three-and-a-half hour lie-in) but which was, I realized, the time that a good percentage of people in the UK actually got up. Weird.
The day thus far has been a mixture of losing, winning, losing and winning on Party, Ultimate, Virgin and Betfair, painting the damp-stained ceiling in the hall, and cleaning the kitchen. Oh, and transferring stuff onto the Zen M, as it is apparently termed. I'm just putting selections of albums onto it, in the process of creating Radio Pete. The problem is, I rarely know the titles of the one "really good track" on an album, so I have to play the album to find it. A slow process.
Only one album so far has got a "transfer every track" accolade. That being "The Sash My Father Wore" by Ballboy. A surprising number of albums have a "I can't remember ANY of these tracks" rating. But I'm only into the B's.
I backed my judgement and shorted Cable this morning at 1.7402 June 10th expiry. There will be no repeat of my insanity in late 2003/early 2004 (when at one point I was up to an exposure of £300 a cent and was five grand ahead). This is a mere fun bet of £50 a cent.
++++
What bastard invented gloss paint? I mean, it's a scumbag of a paint, isn't it? You have to prepare the painting surface (none of this slapping it on like you can with Vinyl Silk), then you apply liberally, but DO NOT OVERBRUSH (or so the instructions tell you. What happens, I wonder, if you do overbrush? Does it heat up and combust, destroying your house, liveihood, and cherished goods of great sentimental value?) and then you wait four days for it to dry. Meanwhile you spend three of those four days trying to get the paint out of the brush via the use of about £20-worth of white spirit and hands that start to feel very odd indeed, given the combination of chemcals to which they are being subjected.
But (and this is an old trick), you have to use a layer of gloss over damp-stained ceilings. Then you paint over it with Matt. result, stains have vanished. (Although Matt sometimes gets upset.)
So, since I was doing that, I decided that I might as well give my inner door a clean lick of paint. Some might argue that it's my inner self that needs a clean lick of paint, and at times I would aver to their opinion, but today the inner door will have to do.
++++
Wanky comments at $3-$6 on Ultimate this morning:
Twat: "That's the trouble with AK. It gets beat by a pair of twos unless it hits."
Twat 2" "Yep"
Birks: "What about a board of 6633Q?
Twat 1: "Then the AK wins."
Birks: "Doesn't that somewhat refute your first statement?"
Twat 2: "Well, on that board, the AK has "hit"".
Birks: "So, what you are saying is, 'the trouble with AK is that it only beats a pair of twos when it beats a pair of twos'."
The rest is silence.
++++++
I've got a couple of days holiday. Hooray. I actually stayed in bed until 7.45am this morning, which seemed like mid-afternoon to me (the equivalent of a three-and-a-half hour lie-in) but which was, I realized, the time that a good percentage of people in the UK actually got up. Weird.
The day thus far has been a mixture of losing, winning, losing and winning on Party, Ultimate, Virgin and Betfair, painting the damp-stained ceiling in the hall, and cleaning the kitchen. Oh, and transferring stuff onto the Zen M, as it is apparently termed. I'm just putting selections of albums onto it, in the process of creating Radio Pete. The problem is, I rarely know the titles of the one "really good track" on an album, so I have to play the album to find it. A slow process.
Only one album so far has got a "transfer every track" accolade. That being "The Sash My Father Wore" by Ballboy. A surprising number of albums have a "I can't remember ANY of these tracks" rating. But I'm only into the B's.
I backed my judgement and shorted Cable this morning at 1.7402 June 10th expiry. There will be no repeat of my insanity in late 2003/early 2004 (when at one point I was up to an exposure of £300 a cent and was five grand ahead). This is a mere fun bet of £50 a cent.
++++
What bastard invented gloss paint? I mean, it's a scumbag of a paint, isn't it? You have to prepare the painting surface (none of this slapping it on like you can with Vinyl Silk), then you apply liberally, but DO NOT OVERBRUSH (or so the instructions tell you. What happens, I wonder, if you do overbrush? Does it heat up and combust, destroying your house, liveihood, and cherished goods of great sentimental value?) and then you wait four days for it to dry. Meanwhile you spend three of those four days trying to get the paint out of the brush via the use of about £20-worth of white spirit and hands that start to feel very odd indeed, given the combination of chemcals to which they are being subjected.
