Bibliophile

Damn Ottakar's, Books etc, WHSmiths et al...

I went shopping on Saturday and managed to buy no less than eight books in about 100 minutes. Eight! Granted, three of them were for other people[1], but still! I did manage to resist buying two books though, so I count that as a partial triumph. I am now the proud owner of:

• Minority Report, by Philip K. Dick
• Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
• The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul, by Douglas Adams
• Don't Panic!, by Neil Gaiman (about Douglas Adams)[2]
• Dune Messiah, by Frank Herbert

And I managed to not buy Shadowland by Peter Strauss, or Alex Garland's second novel (which wasn't that much of a wrench seeing as there were only about 300 words to the page, and it looked like a bit of a ripoff). These have brought my list of 'books to read' to 41 in total, which I think is a pile about five or six feet high. It'll keep me going until September at least!

And now that I'm driving to school, in a car without a CD player, I am rediscovering the redundant and formerly-believed-to-be-obselete format of cassette tapes. Yesterday I recorded three cassettes just for the car, and I have about another five to do. They take quite a bit longer than 90 minutes to record though, since the recording process consists of:

• Deciding which albums will fit onto the cassette
• Selecting the relevant songs in Winamp, and adding more or trimming as required until the playlist is 90 minutes in length
• Shuffling them into random order, and then reordering to make sure that it's unlikely to be a song I particularly like being cut off halfway through when the tape changes sides
• Burning the MP3s as audio files onto a CD-RW (so that I can reuse it) which takes about 20 minutes for a full CD, since my CD rewriter has a nasty tendency to crash if asked to write at anything above 4x (although it says it can do 12x)
• Taking the CD-RW and cassette downstairs to the only music system in the house that can read CD-RWs, and starting to record
• Keeping a watch on the CD player since, when writing audio files to a CD-RW, about 1 in 8 songs will stick, so I then need to skip that track
• Erase the CD-RW and put more tracks on it to fill the 90 minute cassette
• Repeat

Which is why it took about six hours, rather than three and a half gah, I meant four and a half. One of the joys of doing Maths and futher maths is that your ability to do simple arithmetic goes out the window.