2010 — 8 July: Thursday
It's been very quiet and unmusical around here for the last several hours. It's almost as if someone's been fiddling with the hi-fi. There is, of course, a reason.
It's somewhat past midnight and I'm about to call it a night. The A/V stack is currently once more in scattered pieces, but will be much simplified when finally re-assembled while the carpet fitters are banging away, a few hours from now. (Well, that's my plan.)
The rather tasty NAD CD player, the Sony Minidisc recorder and the Denon cassette deck will all now migrate up to the study. Down here in the living room, this will leave the iMac for (under)use as my giant iPod (for MP3s),1 three hi-def Humax satellite receivers (one is also a hard-drive PVR) for UK TV, UK radio and US NPR radio, the Panasonic Freeview hard-drive PVR (with its useful, but very rarely used, DVD writing capability) for digital terrestrial TV, the DVDO Edge video scaler for connecting everything except the Oppo Blu-ray player, and said player itself.
The AudioLab pre- and power amps are now on the lowest shelf to lend their considerable gravitas, as it were, to system stability. I've no doubt the system diagram will be reworked eventually — but not tonight, Josephine :-)
My hope is the slight loss of signal-routing flexibility2 will be more than compensated for by the increased simplicity. We shall see (or hear). G'night.
<Sigh>
Why the "<Sigh>", Mr Mounce? Could be something to do with the distinct absence of sleep, I suspect. I feel about as wrecked at the moment (07:50) as I used to after pulling yet another all-nighter to claw back some of my overdue Polytechnic project work back in 1970 at the Astwick Manor hostel. I had the advantage of youth on my side 40 years ago, it occurs to me :-)
I wonder if my NZ sister-in-law, with her enthusiasm for genealogy, has gone back (as it were) as far as this project? I note one of their display fonts is (yet again) shared with that used for James Cameron's Na'vi language subtitles :-)
I hesitate...
... to characterise myself as a slave to routine, but as I was zapping my fresh plum and blackcurrant (topping for my cereal) I at first heard what I assumed was the noise from one of my neighbour's hated "stink wheels". Not so. I was able to press "Cancel" moments before another plum stone exploded. Phew! It's a life lived on the edge around here, I tell you. About 30 minutes to go before the Invasion of the Carpet Fitters. I have high hopes of them being able to bury one of my Ethernet cables3 in a channel under / through some underlay to minimise my trip hazard at both ends of the staircase. This may take me offline for a while.
Progress after one hour
The upstairs trip hazard has been very neatly pinned and taped and should be undetectable when the carpet goes down on top of the overlay. Nor did I lose connectivity (though, worryingly, my Google email has just been placed on Verizon's spam blacklist over in New York, which is going to make contact with Carol rather difficult yet again). On past tedious experience with Verizon, only a bona-fide US citizen even stands a chance of getting that fixed. Of course, it helps if said citizen is also a Verizon customer. Aren't ISPs wonderful?
Two pairs of drinks provided so far, and several rolls of carpet have been taken upstairs for their "top down" approach. It's 10:50 and the rain seems to have dried up. I'm now working (for want of a better word) on final revisions to my A/V system diagram before tackling the job of making the practice match the theory. [Pause] The downstairs section of Ethernet cable is equally neatly tucked away, and the A/V system diagram is finished. I ended up keeping the Sony minidisc recorder in the living room system "just in case".
So my next task is to do all the reconnecting, but that can wait until the carpet chaps have finished. Of course, it's hardly worth attempting to rework the study system until the carpet up there has been replaced. Festina lente, David. It's 12:13 and I'm feeling a bit hungry.
The dismal science
Having pondered anew the paradox that is uselessly-low interest rates just when I could do with them being high (they were far higher, of course, throughout the quarter of a century I spent in the pythonic grip of a mortgage), I laughed aloud at parts of this:
The economics profession generally began turning away from empirical work in the early 1970s. Around that time, economists fell in love with theoretical constructs, a shift that has no
single explanation. Some analysts say it may reflect economists' desire to be seen as scientists who describe and discover universal laws of nature.
"Economists have physics envy," says Richard Sylla, a financial historian at the Stern School of Business at New York University.
It reminds me of the delicious Randall Munroe cartoon here.
Meanwhile, his latest... "Workaround"... is a hoot, too:
13:41 and they're off to their next job, over in Romsey. They did a very neat job here, and I just have to Dyson up the loose bits of fluff, basically. So, finally, I can start cramming stuff into what was Christa's study ready for the next round. Which is the kitchen vinyl, this coming Monday. So that's one kitchen to be stripped before then.
Further alarums
The fitters had barely left, and I'd just finished using the Dyson to de-fluff everything when I got two back-to-back phone calls from dear Mama's hospital, summoning me from a
brief prayer in the Temple of Cloaca. (Where else can I read Private Eye?)
#1: "She needs her bed moved downstairs." It's a double, and probably won't fit. Her house is tiny. "Oh, I understood it was a single. Buy one, please" (actually,
there was no use of the word 'please').
#2: "No she doesn't — her stairs 'assessment' was OK. Sorry to have bothered you. Thank you for being so nice about it."
More fun. What larks, heh, Pip ol' chum? Dammit, I want to put my house back together! I need, as the Terminator remarked, a vacation.
I'll settle for a cuppa. [Pause] Fingers crossed. Powering everything down for a system test. It's 16:11 and I may be gone for a while...
Oops
Everything is back up and running almost perfectly. Almost, Mr Mounce? Do tell. Well, erm, not a squeak out of my lovely multi-channel AudioLab power amp. Nuffin'. Diddley squat. Zilch. Nada. Except for the normal five-relay cascade as it detects an incoming signal above its trigger threshold. This is most aggravating. Yes, I've quadruple-checked every damned connection. So it's leaving the stack, temporarily, while I slot in the Denon CD/Tuner/Amplifier just to use as a stereo power amplifier while I try to home in on the exact point of failure. Most aggravating.
Still, the new carpet's lovely. And I have a fresh cuppa, and have worked up quite an appetite. It's 18:45 — oh, and the newest Freesat box initially failed to verify my postal code and, yes, its remote does clash with its bigger sibling.
A flicker of hope
As I let my allotted portion of crockpot goodness cool down towards merely scalding, I can confirm (having not even bothered to connect up the loudspeakers, but merely by using the electrostatic headphones that I keep wired into the alternative speaker outputs on the Denon) that everything is fine apart from the AudioLab power amp. Good job I kept the carton, I guess, although I may yet end up driving with it to the repair facility in Huntingdon that they share with Quad — I was last there the day after my birthday when I went with Mike, who was having his Quad electrostatics refurbished.
So, I shall wire up the speakers and see how I enjoy living with a purely stereo system for a while. I expect I'll survive. It's 19:56 and quite pleasant out there now — I'd nipped out to the garage to unearth some decent speaker cable not fitted with bayonet plugs. [Pause] Brilliant. I like it. There's some fine Brazilian music on BBC Radio 3 right now.