2009 — 2 September: Wednesday
That's better. And the promised downpour isn't (currently) down-pouring, too. It's 09:34 or so and the kettle is asking me why it isn't on already. I have no good answer to that. But first, another picture of Christa:
Christa in Old Windsor, late 1974
She was in the tiny (no room to swing a cat) kitchen in our rented flat in Old Windsor in the autumn of 1974, shortly after we'd married.
Metadata in train wreck!
Yesterday's new word was the verb "Raptured". Today, I gather, I'm a "wordinista". Who knew? Snippet and source:
Or you may be interested in books simply as records of the language as it was used in various periods or genres. Not surprisingly, that's what gets linguists and assorted wordinistas adrenalized at the thought of all the big historical corpora that are coming online. But it also raises alluring possibilities for social, political, and intellectual historians and for all the strains of literary philology, old and new. With the vast collection of published books at hand, you can track the way happiness replaced felicity in the 17th century, quantify the rise and fall of propaganda or industrial democracy over the course of the 20th century, or pluck out all the Victorian novels that contain the phrase "gentle reader."
What a pity, then, that the current metadata isn't anywhere near up to the job. It would be funny, if it was funny. It's a sadly fascinating article. You have to smile, a little, at "a mishmash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess."
Childhood fantasies
In Junior school I remember daydreaming about how, as a teacher, I might tackle some of the craziness in the classroom. (By the time I reached Senior school I no longer had any great interest beyond survival and endurance.) Christa, meanwhile, had always been aimed (and I deliberately use the passive) at a teaching career. She, too, realised at about the midpoint of her six years in University that it was not for her. Ironically, we were both good at teaching and explaining...
Reading this worrying "New Yorker" piece on The Rubber Room suggests some of the horrors we both neatly sidestepped. But it's time to stop sidestepping breakfast.
I always knew...
... having a spare "SP-19 4-way audio control" (from "Maplin", I expect) would come in handy one day. Back in the day (ghastly picture here) I used an AMC AV81 audio pre-amp (though, in all honesty, it was less an amp and more an eight input switchbox [four video, four stereo audio]) to glue together my vastly over-complicated system in a way that let me direct stereo audio up to my study without affecting whatever was being watched or listened to downstairs by the other two-thirds of my little family. In my new, much-simplified, one-person household the one remaining audio fly1 in my ointment (described here) was the time discrepancy between the sound upstairs and downstairs. Well, it turns out I still have analogue sound outputs just going to waste / waiting to be used from all the fancy new kit. Why not use them?
So, instead of just directing an NPR feed up here, I can now also route UK digital radio, CD/mp3, and minidisc audio up here too. Of course, I now have to be prepared to trek up and down the stairs when I want to change the source, but a chap with sedentary hobbies needs some exercise, don'tcha agree?
It's 16:38, pouring with rain, and I'm bopping away up here to the sounds of Enigma while lazily contemplating my next cuppa. Rats! Too much distortion from the output stage of the NAD player — that's to say, the analogue output level (non-adjustable, of course) is too meaty relative to the other signals. Plan B. Dig out that AMC box, and use it instead of the cheap and cheerful Maplin box. Why is nothing ever quite as simple as it should be? But, horror of horrors, I need to cook something for my evening meal, first. What a nuisance. What's quick? I predict a couple of boiled eggs and marmalade sandwiches2 in my near-term future. Yum!
The BBC Radio 3 news has just cheerfully told me that depression is on track to become top of the global pops, as it were. Pity, then, that our GPs aren't too hot at spotting it. You hafta smile!
I love it...
... when one of my audio schemes actually works3 without the Law of Unintended Consequences poking its ugly head up. The AMC AV81 pre-amp is now back in the stack, purely for use as an audio router to send one of four chosen audio signals up to the study. Because it's powered, and buffered, and has a volume control, it isn't overwhelmed by the audio signal coming out of the NAD CD player, so I am once again blissfully enjoying a bunch of my mp3s upstairs, playing through the USB input on said CD player downstairs, but without the accompanying distortion. What's more, I can run a completely different signal through the downstairs system. So all I need to do now is learn how to be in two places at once.
It's time (20:17) I was downstairs to catch up with a pixel or two.