2010 — 20 July: Tuesday
What is it about the chaps in my family that makes it so difficult for them to send me an email saying "Arrived safely", I wonder? Tomorrow, they say, is another day. One that started 22 minutes ago, in fact, so I'm off to bed.
G'night.
My respect for...
... the Humax range of Freesat kit is steadily diminishing. The baby unit I bought a week or so ago runs very hot (as did its predecessor), and is also put into standby by oddities of the power saving state and consequent LNB pass-through output from the bigger one that I have so far been unable to wriggle around. And now, it seems, the remote control on the bigger one is dead (the third time I've had a Humax remote die on me) despite a battery transplant, and thus I can no longer access "Media" (a button on the remote1 not replicated on the unit's front control panel) — of course — as that would be far too easy. So the handful of TV recordings I had sprinkled on its hard drive will now languish unseen for the rest of time.
The technical term for this is "a bloody nuisance". I suppose it's therefore a Good Thing I watch almost zero broadcast telly,2 and record even less, I guess.
It's 10:29, another fresh fruit breakfast has made a delicious change to the usual soggy cardboard fare, it's sunny without (yet) being horribly hot, and the next excitement will be Big Bro's return here on Thursday before the pair of us head back to the Midlands. Let the study-clearing recommence. (It's nearly finished, in fact.)
Convoluted enough?
Tea-break! Having comprehensively relocated myself (as it were) into the living room, I've also got the CD player and tape deck back down here. So, as I type, I'm now listening to one of my tapes by a route I admit I'd never have predicted when I made it back in November 1982...
... cassette tape deck
—> digital minidisc recorder's analogue input (digitised at 48 KHz sample rate)
—> CD player's optical digital input (resampled with 24-bit length and 192 KHz sample rate)
—> pre-amp's optical digital input (also 24-bit and 192 KHz)
—> power amp
—> loudspeakers.
Thanks for nothing, Mr Postie, except a pile of junk that subsidises your wages. Straight to the bin. OK, back to work.
Depressed? Moi?
No, not really :-) Except, perhaps, when I see my newspaper of choice for 30 years now contains features like "How to apply sunscreen". Or I read more crap from the Iraq "inquiry" telling me stuff that I was perfectly well aware of in the first place. "Do Ministers need intelligence training" isn't the first question I'd ask.
Never mind. There's a new book out:
[Ilardi] argues that the brain mistakenly interprets the pain of depression as an infection. Thinking that isolation is needed, it sends messages to the sufferer to "crawl into a hole and
wait for it all to go away". This can be disastrous because what depressed people really need is the opposite: more human contact.
Which is why social connectedness forms one-sixth of his "lifestyle based" cure for depression. The other five elements are meaningful activity (to prevent "ruminating" on negative
thoughts); regular exercise; a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids; daily exposure to sunlight; and good quality, restorative sleep.
Sometimes, frankly, it's human contact that depresses me! Still, five out of six ain't too bad.
Somewhat later...
Progress, of a sort. It's actually 19:15 and has been a rather humid, nasty kind of day to be hauling stuff around. Meanwhile, however, I found and scanned in this print of a younger Christa:
I took it with the Polaroid camera I won in a competition. So it was in about April 1975 (and certainly before I had bought her the gold chain and engraved disc to mark our first anniversary, since she wore that every day for the rest of her life). It was taken on the edge of the field at the back of the flat wherein lived a horse and foal at the time. When we returned to Old Windsor in November 1996 for the talk I gave to the "ISTC" we found a little yuppie housing estate where the flat had been, just as there was up in Wilmslow where my infant school had been. "You can," as has been remarked, "never go back."
Brian's just called to tell me my cable order is delayed. He's getting me a longish optical fibre and a stereo pair of RCA phono leads to connect the iMac (which works beautifully, wirelessly, in its new home) and one of my PCs back to the hi-fi at the far end of the room. Ho hum. Better start thinking about my evening meal, though this sort of weather does very little to sharpen my appetite.
I'll tell you what is depressing...
... and that's how many photographers I know who take more interesting pictures than I do. My young retired chum Dave Mitchell has been wandering around Plymouth Hoe with his camera-on-a-kite kit down at Plymouth Hoe. Here's his unusual perspective view of the Eddystone lighthouse:
There are plenty more shots here on his flickr collections. Good stuff!