The study still contains multiple cardboard boxes in exactly the wrong place for the long term positioning of the iMac, and also at least one (1) mouse. I heard something rustling, and looked behind a box to find a mouse trying very hard to blend into the furniture. It's a good thing (for the mouse) I'm not a terrier. So much of today has been spent trying to ensure that there is nowhere in the house with even enough loose food around for a rodent of perfectly average size. Apart from the massive banquet laid out on the trap farm, of course.
For those of you in hermetically sealed modern houses well away from rodent infestations this might all sound rather shocking. It's like this. Victorian terraced houses have just about a zillion places where mice can get into them, and the average London street is home to just about a zillion mice. And not a few rats, incidentally, though I don't think our cellar is quite damp enough. At any rate, this is the third time we've acquired mice, after one batch that took a couple of months to get rid of and one mouse that took a couple of hours to get rid of.
Incidentally, all the mouse eradication websites tell you that whatever else is true of mice, they do not create textbook arch-shaped mouseholes in your skirting boards.
"Exhibit A"
Flylady told us to work on decluttering the master bedroom this week. So we dutifully wandered upstairs after dispatching the kids, and I sorted through six drawers of clothes while Steven fell asleep, poor tired thing. So now I have a warm glowing feeling of worthiness, and, more importantly, the iMac all to myself.
I was going to finish the second batch of DV editing, but I'm still itching to try new things. So tonight's new thing is to see whether I can write a CD which will play in my Goodmans CDMP 352. This is a CD-based MP3 player with the unique selling point of being utterly cheap (read my Ciao review) and highly suitable for the car. I know, if I'd properly bought into this philosophy I'd have dropped a further £300 for an iPod, which would certainly work.
Meanwhile, another tiny Mac OS X query. Is it possible to stop an app loading once it's started? Because i just clicked on iMovie by mistake, and it bounced up and down for ages while I was going "No! No! Go away!"
When making MP3 CDs for the car, I pull CDs randomly off the shelf, aiming for a batch that don't include anything utterly vile, or too many by the same person. And at least one album we really like, and a couple we're not at all familiar with.
The importing bit of iTunes is really easy, but there's been one anomaly; it imported one track in a very odd way; stripping off the last minute of the track, but then playing the first twenty seconds of that missing music simultaneously with the next song in the iTunes library. This is bizarre, and quite unlike any rip failure I've had on a Windows machine. It's also completely recreatable; I did it three times on the same track before giving up.
I can't spot the bug easily on the web, so I'm not going to fret too much about what's gone wrong unless it happens elsewhere. Meanwhile, I take out CDs, put in CDs, and enjoy that little frisson of excitement every time the iMac interrogates CDDB. I feel smug every time CDDB doesn't have a commercial album I own. Even when it was the Early Learning Centre's Wheels on the Bus.
Anyway, in this randomly chosen batch of 8 CDs, I've already found one CD that CDDB doesn't have (Chris Conway's Earth Rising), and I have high hopes for To Hell With Burgundy. Oh, well; that one is there.
It's getting late, so I doubt I'm actually going to burn the CD tonight. Update tomorrow. And who knows? Perhaps the mouse will die.
12:46:32 AM comment [] 
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