2009 — 19 February: Thursday
I genuinely don't know who took this picture, or when. I suspect it was Georg, Christa's younger brother. And it was certainly taken before I met her, so it was some time before April 1974. It was taken in the main living room of the house in Meisenheim. All I know is I like it, and Christa did, too.
Back on the Weed(s)
Seasons #2 and #3 of Weeds showed up yesterday, so I treated myself to a triplet of episodes...
... before curling up, as it were, to bask in the warmth of the "Movie connections" programme about that lovely 1983 film Local Hero. Puttnam thought it was the best thing he ever produced and I don't think he's far wrong.
So, to the sound of Tibetan singing bowls (on the BBC's "Late Junction"), g'night at about 00:12 or so. It's been raining, I notice, but tomorrow is another day.
The Dawn chorus...
... is something I haven't heard for quite some time, but there it is (outside!) twittering away in what looks like a bit of mist. A perfect accompaniment to that vital component of the day: the first cuppa. It's 07:08 but so far I've only noticed one wage slave revving up and setting off. Back in 1984,1 which seems impossibly long ago now, I would have been scoffing down a hasty breakfast at about this time, and then walking the ten minutes or so needed to get me to the bus stop in time to drag myself onto the 07:24 into Southampton and then catch the 08:10 out to Millbrook. For which pleasure IBM gave me a financial topup exactly equivalent to the incremental bus fare difference between my travel to Hursley and to Millbrook.
Pixels galore... dept.
In December 1992 I emailed a friend that "Family Mounce now has a new altar to genuflect in front of — a large (50 inch) rear projection TV of most magnificent quality2 that does real justice to all those LaserDiscs. That's Christmas for several years to come, of course, and is a consolation prize for not buying an unaffordably3 large new house..." At the same time, I had my multi-standard (NTSC and PAL) Pioneer LaserDisc player modified to add a daughterboard that extracted an S-Video signal.4
The Pioneer TV...
... at least had the merit of making the Celestion Ditton 66 monitor speakers look quite small. (Compare and contrast here.) It had three, 7", Hitachi cathode ray tubes (one for each primary colour) and integrated lens arrays, cunningly arranged to fire at an internal mirror and bounce up on to the screen. Of course, converging the images5 was always a challenge.
Fast forward just about a decade... and I was reporting that "the socking great TV decided on Sunday afternoon to go castors-up a few months earlier than I could have wished in terms of the ongoing savings for its replacement <Sigh> Despite having moved the 14 inch set downstairs immediately, we have both — it seems — become just a little visually spoiled and are finding it very hard even to find/see such a tiny screen, let alone adjust to the diminished viewing experience". And so up we moved into the wonderful world of widescreen, plasma. (And the money needed for this was classified, by the bank, as a car loan — given the sum, it must have seemed appropriate.) The next tweak, in mid 2006, was to fit an external video scaler into the system to turn all inputs into a common 1,280x768 progressive output signal that is the native resolution of the screen.
All now seemed blissful and Christa and I settled down into our DVD collection until her ghastly cancer recurred for the final time. Now, an occasional reader may have noted my unsuccessful attempts to defeat the accursed hdcp. Having failed to persuade Pioneer to retrofit such capability, and having failed to persuade the HDFury "dongle" to work its promised magic spell, I've today decided that enough is enough. Watch this space!
Site for sore eyes
Amusing, amazing, and quite maddening. Recommended! Right! Time for a bit more of Weeds, methinks. It's somehow become 19:12 already. And (at 20:46) on a brief break, I've just completed my fastest-ever Sudoku in sixty three seconds. It's strangely addictive. Time for a celebratory snack and a cuppa.
I enjoyed this, immensely.