2008 — 27 July: Sunday
Serendipitously caught the "Comedy Connections" programme about Yes, Minister — marvellous stuff, though all the participants are either dead or now aged beyond initial belief. So a full evening of TV vegetating: the Bixby film, two (count 'em) episodes of amiable tosh also known as Torchwood and now, already, it's time for tonight's picture of Christa:
Christa on the colourful stairs, 1978 or thereabouts
It's just about cool enough to sleep, so G'night at 00:21 or thereabouts.
Could be worse... dept.
Just read a note that came in overnight from far off New Zealandland:
Have just been without power for 24 hrs — and in the country that means no water, no toilets, no cooking, no light — just candles and cold food, no TV, no computer!! — geez what can i do all day!!! But we are back to normal now — briefly — another storm forecast for tomorrow...
Sounds like a narrow escape if you ask me, Sis! (You can tell me the upsetting cow story1 another time.) Talk about the shape of things to come, heh?
It's 11:13 and Junior's getting ready to set off home. It's getting hot, too, so today's a day for idly noodling away at a few databases with the fan on and the curtains drawn. Music a-plenty, too. Possibly some further HDFury experimenting later, but not on my system!
Now, somehow (don't ask me to explain) it's 13:49. A couple of chicken breasts are doing their thermal thing in the oven, with a salad ready and waiting to be added. Dear Mama has just rung, her sister is "having blood" whatever that means. Mama's grocery cupboard is apparently bare (she should see the state of mine!) and her neighbours (who kindly shop for her) are "all away". It is, therefore, probably just as well that she tells me she's "not hungry", isn't it? I am, of course, immediately judged and found wanting in sympathy / empathy — very wrong on both counts. Life, heh?
I am, by the way, faintly amazed that a spare oxygen cylinder can make such a mess of a nice, big, doubtless well-maintained Boeing passenger jet. But then, I was never really cut out to be an aeronautical engineer. Doubtless Big Bro will have his own opinions... He does, and has just expressed them (while awaiting his breakfast):
Aircraft pressure bottles have a strict maintenance regime inc periodic checks for corrosion and periodic hydrostatic pressure tests. If this was an aircraft bottle then something
went wrong in that control process.
If however it was a bottle in a pax bag it is likely to be a hospital type thing and I would bet it never gets the rigorous testing. If itself pressurised, then remember the bottle
was at a pressure altitude of 8-10,000 ft so the differential pressure would have been higher than on the ground.
As for the damage it would cause, then it is like a bomb but appears without ignition. I am amazed it survived a security xray. If it was cargo, then somebody forgot to empty it perhaps,
and lo and behold the cargo system has the least amount of security in the whole system! Although we do ship pressurised bottles around...but in special containers...
So actually they were lucky there was no ignition system there. As for everything else then it worked as designed... blow out panels in floor and ceilings to allow a controlled
depressurisation whilst Biggles descends rapidly to lower altitude where the pax can breathe without the onboard oxygen system (masks) which only have a limited (10 minutes?) capacity.
And descends rapidly means exactly that..... just like the movies.
Thanks, Bro. As you say, the media only want to pin the blame on someone. Once [the story] becomes a thing that broke they are less interested. At least no control lines were cut in the process. But how, I wonder, did you know the pilot's name was Biggles?
Merrily, merrily... dept.
Having munched my late lunch, listening to the Alan Hovhaness "Mount St Helen" symphony (and, for that matter, having enjoyed the Dr Who Prom concert earlier, too) I shall now (it's 15:37) pop myself under the shower and then pack my little video box of tricks and head on over to Winchester to see if the little gizmo behaves any better on Mike's projection system. (I know his G70 has a lot more capability of adjustment than my Pioneer, which has a great, fat, none whatso-blasted-ever.) But first, an amusing snippet from the current Radio Times magazine. I missed the feature on the 50th birthday of fellow style icons Madonna and Barbie...
Barbie's legs take up half her body. Her feet forever point downwards, in expectation of the slipped-on fluffy mule. She never opens her legs when she sits down. A mechanism in her hip ensures they stay chastely together in front of her. Madonna, as far as I'm aware, doesn't have that mechanism.
Now, I ask you. Is that a nice thing to say?
Technology
Pah! The HDFury behaves itself when hooked up to a Toshiba HD DVD and will feed 720p VGA out when offered 720p digital video in via hdmi. Mind you, the frequency of this 720p signal is subtly different from that obtained via the analogue component output when also converted across to VGA analogue. Sufficiently different to (ahem) interfere with the proper convergence of the red, green, and blue guns on a projection system that (when new) cost over 50 times more than the player!
The HDFury misbehaves when hooked up to a Panasonic Blue Ray DVD and will not reliably feed any VGA out when offered 720p digital video in via hdmi. Rumour (that's to say, the appropriate forum) suggests things may improve if we feed the HDFury with a 5V DC external supply. People are also, in general, having problems with the HDCP handshaking from the Panasonic model to a variety of display systems, it seems.
Another chum of mine has a take on this technological approach to IP protection (for that is what HDCP boils down to) that accords with mine. He puts it in more temperate language than I was using earlier this afternoon, though. To paraphrase: "The urge to protect IP is usually led by those who have inherited a business model built on levying a fine on those who want access to it (it's usually got nothing whatsoever to do with the cost of distributing it), and wish to preserve that business model past its sell-by-date, for no other purpose than vested interest."
As I've said, the greed and stupidity of Hollywood executives will get you every time. But now, at 20:19, I'd better deal with my inner man. Not that much food is needed on such a hot day. By the way, this rang a few bells with me, as far as I can remember:
And while ordinary electrical signals happily travel down copper wire at almost the speed of light (669 million mph), brain signals go as fast as a Ford Fiesta. Not only that, but you have to imagine a Ford Fiesta with stuff falling out of the boot. And - this is the best bit - to get from one cell to the next you have to jump out of your Ford Fiesta and swim with your message across a synaptic channel of neurological gloop before getting in another hopeless Ford Fiesta at the other side, air hissing out of tyres, wing mirrors hanging off. That's how high tech it is. It's a wonder we can find our way to the bus stop.
Microscopy
I'm enjoying the BBC Radio 3 play "Two men from Delft", with Stephen Tompkinson as Antony Van Leeuwenhooek. I've got a nice quotation about him here, albeit with a variant spelling of his name. Animalcules, indeed! I can still remember studying some of those at the upper end of the size scale in stagnant pond water in a series of schoolboy jam-jars nearly fifty years ago, with a powerful magnifying glass, though I didn't get my hands on a microscope until several years later.