2009 — 19 March: Thursday — happy birthday son, and cousin!
Actually, it was my sister-in-law's birthday yesterday, wasn't it Lis? Here's another placeholder entry. It's 01:17 or so. Speaking of birthdays and so on, the last anniversary present I bought for Christa was a 19th-century account of a sea-voyage. She devoured it with relish within a day or so, and I've already published one of the two pictures I took showing her doing so. Here's the other, also taken on 30th September 2007:
Christa reading her anniversary present, September 2007
She left another book unfinished at her death — Noël Coward's autobiography. An excellent choice, by the way. I have kept her bookmark in it. I hope that's not too weird a thing to do. G'night.
Hello, sunshine!
That, and remnants of overnight frost, make a pleasant start to the day. It's already 09:23 though inspection of my email activities would confirm I'm not quite as slothful as that implies. Time for breakfast and some re-supplies ahead of the visit from Mr Satellite Dish. (Reception last night, rather ironically, was without a trace of pixellation. Typical system behaviour when it "knows" you're about to tinker with it, of course.) I shall also observe how the Linux PC behaves when I've picked up the needful round tuit.
Dish tinkering...
... is taking place as I type. There will still be three downleads coming in through the living room wall, but two of them (from the 80cm dish, that will now point at the Astra 2 cluster) will go into the new Humax Freesat PVR and the third (that will be from the Sky minidish now pointing at Eutelsat's Hotbird at 13 degrees East) will feed its older sibling with the NPR Worldwide 24x7 digital radio feed. That leaves me with the capability of adding two spare leads from the quad LNB now fitted to the 80cm dish should I, in a weak moment, fall prey to the urge to get a Sky HD system. I suspect that nice Mr Murdoch will have to wait a bit longer to get his money from me, however.
And, lo!
It all came to pass, just as I said. Reported signal strength and quality from Freesat are both at 100% and considerably more than I was getting from the Sky minidish, though it turns out the LNB on that had been letting in some of that nearly universal solvent, rain water. The end of the co-ax lead was somewhat corroded. (And could very well account for some of the pesky pixellation.) So that's three LNBs discarded, and two new ones fitted. Each dish points where the other one used to, and NPR is once again coming in loud and clear from what was a Sky minidish. If I want European hi-def material, I'm going to need a motorised dish but I reckon I can do without.
If I heard him correctly, Mr Satellite Dish has a 4 metre dish of his own, aimed at 55 degrees West (to pick up South American TV from a satellite very close to the horizon for his wife). He liked the plasma screen and is almost hoping his present DLP rear-projection TV blows up to give him the excuse he needs... Chaps need hobbies, you know.
What's next, Mrs Landingham?
The inner man is fed. "Old Harry's Game" has been heard. The evening lies ahead. Junior rang with news that he's resigned from Job A to take Job B; a nice birthday present, I hope. I gather his next office may be in Centre Point, which would mean he can cycle to work. Rather him than me... I enjoyed Francis Wheen's 1990 biography of that old rogue Tom Driberg, so I might just catch the BBC4 programme on him tonight.