2008 — 8 January: happy anniversary Tuesday in NZ

Good grief. It's 36 years since I did my pitiful "Best Man" gig at Big Bro's wedding. Am I getting older, do you think?

Too good to miss... department

Thanks to the ever-reliable Dave Langford's Ansible. And which of my erudite readers know who described the Ansible and what it is, I wonder?

I will reveal how the Duke of Edinburgh secretly trained the Loch Ness Monster to swim up the Seine until it reached the Pont d'Alma and then I will explain how Philip then gave a kind of ghillie's whistle and Nessie reared out of the water and so startled Henri Paul that he swerved into the path of Elvis Presley in the white Fiat Uno, at which point Prince Charles — hovering overhead in a Luftwaffe helicopter — switched on the supermagnet installed by MI6 in the concrete pillar of the tunnel and sucked the Merc to its doom.

Boris Johnson, reported by "What the papers say" (apparently)

I was familiar with the likening of the odds of a National Lottery jackpot as being akin to seeing Elvis alight from a flying saucer and step down on to Nessie. This is not that different, I guess.

Thanks, Brian, for the "Wired" blog link to that 150-inch plasma screen, but did you read (and despair at) the (level of) comments underneath? Besides, think how large the compression artefacts will look! And, on that front, it's occurred to me that the relatively poor showing from the hard drive recordings I'd got from Freeview on the Panasonic recorder when trying it on Mike's HD Samsung¹ LCD TV may be, in part, because they were captured at SP rather than the greedier XP recording rate.

Time for brekkie (09:44) and to see if I correctly second-guessed the choice of bin to be emptied today (though I suppose the vehicle I vaguely heard earlier could have been the green garden waste bag picker-upper).

Procrastination... department

A core skill among the newly-widowered retirees of my acquaintance (well, me, at any rate). But, despite the fact that I'm now waiting in for a dinky little iPod² to show up on the doorstep, I find it hard to argue with the ideas and opinions here. I really (really) must get on with re-ripping those last four cartons of CDs! Else how can I continue to regard myself as a completeist? I'm also seriously considering simplifying my A/V stack, having yet to re-install the Panasonic HD DVD recorder since its Sunday outing to play with Mike's system. (Actually, one powerful reason for simplification is that it's surprisingly difficult to fit more than one unit on a shelf without a second pair of hands [and a sweetly smiling face] to lighten the load.)

The iPod has landed, and is now charging. I have copied the playlist I built for Cathy on to it to take it out for a test spin later this evening, but I note (with mild dismay) that I already have more music on the iMac than will fit on to the "160GB" disc (not even counting those four cartons) because, fool that I am, I naively thought 160GB meant 160GB. Now, (23:07 or so) as I just told her by email, "I'm in iPod heaven, with your playlist on shuffle. It started with my very favourite track — how spooky is that?!" It is a truly beautiful, elegant little gadget, I must admit. No contest, in fact, between it and my once-beloved Creative Zen jukebox. And the quality of my MP3s (VBR, highest quality, remember, and roughly equivalent to 320kbps) gives the lie to that piece in Rolling Stone in my fairly golden-eared³ opinion.

Well, at least I've just cancelled the Virgin Media cable phone line rental and associated direct debit, and will even get a £6 rebate, provided I write in to claim it! This was originally Videotron's, then Clueless & Witless, and then joined the bearded Branson's empire. But it was only ever used, by Christa, for her fax⁴ machine (and, I belatedly discovered, this isn't even connected at the moment, and probably hasn't been for the last seven months, since she began her final leave of absence) for receiving patent texts from her translation business. So, £12/month saved is £12/month earned, I reckon. Anyone want to buy a laser fax machine?

And, staying on a technology theme, a Labour Cabinet is now unanimously in favour of replacement nuclear electricity generation plants. My, how things change over the years!

Footnotes

¹  Reading the "What Video" magazine last night (as one does) I momentarily fell in lust with a Samsung (LE-52F96BD — almost as memorable, that, as a pre-release IBM product code, I assure you) with its LED backlight system offering an absurdly high contrast ratio. Mike deflated my lust, however, by telling me (incorrectly, as it turns out) that it's already an obsolete model, replaced by the one he bought four or five months ago.
²  Apple's dinky little online store has been offline every time I tried to track the parcel's progress today... Aha! It's out on the road right now (16:05). They also serve who only sit and wait.
³  In earlier years I was a record and hi-fi reviewer (freelance, but quite lucrative). And I was still able, a couple of years ago, to set up a full Dolby Digital speaker surround system to within 1dB (as shown by subsequently checking sound levels with a meter). I admit, though, that the higher frequencies are now going to wherever it is that the hair on my head has decided to emigrate.
⁴  Junior and I both used to tease her about this ancient technology, but she earned thousands of pounds with it over the years, so it's a slightly sad end to an era.