But (and this is an old trick), you have to use a layer of gloss over damp-stained ceilings. Then you paint over it with Matt. result, stains have vanished. (Although Matt sometimes gets upset.)
So, since I was doing that, I decided that I might as well give my inner door a clean lick of paint. Some might argue that it's my inner self that needs a clean lick of paint, and at times I would aver to their opinion, but today the inner door will have to do.
++++
Wanky comments at $3-$6 on Ultimate this morning:
Twat: "That's the trouble with AK. It gets beat by a pair of twos unless it hits."
Twat 2" "Yep"
Birks: "What about a board of 6633Q?
Twat 1: "Then the AK wins."
Birks: "Doesn't that somewhat refute your first statement?"
Twat 2: "Well, on that board, the AK has "hit"".
Birks: "So, what you are saying is, 'the trouble with AK is that it only beats a pair of twos when it beats a pair of twos'."
The rest is silence.
++++++
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Go eccentric
Date: 2006-03-30 02:21 pm (UTC)Why bother being so selective with the music? Just bung the whole lot on unless you know that you can't stand the song. That way Radio Pete will deliver surprises and album tracks that you've forgotten about it. If you don't feel like a track, just skip it.
I treasure the wild eclecticism that the thing brings. Acquired from Nicki is a selection of around 500 songs from (a) An Icelandic girl with very strange and varied taste and (b) a gay French bloke with a whole lot of bizarre French and German stuff mixed in with great camp classics (aka the Communards and Will Smith). This may need some of the more unpleasant heavy metal filtering out of it, but it is already bringing unknown pleasures.
Re: Go eccentric
Date: 2006-03-30 02:50 pm (UTC)The problem with the "just skip it" argument is that it's difficult to do when you are on the rowing machine. OK, this only occupies about an hour of my week, but that probably makes up 10% of the time that I am actually listening to the thing. The other problem (with the Rio, anyway, which is 20gb) is that the machine is filling up. Much nicer, I thought, to filter out the stuff I would skip at source and have the best of every CD I own, rather than all of just a proportion of the CDs I own.
Think of it as a Greatest Hits Zen.....
PJ
Re: Go eccentric
Date: 2006-03-30 05:08 pm (UTC)Now you have a Radio Pete 1, 2, 3 ... !
Andy.
Re: Go eccentric
Date: 2006-03-30 05:38 pm (UTC)PJ
Re: Go eccentric
Date: 2006-03-30 07:10 pm (UTC)And to be honest I can't be bothered with playlists - I just let the thing shuffle its way around the whole lot. My trusty old iRiver (touch wood - almost 2 years old now) seems to have a slightly non-random RNG, but that's probably subjective - it just seems to favour certain artists at times. I just view the thing as a radio station that plays stuff I mostly like with no ads and no DJs. Which is nice.
Mike
Be selective!
Date: 2006-03-30 07:33 pm (UTC)If I'm listening and I find I'm thinking, "Well, this isn't so great, but there will be something better on in a minute" -- then I delete the track I'm listening to. Why put up with it?
In a minority of cases, the whole of an album has survived intact, but I have quite a lot of albums represented by only one or two tracks. It's this selection that gives me a listening experience better than I've ever had before. I've been quite amazed to find all the good stuff I had hidden in my collection (under all the rubbish).
-- Jonathan
Re: Be selective!
Date: 2006-03-30 08:15 pm (UTC)PJ
Re: Be selective!
Date: 2006-03-31 05:09 am (UTC)-- Jonathan
Gloss Paint
Date: 2006-03-30 06:57 pm (UTC)Richard (Clyne)
Re: Gloss Paint
Date: 2006-03-30 08:16 pm (UTC)Ahh, is that the trick? Buy cheap brushes and dump 'em.
PJ
Re: Gloss Paint
Date: 2006-03-31 08:03 am (UTC)