Alasdair Watson

It’s grey and miserable out there, and I’m in the office. Welcome to the weekend. I don’t strictly *need* to be, but I figure it’s better to start doing a few small chunks of overtime now, in the hope that I don’t have to watch my entire life getting swallowed by this project this time next month. Last time we did this sort of thing, I did 14 straight days in the office, finishing up with working from 10am Sunday morning to 3am Monday morning, and I was definitely getting a bit peculiar toward the end there.

Still, it is the weekend: distract me. Tell me interesting things – what good books have you read recently? What websites have made you think? Why is this summer’s predominant weather so basically bloody miserable? Can I have that thing when you’re done using it?

Longshot: Any expert-level Adobe Lightroom users reading this? Anyone *know* any hardcore Lightroom users they could put me in touch with? I’m trying to hack something into a process, and I’ve googled and got nothing, but it’s such an obvious thing, I’m convinced there has to be a way to do it, and I need someone’s brains to pick, even if it’s just to be told they’ve left it out….

And while I’m here, this might as well one of those once in a reminders I put up now and again for new people, or old people who weren’t paying attention the first few times: if you’ve got any interest in photography, or in getting the odd pretty picture on your friendspage now and again (and really, I’m doing well if I manage one a week), then you could do worse than friend my photojournal, electricana.

There are services where I could send my entire CD collection to have it ripped to high quality MP3 (had I not already done it myself). There are places I can go to get my DVD collection digitized, and that, I might well consider, at least for the films and TV I like to rewatch. It’d cost me a few hundred quid, but the time to rip a DVD to .avi is significantly higher, and requires more manual intervention and computer power than CD ripping, so I might justify the cost as a time and effort saver. Unless, of course, someone here can point in the direction of a one-click app for OS X that makes turning a DVD to an .avi a matter of sticking the disk in and hitting go – must be able to cope with turning multi-episode TV DVD into separate files.

But I digress from my point, which is that the though occurs: why is there not a place where I can send my books, and get them delivered to me as ebook editions? I would pay pretty reasonable sums for that service – a couple of quid a book, certainly. The technology exists to do it for libraries, etc. Why not is there not a consumer level version of the service yet? I have shelf after shelf, groaning with books, cluttering the place up, making my life look untidy. They would almost certainly all fit on the memory stick I have on my keyring (based on 1-2 MB per book as a PDF for the same of argument – I don’t think I own more than 200 books, so frankly, my entire library would be a drop in the bucket). This would be almost infinitely more convenient.

I accept that not everyone is as happy reading on screen as I am (honestly, I do more reading on screen that I do on paper, these days) but surely there must be more people than just me that would have a use for the service?

Wandered into The Whisky Exchange on Saturday.  That place has become dangerous to me, ever since the bastards sussed out my taste in whisky.

Left with a couple of bottles, and am just sampling the first now.  Smokehead.  And, on reflection, I endorse this product.  Just read the tasting notes on the website, and tell me that doesn’t sound like fun.

Best bit: 25 quid, and on a par with whiskies twice the price.