2009 — 22 July: Wednesday
It's just a year since I published a smaller version of this picture of Christa. Indeed, it's also a year since the guvmint promised me a refund for having broken the law by overcharging me for my driving test. They said they wanted to repay me as quickly as possible — good job I didn't hold my breath. My word, their wheels turn pretty damn' slowly when the supposed money flow is in my direction, don't they?
Christa's picture more reliably puts a smile on my face than my latest A/V toy1 at the moment:
Christa in Old Windsor, June 1974
Have to make an early start for our trip later today. We're off up to the sunny Midlands to call in on the sunny Mama for a dose of cheerful sunshine. My job, apparently, is to make the sandwiches that will keep us going either to, at, or on the way back from, this exciting destination.
Odd, isn't it? You can have a brother for 57 years and only now discover that he'd like celery in the next version of my crockpot. Over my dead body, Bro. Meanwhile, I also discovered a fact about the 3rd cousin of an ex-colleague in that Hall of Aviation. He was at one point the fastest chap in the world, I gather...
Having drunk...
... my early morning, not made by me, cuppa, I can contemplate with greater equanimity one of the theories propounded by my chum Henry last night2 regarding a possible reason for the failure of the Edge. It may be the strain of supporting six active hdmi ports. It seems these are re-authenticated every two seconds (each) by that nefarious hdcp protocol:
Power up order can be critical with HDMI / HDCP. Any HDMI chain is controlled by the display in effect. If a correctly implemented video source does not get an HDCP handshake
in 2 seconds it will either give up and turn off its HDMI input, or start again. That process goes on every 2 seconds indefinitely, but some sources simply give up, like the
early Sky HD box that turned its HDMI off permanently in some circumstances.
Basically if the source and the "repeater" (anything in the middle is a repeater) don't have a display to talk to, it all goes pear shaped. Hence display first, repeater second etc.
The wonderful thing about hdmi / hdcp standards (unlike Tiggers) is that they rest on cheapskate 40-bit encryption and a Java VM. Now, why would that worry me? Meanwhile, it's 08:36, there don't seem to be any traffic issues (but the Java-based Highways Agency application didn't initialise properly a few minutes ago [as shown by the fact that my web browser closed down cleanly]) and it's just starting to rain. Deep joy. Must be time for brekkie I guess. Better get dressed, too.
This modern life
I recently (obliquely) mentioned the author who's the subject of this quote:
In her 2000 book Mother Nature, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy examined the maternal instinct, fathering, and the evolutionary explanation for babies' ridiculous cuteness and fatness. (In short, "Look, I'm adorable and healthy! Do not throw me in the fire or leave me in the forest!") In her new book Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, she starts with the question, Why are humans able to sit in the coach section of an airplane for hours and hours without fatalities? No other primates would be so polite and considerate, especially when someone rolls carry-on luggage across their toes. "What if I were traveling with a planeload of chimpanzees? Any one of us would be lucky to disembark with all ten fingers and toes still attached... Even among the famously peaceful bonobos... veterinarians sometimes have to be called in following altercations to stitch back on a scrotum or penis," Hrdy writes.
Wonder if she's ever flown British Airways?
The Boys are Back in Town
After adventures too numerous, etc etc we're back, and I'm about to show him A Knight's Tale — he leads a life entirely sheltered from such cultural artefacts, it seems. It's 21:23 and he did all the driving, but I'm still knackered.