2010 — 29 October: Friday

As it's now just after midnight1 I shall simply report I watched, and enjoyed, "Letters to Juliet" despite its utter predictability. The Phill Jupitus BBC 6Music documentary on Elvis Costello is right now discussing "The Juliet letters" — the collaboration between Costello and the Brodsky Quartet. Spooky.

G'night.

Wet, windy, and overcast

If that's to be the case, I'd better nip out for a fresh batch of edible stuff this morning. A somewhat melancholy start in another way, too, as I've only just learned of the death of the elderly judge with whose family2 Christa stayed for the year of her High School exchange in 1963 in Nebraska. "Everybody leaves" as Johnny Cash reminds us.

But not without a cuppa! [Pause] Right, been there and done that. Now it's time for my delayed breakfast. I must say, the Waitrose car park filled up amazingly quickly in the quarter of an hour or so while I dithered my way along their shelves. It's now 09:48 and very cloudy out there.

Letters from Brenda

As I'm now, perforce, a single parent (and my "child" is already in his fourth decade!) I'm totally unaffected by this item — but totally bemused by the fact that our unjoined-up systems make it necessary to print and send 4,000,000 letters asking for information that is already housed in doubtless remote parts of these expensive lumps of badly-planned and programmed IT boxes! Just how inefficient is this wonderful state of ours?

Pixellated memories

Thinking a little further about that basic (not BASIC) principle of computing: Garbage In Garbage Out... There's a brief sequence in the 2009 film "Crossing Over" in which the Harrison Ford character is studying a low-quality video surveillance tape of a car park, and asks his colleague to enhance a section of the image, thereby retrieving a clear image of a vehicle licence plate. A little ironic, given what the Harrison Ford character in "Blade Runner" managed to reconstruct from a photographic print 28 years ago. I was reminded by this frame from PHD (Piled Higher & Deeper) comics:

TV science

And I was led there from some stuff here. Don't miss "Slightly wet piece of rock"! — an image I missed first time round:

Earth, Air, Water

Thanks, Tom.

Away with the (costly) fairies

It's official: I (and Big Bro) are now dear Mama's "keepers". Our Lasting Power of Attorney over her property, financial affairs, health and welfare has been registered as required in Schedule 1 Part 2 (15) of the Mental Capacity Act 2005. Just as she wanted, though she will now not understand what it all means. Here's a grim op-ed piece (co-written by a retired associate justice of the Supreme Court) about the growing burden of dementia care in the US. Source and snippet:

As things stand today, for each penny the National Institutes of Health spends on Alzheimer's research, we spend more than $3.50 on caring for people with the condition. This explains why the financial cost of not conducting adequate research is so high. The United States spends $172 billion a year to care for people with Alzheimer's. By 2020 the cumulative price tag, in current dollars, will be $2 trillion, and by 2050, $20 trillion.

Sandra Day O'Connor et al in the NYT


Lunch is becoming a pressing issue. I've already decanted my salad from the fridge (to avoid the rubbery effect of a frozen hard-boiled egg). But I still have time to reveal my latest DVD — Emily Mortimer's film choices are interesting, and she was certainly good in the recent "Harry Brown". This one may just be a little bit off-the-wall...

DVD

... though she does not play the part of the doll! Right... lunch it is.

It's the same...

... the whole world over. Big Bro, having read my diary (he must be short of entertainment in Singapore) has forwarded a letter that you can find nearly 37,000,000 Google results for if you use the search string "Australian letter of the year". It made me laugh more than somewhat.

Later that day

As I lingeringly munch my delicious evening pudding-mixture of pineapple, mango, and passion fruit after allowing time for the last of the crockpot to make itself at home in the rumbly tum, what have I been up to since the (turkey) salad lunch? Let's see.

Well, Brian rang me to say he'd finished resoldering my electrostatic headphones connector/transformer box, which was therefore now ready for me to pick up. He'd very kindly resoldered all the internal transformer connections and replaced the frankly rather cheap speaker cable that was originally fitted when the unit was new back in 1979. Here, by the way, is an advert3 for the phones — isn't it amazing what lingers on this Interweb malarkey?

headphones

Breaks off the narrative flow briefly to browse the offer here of listening to "Life" by Keith Richards.

Where was I? So I drove over, but couldn't get an answer. Drove on to Roger and Eileen in hopes of blagging a cuppa, only to find Eileen now enjoying the beginnings of the cold Roger had had last week. Fled the virus back to Brian. Still no sign of life. Returned home. Emailed him — of course he was in, but being upstairs in a back room, he simply hadn't heard the doorbell. Off I go again, taking with me the mini-amp, power supply, and signal leads, everything needed for a system acceptance test. Hook it all up to the little server at one end of his kitchen as he has some music (thousands of mp3 files) on it. Result?

Well, not a good one. Just silence. Check all connections, switch in a different amplifier, different leads, different power supply, try the setup upstairs. Works just fine. The amp's good. Is it the lead? The resoldered box? Oops, the server has frozen and needs rebooting. Actually, the mouse USB connector got dislodged while changing audio signal leads, and failing to push in the plug far enough. Short story version: everything was working fine all the time. Bring it all home. Literally on the point of connecting it up. Knock on the door. Who's that?

It's my chum Steve (ex-owner of Pinpoint Music in Eastleigh, now resident in Cincinnati) just dropping by to say "hello". (Long way to come.) Cuppa tea, good chat and catch-up on Life, the Universe, and Everything, including woes induced by an ailing elderly parent. (We each have one.) Wave him on his way, heat up aforementioned crockpot to enjoy with the second episode of Season #4 of "Boston Legal". Before I know it, it's 20:34 and Nicky Horne is playing the same Pink Floyd material (from "Animals", 1977) that I last heard him play on Capital Radio when he'd somehow managed to get hold of a studio master tape and played that. Spooky again.

  

Footnotes

1  And I'm drooping.
2  And I had to tell them, in turn, of Christa's death. As far as I know, this is the last set of people I had yet to inform.
3  Close reading of which suggests I was mistaken yesterday in saying that the polarising voltage was derived from the input signal. Brian and I had both been wondering how that trick was pulled off having seen how little gubbins there actually is inside the transformer box.