The Lair of the SlowFox

</blues>Woke up this morning (da-da, da dum....)</blues

'twas weird indeed, though: there was only my Micra, girly opposite's Micra and bloke two doors down's Focus parked outside our respective houses. All the other residences, from Castle Fox down to the Chinese take-away, had vacant roadspace outside.

This almost never happens: competition for parking spaces can be quite intense outside Castle Fox - sometimes I have to park as much as 10 metres^* away from my front door. That said, the lines of parked cars are normally pretty solid, even if the odd sort of Brownian Motion that exists in the whole vehicle storage game 'round these parts does seem to work out in my favour more often than not.

Apple are selling the old, 2nd generation Shuffles off cheap, so I've got one - £31 all in, including my email address engraved on the back. I was going to get the square root of two engraved on it instead (1.4142135623... from memory⁺), but decided that that would be just a bit too strange. Even for me.

Anyway, the Shuffle seems to play nicely with Banshee under Linux (although obviously not with DRM material), so that's good. The only slight drawback to the Shuffle I've noticed to date is that, when ambling along with the hound, and the Shuffle clipped to my trouser pocket, it's possible to accidentally skip tracks through inadvertant brushing of the controls. So that's what the 'hold' function's for, then...

* - just to annoy glittertine, for whom I know parking is a genuine issue ;-P

+ - why yes, I do have the square roots of the integers from 1 to 10 memorised to 10 decimal places. Because you never know when this knowledge might prove useful...