2008 — 30 July: Wednesday
Tales of the City have now all been soaked up. It dates back to 1993, for goodness sake. Remarkable work.
Right. Tonight's picture of Christa shows her with one of Georg's lads (her nephew Christoph, that is, unless I miss my guess and it's Phillip) a couple of years before Junior came along. I could see she was going to make a marvellous Mum1 — as she indeed went on to do:
Christa with one of her nephews, 1977
G'night at 00:01 or so.
Troy who?
I like to think I'm capable of admiring a hatchet job as well as the next chap. I'm apparently not. Someone called Troy Patterson has taken against a favourite author of mine, and I don't like it. To be precise, he's far from keen on Brideshead Revisited. Literature's finest schlock, heh? (Source.) Oddly, here's a piece comparing and contrasting Waugh and Orwell. I never knew Waugh's first wife (another Evelyn) referred to his father as "a complete Pinkle-Wonk." (Source.) His grandfather was known as "The Brute", but that's another story.
Oh well, let's see if the news2 at 09:00 is any more palatable. Brekkie is ongoing, but I'll be putting the packed lunch on hold for a pub lunch in Braishfield. Here's hoping it's not too hot for our walk. It's currently bright and sunny with a hint of a breeze.
Went the day well?
Well, it's 19:46 and I've been sinking a blissful cuppa while listening to Mike Harding's choice of folk music and waiting for my sausages and salad to ascend towards ambient temperature after they've been patiently waiting for me in the fridge. The walk — an eight-mile loop around Braishfield, punctuated by a pint of HSB and one of the Newport's famed ham sandwiches — was delightful. Bright, but mostly not too hot, reasonable shade, and enough bits of breeze to conceal the fact that my open-necked shirt was allowing a suspicion of sun onto the pale pink chesty bit.
However, as we were changing out of boots at the end of the walk Mike left his hand-held GPS unit on the car roof, and I didn't notice, when we set off for the return (you can see where this is going, I suspect). We both commented on the odd rattling sound that seemed to be coming from the boot, but it stopped as I swung left and uphill onto the Hursley Road. Arriving back in Winchester, we finally noted the missing device, deduced the source of the rattle, decided exactly where we'd been when we last heard it, retraced the route to that point, and successfully picked up a highly-squished Garmin that, unlike the famed "Timex" watches of the 1960s adverts, was no longer ticking, as it were. Shattered, in fact.
Next came the great adventure of the HDFury. Adding a 5V power supply worked wonders on the digital video output from the Panasonic Blue Ray player, and Mike can now enjoy upscaled 720p projected video from his large set of standard definition PAL and NTSC DVDs and downscaled (from 1080p) from his growing collection of Blue Ray and HD DVDs.
However, it became very apparent during the course of the afternoon that the HDFury's converted analogue VGA output is a pretty weird variant of the incoming DVI input, so it's little surprise neither my Pioneer plasma nor even the video scaler could "play nice" with it. Quite a lot of adjusting and experimenting was needed to get the G70 to "play nice", and some fine-tuning remains to be done. Still, it was basically a success story, so at least the device is vindicated (stripping HDCP and converting incoming digital video to outgoing RGBHV) and will now be put to good use in its new home. It's impressive how large a picture you can drag out of a standard definition NTSC signal and project onto a screen six or seven feet high without visible line structure. Of course, the better the resolution of the input signal, the better the projected result.
Of course, this leaves me back without an HDCP-stripping digital video solution for my own system despite the theoretical advantages of having a pure digital input but, as I've said, the analogue results from upscaling 480i / 576i RGB and component to 768p are actually perfectly acceptable. And when Brian returns my original Hi-Def satellite, I'll have trouble-free BBC satellite HD back online. (I think I mentioned the newer Humax box only shows the HD channel for eight seconds or so at a time via the analogue outputs [component or RGB SCART] though it doesn't stop feeding the digital audio.)
An interesting exercise.
Look at the NZ weather...
... I'm currently missing downunder:
Lis adds: "[you] probably can't really see the water level in those photos — but it does get a bit scary". Hang in there, m'dear!
Dismal science revisited... dept
Deciding how to spend money where it does the most good is a tricky business. Consider terrorism:
Increasing defensive measures world-wide by 25% would cost at least $75 billion over five years. In the extremely unlikely scenario that attacks dropped by 25%, the world would
save about $21 billion. That figure is reached by adding up the economic damage caused by terrorists, and by putting a high economic value on the lives lost.
But even in this best-case scenario, the costs will be at least three times higher than the benefits. Put another way, each extra dollar spent increasing defensive measures will
generate -- at most -- about 30 cents of return.
We could save about 105 lives a year, globally. There are few areas where we would consider spending so much to do so little. To put this into context, 30,000 lives are lost
annually on U.S. highways.
Tonight's reading, and future watching
These two were waiting (and baking gently in Amazonian cardboard) on my doorstep when I got home:
The book (by a young Guardian journalist) is about one of my Top 10 films. The TV series was one I missed (mainly because I've had vastly different priorities on what passes for my mind in recent months), but it looks very promising. By contrast, tonight's viewing is going to be Spielberg's "E.T." — I've borrowed it, but have somehow managed never to see it since its initial release. I shall start it now (21:30) in fact. Ciao for now.