2009 — 5 August: Wednesday

Considering how little I got done, I'd quite like to know why I'm now so very tired. It's 00:48 and I'm about to "collopse" (rhymes with "scallops" — or, at least, it does in these parts) as I prepare tonight's photo. I've managed to adjust it to get a more natural skin tone since its last outing (here). The scan is from one of my few Ektachrome slides; I normally used Kodachrome 25:

Christa in the Old Windsor kitchen, 1977ish

G'night.

An overnight email...

... from L.A. reassures me that Big Bro got as far as there in J class, whatever that means. He tells me he's also scored an upgrade on the last leg to Auckland. Slight pause while I allow Java to be upgraded to Java 6 Update 15, whatever that means. That should give me time to put the kettle on. It's 08:12 and still dry. As am I.

Wicked Uncle ERNIE...

... has decided he doesn't love me this month. Not so much as a token £25 — bringing to an end a minor league winning streak. It's not so much an investment strategy as a bit of fun. Mind you, the BBC tells me the pension deficit of the top 100 companies has clawed its way up to the dizzy heights of £96,000,000,000 — and I see that Barclays felt unable to keep their final salary scheme going despite obscene profits. If companies were people they'd be sociopathic monsters at best.

Any excuse for a trip to the seaside

Who knew jellyfish help mix oceans? (Mind you, if butterflies can start hurricanes, then why not?) Source and snippet:

To verify the findings from their simulations, the scientists traveled to the island of Palau, where they studied animal-led transport of water among jellyfish. Their jellyfish experiments involved putting fluorescent dye in the water in front of the jellies, then watching what happened to that dye and to the water that took up the dye as the jellyfish swam.

Kate Melville in Science à go go


I wonder how much atmospheric mixing occurred on their seaside trip.

Flight into danger

For those of you old enough to remember Arthur Hailey. Reading this reminds me that I've yet to publish my edited version of Big Bro's comments on the intersection of computers and flight. I must say I was amused by the idea of starting to get bored after three hours. I start to get bored after three minutes.

Notes

Not by Bro, I hasten to clarify!

Those pesky hi-def format wars. Those wily Orientals. Still, BBC R3 is just playing me the same Keith Jarrett / Gidon Kremer performance of "Fratres" that I picked up recently. Wonderful music. Time (09:31) for a spot of pre-shopping breakfast. Not too much, though. I've been eating far too much while out and about with Bro. (Did I mention the wonderful fillet in the Popeseye restaurant on Saturday night? No, I thought not.)

Just fielded a call from my friend Chris about extracting the audio track from a DVD and heard the sorry saga of his new hi-def TV into the bargain. It's not just me. Right, now it really is time to go and eat that cardboard mush that keeps my heart healthy — allegedly.

The warm glow...

... of a (shopping) job well done is about 10% due to that and 90% due to the appallingly sticky humidity that has currently displaced the forecast heavy rain. That rain has now moved out to 21:00 tonight, if the BBC can be believed. Do I put the car back in its bedroom or do I (ad)venture out on an (ad)venture? Decisions. Decisions.

Oops. David Dimbleby has just told the nation not to fly Ryanair after what sounds like a bit of a jobsworth buck-passing shambles at Stansted on Saturday. Such jolly fun. Armed riot police protecting check-in clerks. These things are always described as a "one-off" that will "never happen again". I wonder how much it would cost you to avoid this publicity.

Odd afternoon thoughts

It's weirdly satisfying to chop a large wild bramble up. Its main stem was racing along the inside of my little front garden's low wall at an amazing pace. Not any more. It's also odd to discover that I actually do have a talent: for making very tasty stewed plums. Almost as odd as the discovery (a couple of years ago, now) that I could make fluffy scrambled eggs that Christa could keep down during her chemo treatment when almost everything else made unpleasant return trips. Mind you, I don't think I've made that dish more than once since her death.

Still unpleasantly hot and sticky at 17:21 but then it is supposed to be summer.

I'm vaguely contemplating upgrading the audio side of my A/V system. It's a hobby, and I was rather bounced into the hasty purchase of my present amplifier in January when my beloved Yamaha gave up on me after eleven years. My reasoning (if that's what it is) is that the DVDO Edge scaler does all the hard lifting of video processing, while delivering lossless digital audio via its second hdmi output. I suspect I can do better on the pure audio front than a relatively low-end (£320, for heaven's sake) A/V amplifier whose video processing / upscaling circuitry and hdmi input switching is now all completely redundant. Since the Oppo Blu-ray decodes everything going (as it were) and can then output it as lossless LPCM, I rather fancy feeding it into the Audiolab 8000AP pre-amp and 8000X7 power amp combination. After all, now that Bro's broken one of my secondary glazing panels I'm going to need a space heater this winter! More decisions.