Sunday, April 8, 2012

I managed to get out today

Yes - I made it into St Eloy for some shopping - such is the highlight of my life. Mind you, I spent a few bob. Another plant sale, and so I bought three soft fruit bushes - two redcurrants and one blueberry - a tray of 12 cauliflowers and a tray of 12 lettuce.

Another thing was that a few months ago LIDL had on sale a kind or remote speaker that looked like a mushroom. It takes a micro-SD card, but also there's a small jack that fits into a small headphone socket and there's also a USB connector for charging up the internal battery and running the sound system off a laptop computer. They were on sale for €12:99 and I was humming and hawing about one, but today they were reduced to €9:99 and so I bought one.

And honestly, I'm impressed with it. The sound is really good, much better than I expected. And I'm looking forward to trying it with a micro-SD card when I'm working somewhere. But the main reason for having it is that the phone that I bought in Canada takes a micro-SD card and so I bought a 16GB card, recorded all of my music onto it, and used the phone as a walkman-type of thing. I wasn't impressed with the earphones though and so I can plug this speaker into the phone and listen to it like that.

And so back home, in between the phone calls, I planted the cauliflower, the fruit bushes and 6 of the lettuce. I'll give the other lettuce to Liz on Monday for her to plant.

This morning though, I went through the magazine that I received in the post and made a list of potential radio programmes that I can do. There must be a good half-dozen that I can squeeze out of that. And then I finished the one that I was doing, adding a bit more stuff that I came across that was relevant, and finishing off the additional notes for June. I'm cracking on with this.

Another thing that I needed to do was to transform a few radio programmes from *.wav format to *.mp3 format. And it took ages to find a freeware utility to do it. I had all sorts of difficulties doing that.

Now here's a thing. A few weeks ago I bought a copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and so I went to watch it tonight on my new TV. And what surprised me is that the list of languages for subtitles available on disc is English, French and Dutch, whereas the spoken languages available are English, French and .... errrrr .... Flemish. Now I have never seen that before. The difference in language between Dutch and Flemish is far, far less than, say, French and Québecois, and usually a film company will go with either Dutch or Flemish - confident that those who know one will not notice the difference in the other - but to have them available as a mixed but exclusive option like this is totally bizarre. I've a good mind next time to listen to it in Flemish but read the Dutch subtitles and to see if I can spot the difference.

Ja, zeker!

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