2010 — 10 July: Saturday
If the heat doesn't kill me, I'm prepared to believe the pollen might. It's just gone midnight, though I suspect it's too hot upstairs, still, to bother trying to sleep yet.
Mind you, my two polo shirts and four T-shirts came in off the line bone dry in double-quick time. If they weren't already white, they would have been bleached in the sun, too.
G'night.
Sleep having fled...
... over an hour ago, it's well past time to resume kitchen prep. After all, I've already stuffed further sealant into the unbelievably small fissure through which yet further ants (tiny ones, I grant you) emerged to raid my little bag of used tea-bags by the sink, and I've had my initial cuppa. There's more than a certain irony to be hefting a fridge/freezer and two further freezers around during a heat wave, isn't there?
Overnight emails confirm dear Mama's pending discharge back into "the community". Madness! Ever onward, David. It's a great life. And you still need some breakfast, dear chap. It's 08:14 and warming up unnicely.
At least I'm not...
... the only chap touched gently by the caresses of Father Time (as it were). Click the pic for today's interview with the lad:
I've mentioned him and his mastery of the paraprosdokian before. Now I'm slowly assembling a tiny collection of some of his material, too. Brilliant. Here's his official site. And an earlier Guardian interview from September 2005.
As pants the h(e)art...
It's not getting cooler, is it? Soon be time for lunch — and a bit of a break. It's 12:55 and it would be all too easy to persuade me to lose myself in the pages of Persuasion — must resist!
Speaking, a couple of hours later, of pants, little did I suspect when I thanked Murphy (in November 2007) for not having splattered my trousers with an exploding mini-tomato, that I spoke too soon. However, had I not just come back in from hanging a hastily swilled pair of shorts and T-shirt on the line, I wouldn't have seen this quite well-camouflaged little chap on the vine, would I?
No idea of make or model, but he's rather less than a centimetre in, as it were, the round. I also now know that I don't know where lurk any other pairs of shorts, so that's something else to ponder if the summer lasts more than another day or so.
Meanwhile, Ladysmith Black Mambazo (remember Paul Simon's 1986 "Graceland" album?) warble on. It's 15:50 and I should get back to the seemingly-endless shifting of stuff from A to B. After a cuppa, of course.
It's a fast-moving world
As recently as last Thursday I see I was confidently expecting to be able to use my DVDO Edge video scaler and hub to hook just about all my A/V kit to, except for the Oppo Blu-ray — after all, the Edge has loads of I/O capability. But, when I tried it, (and although it worked perfectly) I very soon got very fed up of waiting for the damnable hdcp protocol hand-shaking to work its way around the system whenever I changed from one signal source to another (particularly as, to add insult to injury, I was using two of the video sources purely for audio). I don't know how bothered Joe Public is at having to wait as much as ten seconds to switch from, say, Freesat digital radio to NPR and back again, but I'm not that patient. So it was back to optical digital leads and using the equally I/O capable AudioLab pre-amp.1
The late Benny Powell just told a story about being soothed (during an MRI scan) by the attendant unknowingly playing him one of the tracks ("Battle Royal") he'd recorded in 1961 with Duke Ellington and Count Basie. How cool is that?
A lot cooler than the 27C up in my study.
Oops, another one
My Humax hi-def satellite PVR (call it "Box A") has twin tuners, twin LNB inputs, an LNB output, and can happily record two programmes simultaneously while I watch a third or play a recording from its hard drive. So far, so good. My Humax hi-def satellite receiver (call it "Box B"), which I bought just for use as an ersatz DAB radio, has a single tuner, one LNB input, no LNB output, and can happily play whatever programme I tune it to. No problem.
The fun starts when Box B is feeding on the LNB output from Box A, and Box A wakes up, thereby muting Box B. (And, yes, I've closely studied both manuals, all the settings,2 and — as ever — checked all connections.) After an irritating period of practical experiment, I have a simple (but equally irritating) workaround. Feed one LNB signal (from my newish quad LNB) to Box A and the other one to Box B. They are then less like conflicted conjoined twins, though their remote controls still clash, of course. Of course, Box A is reduced to recording and watching programmes from a single multiplex on the transponder, though I presume I can still also watch a recording should I choose to do so.
A better solution would be to invite Mr Sat Dish man back to hook up LNB #3 and drill yet another hole through my wall with yet another signal cable for use just with Box B. However, since Christa's death, I actually watch very little broadcast TV. And scanning tonight's offerings doesn't incline me to tune away from my latest radio discovery: Planet Rock. It's 21:20 and has cooled somewhat, though I think the pollen level is fairly high at the moment.
Only 23:36 but I'm completely cream-crackered. G'night.