(no subject)

I'm still making not much sense. My theory is that tomorrow and Friday will be hot again. Also, that I overworked. Also, that setting up a new system is tangling my brain. I am taking refuge in a very small glass of very fine muscat. Also, in slowly getting things to the stage where I can ask for help (lists of glitches!) and then, the system fixed, get back to work (and, speaking of work, why doesn't this sentence?).

I'm definitely paying for having braved the Great Outdoors today, but it was worth it. Well, almost worth it. I don't really enjoy it when I can only breathe using a tiny bit of my lungs, but I do enjoy it when I can act like a normal person.

Tomorrow afternoon I'm tempted to drink more of that iced tea with slices of lemon, tonic water and strawberry liqueur. I'm positive it's good for my breathing: reduces muscles spasms, expands the lungs and gets me so very relaxed I don't really mind.

Except for the breathing and the aches, I'm doing rather well, actually. I've only got two more programs to download and test and then I'll have a full list few things I can't do but ought to be able to. Also, I'll be able to do most things. This means that tomorrow afternoon, I should be able to get back to work (with breaks for trouble shooting as I get advice from my technowhiz friend).

If you're really lucky, my posts will become interesting again around then... I'll post a pince nez picture to indicate this wonderful progress (also to keep Chaz happy, for I rather suspect he wants to take those glasses to Mars), but the picture may only appear on LJ. We'll see.

My computer life is getting frabjously complicated, isn't it? (and for my next trick, I download another essential program.)

On watching a film (finally)

I have seen The Hobbit! I don't feel up to a proper critique (and besides, everyone else has given them) so here are some random comments.

Richard Armitage is an amazing actor, with or without good lines and with or without dwarf makeup.

Jackson and his people believe in a world without food production and also in a world with remarkably strange geology. They have travellers' stew, even when it's made by creatures too simple to wear clothes (trolls with pots!) or dwarves who keep mislaying their luggage. If ever I meet Jackson, I'm going to ask him if I may make him a stew while he watches... Or maybe while a team of geologists watch the movie and enlighten us as to how Jackson's Middle Earth was formed.

I misheard Gollum as saying "elfishes" and now I can't get the thought of fishy elves out of my mind: Elrond with fins and scales. Maybe this needs to be Part IV of The Hobbit ("There and Back Again - the Seaside Holiday"). I also want Part IV to include eagles, measuring their personal response to moths and their messages. I see those eagles as discontented, sarcastic and wildly amusing. They would have Australian accents. Not just Australian accents. Sydney accents. Coogee is their beach of choice.

Speaking of accents, why did the dwarf-who-was-once-a-NZ-Norse-god lose his accent more often than the dwarf-who-was-once-a-vampire?

There was enough Tolkien in The Hobbit so that it's a nice homage. It's not Tolkien, however. It lacks the groundedness. The sort of awareness of people's private worlds that can have Sam Gamgee know the exact step that will take him out of the familiar and into the unknown is absent from Jackson's film. In its place is much derring-do and Indiana Jones style sequential adventure. I enjoyed it, but I strongly feel that it should be renamed "Raiders of the Lost Hobbit."