2008 — 18 Feb: Monday, and it's cold!
It's 01:21, and I've just reinstated the Pioneer DVD 575A in my system after a hard day's night comparing its output with the Helios 4000 HD upscaling player. The latter just has too many quirks during operation — for example, when skipping to the next chapter, subtitles come back on! And if you're foolish enough to change HD modes it's all too easy to, as it were, lock1 yourself out and be left with a blank screen...
If (unlikely!) anyone is wondering about my new Panasonic DVD HD Freeview PVR... the fact that it appears to apply the ghastly hdcp flag to its upscaled output (despite the fact that this means it's "protecting" what starts out as a standard definition signal) means relegation2 to simple "replacement" status for the one that failed on me. Still, it remains useful as a spare multi-region DVD deck in the system though it, too, has a few idiosyncracies — it gets unhappy, for example, if you have a DVD already loaded on power on, and can lock up.
One decision still left, of course. Do I connect the Pioneer DVD player back in via its SCART and use its RGB output (ruling out use of its internal de-interlace capability but using a spare input on the Joytech SCART switch box)? Or do I use it via its component output, set to progressive? The DVDO video scaler has a spare component input. In earlier days, it would have been simple, but Pioneers are sometimes3 very good at de-interlacing. It may yet come down to a close re-examination of the extent (if any) of the CUE4 problem!
Yet more testing and experimentation — good job it's only a hobby. Now, remind me. When did "trialling" become a legitimate verb?
Cadbury Schweppes, which makes half of Britain's Easter eggs, is trialling an unboxed "eco-egg" as part of its efforts to reduce 30% of its carbon emissions by 2020.
And when did a Company Press Release become a legitimate source of news? Time for Grumpy to retire (to bed, that is — I'm already retired!)
Strollers in the moonlight
I know UK citizens are under more or less constant surveillance, but...
Thanks to Mike for the snap. You wouldn't believe the shenanigans I had with it (Ill-met by moonlight, indeed) as Photoshop Elements 5.0 (name and shame!) declined to play nice. It does this from time to time; menu options that were available become greyed out.5 In this case, I took the raw image Mike supplied through a combination of Photoshop (for a tad of "SmartFixing"), Fireworks (to crop it, but then in a fruitless attempt to rotate it slightly since Photoshop had decided to go on strike in that "Custom rotate" department), and finally Xara Xtreme to rescue me by rotating the converted bitmap by eye before exporting as this JPEG. Software, heh? Or is it Monday?
The Black Cloud
No, not my mood. The title of my hero Fred Hoyle's excellent novel. Triggered by this story. I almost got excited, until reading that frankly disappointing "when it smacks into our galaxy in 20-40 million years". Mind you, it seems to have taken astronomers over 44 years to work out whether it was approaching us or receding.
Does the Archbishop realise?
That, under Sharia Law, "a man must dress like a man and woman [sic] must dress like a woman". I saw this on the BBC news site so I'm guessing it must be true.
What's going on?... dept.
Yesterday someone6 searching for:
quincunx palliser appendix
was ushered through Molehole's front door. Overnight, I find a variant search string:
galton quincunx foto
Oh well. Time (09:09) for some brekkie, followed by a round of shelf-restocking. Then meet up with Len for a bite of lunch. Listening to the radio reports of traffic chaos in other parts of the frozen and befogged UK makes me very glad to be sitting here in a nice sunny study.
Right! The shopping has been shopped. The car is warmed up and ready. It's time (12:13) for that lunch. And now, almost before you know it, it's 17:21, Len has been shown Lifted, as has young Roger who's just been round for a chat, an iPod demo, and a cuppa. The lunchtime steak and ale pie is doubtless digested, the car is snugly back in its nest, and I suppose I need to give a thought or two to something in the supper line. Life goes trundling on. Hasn't it been lovely and sunny though? And the sun is still shining! Wonderful, despite "Sally Traffic's" dire predictions of a country full of freezing fog tonight.
Light slowly dawns... dept.
When innocently quoting the lines from Robert Frost yesterday I had no idea that they were used as a post-hypnotic trigger in the Don Siegel film "Telefon". (Thanks, Brian!) The only other film using such a plot device (that I can recall at the moment) is The Hot Rock and the phrase (of course!) was "Afghanistan Banana Stand". Somewhat less poetical, I agree.