2006 — Day 35 - Welsh dragon sausages

I unaccountably³ missed the recent item about Welsh Trading Standards officials (if that's what they are) taking exception to the makers of "Welsh Dragon" sausages because the product does not in fact contain dragon. Does the fact that they're actually made from pork imply the existence of flying pigs in that part of the world?

Silver disc decision point?

"Once upon a time" (notice how I'm inconsistent with my use of the <q> tag, and how the appearance of my quotation marks varies accordingly? No? Well, I do [particularly as IE7 ignores the tag]) — where was I? Oh yes, when DVDs were just about to be launched here in the Benighted Kingdom⁴ I had a decision to make. I was a keen (the only?) user/consumer of LaserDiscs. Apart from Pioneer's combi-player, it was apparent that LaserDiscs were following in the Dodo's footsteps. So I equipped myself with the then top-of-the-range player, buying it as late as I could (and thus actually paying about half the original price) before it was discontinued.

Since (probably to the approval of Barry Fox) I currently use a non-HDCP plasma screen (whose native resolution of 1280x768 actually exceeds the basic HDTV 720p resolution of 1280x720) and since I feed all my video signals to it via a decent quality de-interlacer/upscaler and since I paid a not-so-small fortune for it less than four years ago, I am in no hurry to replace the screen. Besides (almost as important) I have not yet finished burning nasty on-screen (and totally unnecessary) logos⁵ onto it.

So my decision is, of course, at what point do I buy a top-of-the-range DVD player prior to the onslaught from either or both Blu-Ray and HD DVD? It is already becoming quite tricky to find one that doesn't have onboard upscaling and HDMI output.

Slings and arrows department

I sort of promise to do a better job of the overly-primitive "Previous" and "Next" arrows at the top of each page here. (And yes, Peter A/Peter M, I may even duplicate them at the foot of the page for you.) But I'm amused to note that IE7 gets around the problem of the "Next" arrow twitching laterally from time to time (caused by the depth of the page either calling for, or making unnecessary, a vertical scrollbar in the browser window) by simply keeping its scrollbar whether needed or not (but greyed out when not needed). Is this cleverness or laziness, I wonder?

8 December 2006

Footnotes

³  Not that unaccountable. I don't read The Times now that it's owned by the chap Private Eye is in the habit of calling The Dirty Digger. But Dave Langford seems to, and reports in his latest Ansible newsletter.
⁴  I was once sent (in IBM) a snailmail inviting me to some quality-related event. It was addressed to me personally "from the desk of" an executive whose name blissfully escapes me; but it was more tellingly addressed to me as a citizen of the "Untied Kingdom".
⁵  I actually sent Greg Dyke (an ex-Director General of the BBC) an email asking him if he would refund the proportion of the cost of my screen that was in danger of becoming permanently marked with a "BBC Four" logo since the culprit transmission would literally be identified — no reply, of course.