Fitting the battle of life

So, with hardy-proposed enabled, I currently have several ‘important security updates’ and another 50 proposed updates waiting to be downloaded and installed.

Except I’m back home with mother for the week, and she lives out in the sticks. Not the real country-side sticks, but some little coastal town. And several km from the exchange. And has so-called broadband on this old copper line.

See, in London I have some zippy cable. Here, I don’t. And downloading these updates would take, update-manager guesstimated, an hour and a half.

Sod it, I’ll wait til the weekend. (Update: Apart from the security updates, after I read why they’re important this time round. There aren’t many so it won’t take too long!)

I am a sucker for the old Waterstones 3 for 2. Especially when I’m being dragged around Norwich by my mother and sister looking at shoes all day – popping into any bookshop is frankly a relief. And I love books.

I just finished Libra by Don DeLillo, and am (and have been for some time – pesky exams getting in the way) two-thirds of the way through Underworld by the same. And yet there I am, bored out of my mind, and I’ve got £20 left in the bank. A 3 for 2 on £8 paperbacks is tempting at the best of times, but witht that little money in my account you’d have thought it would be a firm no. But the shoes were getting on my nerves…

…so I bought (for probably a lot more than I could have paid online, but hey – I enjoyed the process of buying them, because it saved me from the shoes):

• We Need to Talk About Kevin,
• Midnight’s Children, and
• No Country for Old Men,

which I might get round to reading this Summer. Maybe. Perhaps.

In my first post for some time, I’ve decided to mention simply that I’ve moved from using Rhythmbox to Banshee for all my audio needs. It took me a while because Banshee kept crashing until I removed old database files and allowed it to create new ones from scratch (which I only figured out after several aborted attempts to install, multiple ‘remove –purge’ attempts to no avail, before I searched my home folder for all mentions of banshee to expunge them).

I quite like it. Bits of it are very much polished – the music browser is good, and I particularly like the not-Cover Flow album cover browser. Simple but effective.

One of its (Banshee 1.0) biggest advantages for me is the ability to play back video files, so I can now subscribe to both audio and video podcasts in the same application. While it doesn’t seem to handle that many video files, at least it’s a start.

It has good Last.fm integration, which I see as a good thing even though I don’t really use Last.fm that much – it’s just good to have it scrobbling away, even if it doesn’t automatically connect on start-up.

So in the past year I’ve used Rhythmbox, Exaile, Rhythmbox again for quite some time and now I’m on to Banshee.  Oh, I used Amarok at some point as well. Spoilt for choice? It’s a good thing. The app that does its job the best will win out. The ‘market’ would work better if all these apps used a common, open database format, so you could simply plug a different front-end on top and not have to re-scan your music collection every time you switch, but hey – it doesn’t take long.