2007 — 6 Apr: Good Friday, indeed!
Windows is (slightly) more stupidly bull-headed than I bargained for. As I had "updates pending" as shown by that yellow shield with an "!" in it, I kept an eye on the system when I shut it down in the small hours. Thus I spotted that I needed to choose explicitly not to apply said updates as I knew that would undo the effect of the System Restore and simply break my sound card functions once again. (I admit I broke my printer all by myself by naively choosing the optional hardware update offered by HP via the Windows Update web site! If it ain't broke, as they say, don't fix it. The enforced system update at least didn't force the printer update on me...)
What I didn't realise is that on startup later this morning (and, trust me, I have better things to do with my time than watch and wait for Windows to get its leisurely act together, apply its morning layer of "slap" etc) it would blindly apply the pending update and then sit waiting for me to restart the system to finish the job. Happily, I had already bookmarked the page with the hotfix to this broken fix on my iMac, and could thus immediately re-fix the system.
While I suppose I grudgingly agree that getting updates onto one's system is a Good Thing, when those updates break my system I get a tad grouchy. On this, of all days in the Christian calendar, I do believe I took the name of the Lord in vain, in fact! Oops.
My Word
The chap who asked me for an A/V receiver recommendation emailed to say he'd bought the model I suggested, though he bought a gold-coloured one (probably, technically, "champagne") at £100 cheaper via "Purely Gadgets" than from SuperFi (worth knowing). He adds "Sounds great although I'm still trying to configure it. e.g. SkyHD doesn't transmit dolby digital over HDMI and I'm not convinced the receiver isn't messing around with the hidef picture".
Well he ought to be wrong on the first count (even the BBC HD test transmissions on satellite manage Dolby Digital via hdmi, so I don't see why Sky wouldn't) and he's possibly overlooked the built-in video conversion and upscaling that does, indeed, "mess with"1 the hidef picture.
Arthur C Clarke's favorite T-shirt...
I invented the satellite and all I got was this lousy t-shirt — see David Langford's latest Ansible.
Too good not to nick it... department
Browsing AbeBooks via the iMac (but not via Windows, oddly) I found their "Not-Book E-Cards" campaign page. This example tickled me:
