Auld Reekie

The alarm goes off early. I hit snooze. I then thing “did I hit snooze, or did I just switch the alarm off?” So I get out of bed, so I don’t fall asleep and miss my train. The alarm goes off when I’m shaving.

The trip down is good, and I listen to 2 1/2 albums on my HTC Desire, and the battery only goes down a wee notch.

As the train nears Montrose, I recall that it was the TGO Challenge dinner last night, and text Darren (he’d have been awake anyway), and say I’ll keep an eye out. I see one chap with rucksack on the platform, as he moves, there’s a flash of a t-shirt. He gets into the same carriage, and  sits near me. I don’t recognise him, and leave him to stare at the beautiful Scottish scenery. Thinking that he’s thinking “I walked across that”, resolves me to my Summer plans of getting out to the ‘Gorms. But I’ve been there before. As the train nears the end of the line at Edinburgh, I say a few words to him. It’s JH on his way back to Taunton. We’d had chats on forums in times past. Hand shakes hand, and he’s off to wait for his train, while I wait for an old University pal.

The rest of the morning/afternoon is spent chewing the fat and buying books. I’ve a cold and he’s got things on his mind, but it’s fun to catch up again. Waterstones is raided, and I apologise to the lass at the till for leaving big gaps in their Scots poetry section:

• “Gair nan Clarsach/The Harps’ Cry”, ed by Colm O Baoill, translated by Meg Bateman [Birlinn]
• “Duanaire na Sracaire/Songbook of the Pillagers”, ed Wilson McLeod and Meg Bateman [Birlinn]
• “Chuckies fir the Cairn”, ed Rab Wilson [Luath] – purely for the title

At the nearby gallery I get Walter Benjamin’s “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”, and Elisabeth Couturier’s “Talk about design”. I have a hankering for something new to get me motivated.

On the way back, I switch on GPS (for 5-10 minutes) and wifi and download app updates on 3g and reply to emails … and watch the battery life drain down to the orange warning. Switching off the power-hungry apps, I settle into 30 minutes of an audiobook on MortPlayer, and reading a PDF book. The battery life remains steady.

I do notice that the image above appears much sharper on the HTC Desire’s AMOLED screen than it does on the LG LCD monitor at home. I looked at file sizes and ruled out a quality difference, as the file on the phone and the file on the pc were identical copies. All I can think of is the difference in screen quality. Or maybe it is something else.