Tracking down Danny Elfman's "Wolf Suite, part 1" without knowing it, and fixing a broken Kindle book (shhhh, don't tell anyone)

BLOT: (25 Mar 2012 - 12:40:38 AM)

Tracking down Danny Elfman's "Wolf Suite, part 1" without knowing it, and fixing a broken Kindle book (shhhh, don't tell anyone)

I have watched the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy trailer a good dozen or thirteen times. While I do dig the trailer, the song playing has been a big part of it.

And, in the way that really brilliant thoughts, even in really brilliant minds, can take a while to surface: it was only today that I realized that the song being played in the trailer most likely had nothing to do with the movie itself. Fired up my elite Google skills—I think my search was something like: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Trailer Music Where From—and had my answer in no time at all. About 4:12 later, to be precise. It is this ditty [now with even less Cold War paranoia!] -

Want to bet on how many times I will play it in a row and then be tired of it? Let's experiment! Though in the meantime it is digging in my soul and dragging the need-for-cello right on out, which makes me think that something like digital box-set of five CDs worth of Shostakovich string quartet-ery might be in my near future [can you say, birthday gift hint?]. By near, I think I mean a month [or, say, two months and 5 days *wink*], because we are once again in the broke times, but that's cool, too. Absence of cellos makes the heart grow fonder, and so forth. Besides, I have some Zoe Keating I need to play in the meantime.

Speaking of adventures in digital technology, had a case today where I sat down to fix a Kindle book. In this case, Don DeLillo's White Noise which, being a Kindle edition more expensive than its paperback [on Amazon, not cover price], probably should have some slight guarantee that it won't be all horked up attached. In this case, it had an extra space between paragraphs, and after awhile it started to get on my nerves. I had to rip the DRM off it (sssssshhhhhhh) just so I could decompile it, investigate the HTML to see what was wrong, spot the most likely culprit, go back in and redesign some styles to make up for what I think the extra paragraph breaks were trying to do, and then recompile the OPF and get a book that I can read. Sure, I know what you are thinking: "Doug, there is a think called paper and it doesn't take an hour and a half to reprogram..." and really the only answer I have to that is, "Hey, what happens when you get a paper copy and there's a glaring error? Sure it took me an hour or so of problem solving, but I have an ebook that looks pretty, now."

The big XXI, am I right?

Me in 2012