2010 — 25 March: Thursday
It's 02:11 and thus well past time for some sleep. The evening's two films were The Soloist and The Object of My Affection. Both excellent, and the former1 new to me. The next evening's entertainment is going to be watching John Boorman's son at the "Anvil" in Basingstoke. I'm on taxi duty for that, too. Never been there before, as it happens. G'night.
It's already 08:56...
... and George Malcolm has just played Alec Templeton's "Bach goes to town" — magic. (Good ol' BBC Radio 3 repeats!) I find I still prefer my John James / Pete Berryman two guitars version, but this harpsichord variant is slowly growing on me. All I need now is a cuppa. I'll get right on it.
Christa was generally plugged into the "family" network rather more effectively than I ever have been. She would, I suspect, thus have been less surprised to hear that my cousin Peter (the ex-Gordonstoun headboy and Dorset dentist who at one time had a sideline in a confectionery business [I hope, sugar-free]) has just become a grandfather, which, I suspect, makes me some species of great uncle... again. I don't even know if this is for more than the third time (I already have two great nieces down in New Zealandland). We can now add Abigail Grace Mounce to the roster. Life goes on, as they say.
It was honorary...
... grandmother Val, in Old Windsor, who reminded me of one of Christa's therapies — basically, to get into the car and scoot out somewhere for a few miles with the radio blaring. I'd long known of this, and was self-medicating thus just a short while back (without the radio) but the rain became so heavy (it was dry when I set off, of course) that I simply did a U-turn at a convenient point near my destination and hightailed it for home. It's all very well for April showers to bring the flowers, but not if March storms wash them away first, surely? So, at 13:22, and with a relatively early lunch gently digesting in the ol' tum, the rest of the afternoon is now my oyster until I fire up the Yaris again for its evening incarnation as a taxi. At least it's now beautifully freshly showered, though only on the outside...
Recalling...
... how easy, and speedy, it was to use spare main RAM as a disk drive in my much-missed Acorn RISC-OS machines, I find myself curiously tempted by the thought of using an SSD drive as my boot device in any new system. (I'm sure the writing is indelibly on the wall for XP, and I expunged Vista within a short time of trying it. OS-X is all very well, but somehow fails to peel my banana. Ubuntu continues to make progress, but remains rough around the edges.) So I find my Spring thoughts, such as they are, vaguely turning towards lucky number "7". There's an interesting review here, for example, of the sort of device, and sort of scenario, I contemplate from time to time.
Meanwhile, Brian's new A/V system is nearly ready for my inspection:
I would have invited you round earlier to inspect the [system] but as you can gather it has taken a little while to get to grips with the multitude of possible ways to have sub-optimised sound and video. Indeed I believe nirvana to be unreachable as the optimum solution would be to have no upscaling or sound processing in any input device (I believe the Denon's Anchor Bay scaler is better than any other I have and the codecs are at least as good). However, as you reminded me, the Oppo manual suggests I need at least 720p video to get the higher bitrate audio feeds so upscaling must take place somewhere for this to happen...
Good to see he now shares my (and Mike's) opinion of the upscaling technology.
Under the weather...
The recent torrential downpour and thunder appears to have moved on to rain on a parade somewhere else. It's 17:12, a little bit brighter, and the evening meal is getting thermally agitated as I have to be up and away within the next hour at the most. I shall shortly find out if the Yaris is watertight, I guess.
Later
Back from Basingstoke just in time to hear some memories from Alexander Theroux of the amazing Edward Gorey. Recall... while I was contemplating a change of main heading for this website, I discovered that his parents divorced, then remarried some years later. Gorey's stepmother in the interim was for a while Corinna Mura, who (uncredited) sang the "Marseillaise" in the movie Casablanca. Time for tea!