2009 — 31 August: Monday
Tired again, and late again, for that matter. Tonight's picture of Christa shows her a couple of months before Peter was born. An interestingly-fraught period, that last couple of months — trust me:
Christa in Old Windsor, early 1980
As for the film earlier this evening; yes, a couple of my predictions were spot-on. I'm latterly a little suspicious of such overt emotional manipulation, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a good film. Mind you, I'm still puzzled about how it can possibly be only 16 weeks until Christmas! G'night.
An aside to Christa
I was making my boot-me-up cuppa a few minutes ago and caught a glimpse of a grey squirrel wandering at ease through the little jungle, and then disappearing along the back wall into what has become a cat-proof haven in the trees you planted along the bottom edge. I only had my single vision glasses on, which meant my view wasn't too clear, but I was both surprised and pleased to note that my immediate reaction was a big smile. And some pleasing memories of other squirrels and other times. Tears were later, and very brief. This is still progress.
It's 09:12 and rather grey and drizzly out there. Big Bro tells me overnight of further winds that have taken out another couple of panels from his NZ greenhouse. He's obviously not yet in Brunei (or has already finished there). And Brack tipped me the wink about a new SF film — District 9 — that I only heard a brief bit of BBC Radio 4 Arts show chatter about last Friday. It's certainly shot up the IMDB Top #250. (Like a rocket?)
The march of "man"
Well, I never knew that evolution was a religion. This image of the evolution of brass musical instruments has been banned from a High School Band T-shirt. Incredibubble.
More on this nonsense here. As usual, the comments are an evolving form of entertainment.
What would they make of the range of T-shirts here, I wonder? I like this one:
Which leads me unnicely to another classy image, and a fine little polemic from Clive James, here. Definitely time to up the blood sugar level. It's 09:40 and a bit brighter out there. Oh, wait, I see that nominative determinism is alive and well, in Mali:
Today's world is fast leaving me in the dust, it seems.
A hint of sunshine...
... to accompany Stravinsky's glorious two-piano variant of the "Rite of Spring". Sacre bleu!
Initial system-antic conclusions
Every time I've rattled around the "why don't I just play DVDs and digital music on my PC in the living room?" set of questions I just keep coming back ineluctably to the conclusion that, sometimes, it really is better to use domestic single-task hardware (ostensibly) designed to do one thing well. So much for the convergence of the PC and the TV in my little world, I guess. I quite liked what I saw of the Windows XP 2005 media centre interface (but that's "quite", notice). And I certainly like the performance, if not the user interface, of the various ways of playing well-ripped mp3s through the hi-fi. I also quite like the Xbox MediaPC Linux-based hack that my chum Brian uses, but (as he himself admits) the upscaling is naff and there are too many video glitches and dropped frames across his network. I like, too, the proposition of Windows Home Server, but that seems to bring a world of copy protection etc trailing in its ugly wake. Plus the approved hardware keeps chopping and changing, and I don't seem able to find any that I can actually inspect in action. Nothing insuperable, granted.
But, that said (and I'd be the first to agree I haven't exactly taken the cheapest route) I do now have a superb video system matched nicely to the plasma, and a superb audio system optimised for simple stereo but well able to handle 5.1 surround. I really can say that the Oppo Blu-ray player is one of the sweetest bits of kit I've had hands on, and its DVD upscaling is unparalleled. I find it fascinating to see just how much detail you can recover from a well-mastered standard definition NTSC DVD when it is skilfully upscaled. Blu-ray is almost unnecessary, which has also greatly surprised me. The Audiolab pre-power combo is well up with my old Technics stereo power amp. The PMC speakers, and the centre unit, are bedding down nicely. (The Castles are now floating up near the ceiling at the back of the room.)
Of course, I lack any video streaming until I sit down and sort out the little Linux box. Step one of which is fix its digital audio output yet again, and step two will be to actually re-attach it to the rest of the system in any case. I suspect I will content myself with using it to display 1080 pixel high JPEGs of my DVD covers and for web browsing, to be honest.
The new NAD CD player is just gorgeous to listen to, and has its own USB port specifically designed to accept mp3s and WMAs from an external disk drive. It can also resample any incoming digital via USB or via optical to a 192KHz rate with 24-bit word length before final DAC and output. It's an aural delight.
Crikey! Time for some lunch.
Others seem to agree
Although initially landing here (to drool very briefly over a new high-end 3-chip DLP system) it was a mere mouse click or two to this item about home A/V networking, and one on the death of the old HTPC, and its replacement. Plus, a reminder about nodes and standing waves in your listening room...
100 Mbps...
... is actually quite tediously slow when you (I) finally get the round tuit I needed to copy the mp3 library back over from the iMac disc after Junior had finished cleaning up all the ID3 tags for me. Three hours, so far, and I've yet to reach the letter "E". Of course, the fun really starts when I disperse the files across a set of folders that will best enable that NAD CD player to cope with the 30,000 or so files. Here are its capabilities:
I shall just have to leave things copying while I'm out with one of the birthday boys tonight.