DVD challenge, LispWorks, Bark Chippings and Weeds

Our DVDs

DVDs on the left belong to one of us; those on the right to the other. Your (not very difficult) challenge is to decide which are Clare's and which are mine, and where the boundary is.

Click on image to make larger if you can summon up the energy.*

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Downloaded LispWorks Personal Edition this morning. I've been put off in the past by the unfriendly tone of the Ts&Cs:

"Please note that the LispWorks Personal Edition, distributed free of charge, has the following intentional limitations:

• There is a heap size limit which, if exceeded, causes the image to exit. A warning is provided when the limit is approached.


• There is a time limit of 5 hours for each session, after which LispWorks Personal exits, possibly without saving your work or performing cleanups such as removing temporary files. You are warned after 4 hours of use.


• The functions save-image, deliver, and load-all-patches are not available.


• Initialization files are not loaded.


• Layered products that are part of LispWorks Professional and Enterprise Editions (CLIM, KnowledgeWorks, Common SQL and LispWorks ORB) are not included."

But it's well-supported and they have to make money. As with all language/development systems there's that steep initial learning curve. This afternoon it's PDF manual time - if I can summon up the energy.

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In other news, I'm expecting two tons of bark chippings for the front garden to be delivered this afternoon. To be spread on the anti-weed mats Clare already laid out.

I'm also expecting Clare herself at some point, bearing the Christmas wreath she's meant to have learned how to make at the Bishop's Palace lunchtime class (just finished at time of writing), plus the prizes she won at the Labour Party Christmas raffle last Saturday in Wells Town Hall which need picking up on the Glastonbury Road: a bit of a stroll from the Palace.

"If they're too heavy, give me a ring," I said. "I'll pick you up in the car."

That would be the car which I won't be able to get out of the drive on account of two enormous bags of bark chippings blocking the bottom.

Later: my fears prove groundless as the first bag is placed carefully on the mat

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* Yep, I'm just the SF (and GoT). All the rest are hers.

New toys

Alex and Clare at British Camp, the Malvern Hills

Here is positively the last of the holiday snaps.

Yesterday I was mulling over a replacement for my 'smashed at the summit of British Camp' Samsung Galaxy S3. So two years almost to the day, a new mobile phone should be arriving this morning, the Nexus 6. It's not cheap, but it gives me hours of innocent pleasure (yes, you at the back!).

We should all be wary of being captured by some tech giant's platform ecosystem, but I am seduced by the lack of bloatware and the raw technical specs of Google's stuff. The pain of configuration hangs as a black shadow, etc ...

The other Amazon toy due today - out of the blue, so to speak - is the "Interstellar" DVD, ordered months ago after I refused to sit through three hours of inchoate mumbly hokum at the cinema. Obviously I have lower standards at home, although I shall tell everyone that it's to study the accurate visualisation of black hole orbital kinematics in regions of ultra-high spacetime curvature .. or something like that.

The chances of it being watched are not high: my copy of the Scarlett Johansson vehicle "Lucy" still lies unviewed weeks after its arrival, and that's been rated pretty good. Last night, after our arrival home, we all sat and watched Sigourney Weaver in "Aliens", marvelling at the mash-up of "Star Wars". "Starship Troopers" and "The Matrix" that film was (I may be getting my chronology a bit mixed up here).

Under the Skin (film)

We just watched the DVD of "Under the Skin" featuring Scarlett Johansson as Isserley, the alien which predates Scottish hitchhikers. (I struggle with a link to yesterday's referendum.)

Scarlett Johansson as 'the alien'

Michel Faber's book is really excellent, expertly charting Isserley's psychological transition from resentful corporate hunter-gatherer to terminally-rebellious renegade. The film (apparently due to lack of funds) dispenses with the meat-processing backroom cast and the posh-boy from corporate HQ, replacing plot and setting with dreamy Scottish imagery and Ms Johansson.

The Director and Producer wanted this to come across as art-house, but cinematic staging can't substitute for plot, motive, dialogue and character development. I won't say we wasted 104 minutes of our lives, but the longueurs were exasperating and the overall treatment just didn't work.

Read the book instead.