2009 — 28 July: Tuesday
Back on (DVDO) Edge in a few hours, with luck. Meanwhile, it's just gone midnight — time for a picture of Christa that I last showed 13 months ago. I took it just after she'd arrived back at the Vicarage in Old Windsor. I was in my bedroom upstairs impatiently looking forward to her arrival on that distant summer evening:
Christa at the Old Windsor vicarage, 1974
The evening's entertainment, recently concluded, was the 1998 John Herzfeld film "2 Days in the Valley". I note Catherine Hardwicke (who went on to direct Twilight) was its production designer.
G'night.
Don'tcha hate it when...
... your network connection wakes up dead, as it were? Still, power cycling the router and restarting the electronic brain seems to have worked — if only human problems were as easily solved. Still, I've been brought a kindly cuppa and two biscuits (I suspect Bro's diet is not all it should be) by way of compensation. He's off up to London for a business lunch, I gather. But will be back in time to take me out for an evening meal. Meanwhile, Mr Parcel Force has just gently dropped off a new box and picked up the old one. It's 08:36 and obviously time to get the next round of video fun'n'games under way.1 Could get dressed first, I suppose.
Crikey. JS Bach died on this day in 1750 (so has obviously been decomposing for many years).
Success!
The replacement box does exactly what it says on the, erm, cardboard box it came in. All the hdmi inputs I've tried so far (four out of the six) are behaving impeccably, and I've thus been able to tweak the black level separately on each of the Blu-ray, DVD, Freeview PVR, and Freesat Hi-Def (using, for the last of these, the 45-second burst I managed to capture — some months ago now — of the BBC's own widescreen, 1080-line test card). Excellent. The only remaining problem is choosing what to watch. That's always been a more nearly intractable problem.
It's just gone 10:00 and I think Big Bro is just about ready to go, now that he's swiped all my hot water for his shower.
Just how dim do you have to be to think that you can safely text while driving? Let alone spend $6,000,000 on research to prove this? Source and snippet:
In the moments before a crash or near crash, drivers typically spent nearly five seconds looking at their devices — enough time at typical highway speeds to cover more than the length of a football field.
I can just imagine the Darwin Award headline. That fine organisation uses this equally fine xkcd comic panel on their home page:
Apparently Mrs Google has no deaths noted for either snake-charming or haberdashery.
Later
Well, my planned playmate couldn't come out to play today for lunch or tiffin, so I've had an afternoon of A/V experimentation. I seem to have some surplus kit... And the digital video scaler does an awesome job. I do indeed now have a very satisfactory single-box solution for spinning my silver platters (providing they are Blu-ray, DVD, or just about any kind of CD). And I have a couple of spare hdmi inputs left over. Now there's a thought! The one thing I haven't yet tried is the quality of 24 frame per second from DVD, as opposed to Blu-ray. Give it time.
It's 18:00 and Big Bro is on the hook to take me out for a meal. Suddenly I'm hungry. Very hungry.