2009 — 10 March: Tuesday
For a change, tonight, a much more recent picture of Christa. One, in fact, from the precious batch (taken by Brynja) in August 2006 shortly after her surgery and shortly before I retired:
As I've said, I think now I miss her (gorgeous) smile as much as anything else about her. Ho-hum.
Somehow, it's managed to become 00:32 without me noticing. I must have been too intent on watching the first episode of Pride and Prejudice perhaps? Quite superb. Either that, or reworking the (ever-simpler) A/V system and its diagram.
G'night.
Hear that Coyopa?!
The sun is out, the David is (nearly) up, the first wave of binmen have bin, and a cuppa with my name on it is cooling somewhere. It's 09:06. Not being too well up on Mayan theology, this was news to me. Fascinating. Thanks for the link, Brian.
After my rebooting cuppa and a spot of breakfast, and purely in the interests of dispassionate technological research, I should be in a position to assess the relative performance of a Freesat recording of the curvy Raquel earlier this morning versus a Freeview ditto. I padded the (timing of the!) Freeview (Panasonic) session by one minute at the start and five at the end. The Freesat (Humax) offered start and end times driven directly by the Channel 4 flags, so that will be another aspect of the assessment. One thing I noticed last night when setting up this little technology race is that the satellite EPG populates a damn' sight faster than the terrestrial one. Bandwidth rules.
Educashun, heh?
Twenty years ago I read, with interest, the tale of Scott Turow's time in Harvard Law School in the 1970s. Now I see a recent Harvard MBA (mediocre but arrogant) has lambasted the business side of that lucrative educational system. Amazing. (I was also struck by the illiteracy of the visible comments — I couldn't be bothered to read the rest.)
Hark! The second round of binmen. Time for breakfast. Mind you, this is an effective appetite suppressant.
The majority of pensioners are not taxed...
... says our revered leader, as he is taken to task1 by a taxed pensioner on a phone-in. Still he's signed an agreement last week that ensures RBS will lend an extra £25,000,000,000 (of tax payers' money) so that's alright then. "I'm telling you what's actually happening" protests another caller, but our PM is forgetful of the fact that he's not talking to a politician. So he sticks to his tatty script of well-crafted stats. He and/or his advisors seem to have more faith in the reality of this bit of paper than in the simple fact that the banking system is broken. "Our debt is actually lower than other countries" — really? I'm not sure how much more I can listen to this uni-ocular Hibernian savant.
It's been suggested to me that The real problem is a political system that increasingly centralises all power in one person, surrounded by a machinery of government that has frighteningly little contact with life outside the political machine (at least of a non-financial nature) and is supine in the face of highly orchestrated, and plausible, special interests. Last night's "Dispatches" exposing the true extent of the liability of the PFI scam was a bit of an eye-waterer, too.
"I would like to ask the PM why he finds it so hard to say 'Sorry'" says another of his voters. Even the presenter can't get him to say 'Sorry'... What a surprise. The PM says the regulatory system wasn't good enough. Let me think, now, who was in a position (as Chancellor, and now as PM) to fix that in the last decade? No, nobody springs to mind. Still, he takes responsibility for the "light touch" regulation, and won't even apologise for that. Back to the music of Ligeti, methinks.
Progress, of a sort...
Murphy's Law, of course, ensured that the correct co-ax downlead from the two going into the DiSEqC/SAT "switch" was the second. I found that out the hard way, by connecting the first to the original Humax hi-def satellite receiver, resetting it to factory default state, and seeing what it could find. It found several hundred TV channels (including some whose German names I recalled from those distant days of Astra 1 and Christa's wish to watch some channels from the Fatherland) and precisely eight radio channels — NPR not being one of them. The second downlead, by a process of Holmesian elimination, was therefore the one coming from the offset LNB aimed at the Hotbird satellite and, 30 minutes later, I have my NPR Worldwide back on tap.
As for the parallel recordings last night of Raquel Welch more or less constantly in a pale green bikini... they confirmed that a) they don't make films like that any more (thank goodness) and b) the Freesat reception is indeed riddled with pixellation and intermittent loss of signal. Time, therefore, for the new LNBs and the swapping to that larger dish. Both recordings started before the film began; I didn't bother to skim through either to confirm when it ended. The telecine conversion of a film made in 1967 was reasonable, and at least it was shown as a letterboxed widescreen, but I could have done without the unenthusiastic lady in the bottom right hand quarter or so of the picture "signing" the dialogue (such as it was). Not a "keeper".
There's been criticism in the past of BBC podcasts and/or "listen again" files not showing up on time. Stephen Fry's podcast is currently two days in the future...
Nearly forgot...
A couple of DVDs arrived in yesterday's snailmail: Larry Clark's 2002 film and that TV series about the CIA:
Time for an evening meal. It's crept up to 18:19 somehow. Aah, that's better. Now, loyal though I am to NPR they cannot compete either with the charms of "Desmo" Carrington or with the wonderful series currently being repeated on BBC 6Music, with episode two later tonight. Producer Peter Everett also turned it into a fascinating book that I bought back in November 1986:
He's right... I'll never be 16 again, dammit. But then, nor will Junior, of course! The fact that he's posted X-rays of his left knee on his blog is a little worrying...