2008 — 23 Mar: Sunday — expecting a flurry of snow
It's 00:26 and I'm listening to NPR's "Hot Jazz on a Saturday Night" — it's been an awfully long time since I did that, believe me. It is positively wintry out there and my eyelids are threatening to slam together. I shall keep this short.
I've signed up to Amazon's online storage and am trying out the "Bucket Explorer" software for the uploading. So far, so good. But it sure ain't as fast as a locally attached external hard drive! Yet more stuff to organise. I almost overlooked one of my credit card payments, too. I'd filled in the details in my little banking program, but neglected to follow through with the "real world" (actually cyberspatial) transaction. And the fact that this Monday is another Bank Hol in the UK takes me quite close (after allowing their four1 working days) to the due date which — naturally — is April Fool's Day.
Donkey Who?... dept.
My first Easter without Christa. It's a grey day, cold and drizzling with rain. Not an encouragement to venture out and about so I'm currently listening to BBC7 and the tale of Don Quixote, with Bernard Cribbins as Sancho Panza... I've not tackled the tome, and I don't know when John Arden produced this adaptation, but it's proving pretty good listening so far. However it has rendered brekkie somewhat overdue, (it's 11:27 and I've only just finished chomping). As I've said, having digital terrestrial radio on around the house leads to a bit of an echo as the various sets take slightly different amounts of time to do their decoding. Man cannot live by audio alone, however. In a more modern piece of satire, I've also been reading a nice interview from New Zealandland featuring Garry Trudeau and his marvellous cartoon strip "Doonesbury":
Bush is the seventh President to feature in the strip — and the most lavishly mocked... But the Doonesbury Dubya is a lethal moron, a blissfully inarticulate posturing idiot surrounded by yes-men. Considering Bush's effectiveness as an agent of change — he got an extraordinary percentage of his agenda passed into law, especially in his first term — it seems worth asking whether Trudeau should have taken him more seriously...
"I don't think anyone has ever under-estimated Bush's ability to get his way, and that unquestionably takes some sort of social intelligence. What is unforgivable in a president is wilful, prideful ignorance, and I have made that and its corollary — a contempt for expertise — the central focus of my critique. True, I have availed myself of the easy stuff — the Bushisms and his banal, intentionally dumbed-down communication style — but that's just another way of saying the man is fundamentally not up to the job."
Later that day... dept.
It's now 13:44. During (and after) lunch I will admit I've been playing with the MediaPC downstairs and am growing to like it quite a lot more. With the network access to all the media I have dotted around the house, and with a judicious relocation of the monitor from Christa's PC in her study, I think I have the basis of a viable system, even if I don't use the 50" plasma as its display.2 But it also points up the need for me to keep my digital bits & pieces a lot better organised.
Mike has already suggested I'm "mad" not to have gone for a system with hdmi, but perhaps he forgets I have a history of bad behaviour on my present non-hdcp setup3 with hdmi signals (and I have to use an hdmi-to-DVI converter in any case). If and when I get my next large display will be time enough for the hdmi/hdcp standards to have settled down, I hope. Meanwhile, the DVDO scaler produces a pixel-perfect match on my present screen. I must add, by the way, that the PVR recording I made of "House" on the replacement Panasonic (with its built-in digital terrestrial tuner, and therefore at least one less digital-to-analogue conversion within the belly of the beast) looked superb. The drama was, sadly, considerably less dramatic as it seems to be striving for more comedy.
Right! It's nearly time (18:20) I wasn't here because, if you see what I mean, I should shortly be there instead. Here's hoping the roads stay empty and the ice stays melted. I had a nice little wheel spin coming out of Waitrose yesterday when I belatedly realised a White Van Man was actually beckoning me out before he turned in. The spirit of Easter, heh?