Schicksal...

Playlist
Various - 2013 Acquisitions
Various - Albums of the Year 1959-2012
Tangerine Dream - Pergamon
Habanera Saxophone Quartet - Mysterious Morning
Tippett - String Quartets 1-4
Alice Cooper - Greatest Hits
Pink Floyd - A Foot in the Door

Fate took a hand in things today - not that I believe in fate but, you know those times where you think if such and such a thing hadn't happened then something else wouldn't have happened either...

First though, this early evening, a visit to the much pictured here cathedral...

...actually venturing inside...

...where I sat up beyond the choir...

There were perhaps just a dozen or so people in the vast space, one of whom was ex-Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who was in town to speak at the Edinburgh International Book Festival...

While he was in the cathedral for communion, I was in to enjoy the setting by Byrd of the mass...

Forty five minutes of reasonable entertainment, of which Byrd took up maybe a third...

Worthwhile nonetheless but if I do it again, I'll sit up the back - so I can exit when the deep religious stuff starts...

On the way home, this wee beauty spotted in a nearby garden...

And so to the input of fate...

At lunchtime I'd headed to the St Brides Acoustic Music Centre for the second day to obtain two tickets for chum Norman Lamont's show there on Sunday...

Having purchased tix for Anne and I yesterday, I was now obtaining same for Impossible Songs...

However, due to a lack of manpower onsite, their box office was shut between 12:45 and 1:30, meaning I had to hang around the area for a while...

I found myself in nearby Silicon Centre, asking the assistant why it might be that, all of a sudden, CDs burned on my system wouldn't play in my old CD player...

After a bit of discussion, I decided to buy a different brand of CD - then I spotted a cheeky wee portable DVD drive for around £25...

I duly left with this also in the bag - given that the assistant opined there might be a problem with the laser in my current writer...

I returned to the now open box office, got the tickets, attended Mass and headed home...

After some considerable amount of telly time, I retired upstairs to set things up...

Reviews (read post purchase of course) had pointed to possible problems with the new machine including the drawer not opening, flimsy workmanship, distorted tracks when burning discs issued by Warner Brothers, having to use two USB ports to power it etc etc...

Putting those to the back of my mind, I soldiered on and, in the hour between the end of our now nightly reruns of "The Big Bang Theory" and the start of "Don't Trust the B**** in Apartment 23", I had set it up, ripped a disc of saxophone quartet music which had arrived in the post, ripped Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits (on Warners) and burned a Pink Floyd best of...

Success on a plate...

Now being able to burn discs successfully again, I really wanted to get to the bottom of my printer problem - i.e. not being able to print from the netbook but being able to e-mail the printer and having it print that way...

The current set up was hopeless for printing on CDs...

I started at 9:30...

By 1:30 am it was, unbelievably, sorted...

And so, if the box office had not been closed due to lack of manpower, I would not have been spurred on to this result...

Or maybe it was because I attended Mass and God fixed my printer...

Or maybe it got sorted because today would have been Crispy the Kitten's twenty ninth birthday...

We'll never know...

Highlight of the Day : System upgrade...