2010 — 14 November: Sunday
Another (Jo) Good start,1 this time at 08:49 or so. Mysteriously, there seems to be an unwashed empty crockpot crouching in the kitchen sink. It hasn't stopped me making a morning cuppa, of course, but will have to be dealt with soon.
I've only just discovered how dreadful the Guardian's web site is when browsed without AdBlock. Yuk. (Using Chrome under XP, not the new black beast. That's now disconnected while I set about moving things around in readiness for it.)
To rent or to buy? That is the question
Over three decades, Christa and I were able to compare the German approach to housing — rented, rather than owned — and the noticeable effect on the relative prosperity of her two brothers over in the Fatherland. This was in stark contrast with the crazy system here in the UK, and the equally noticeable effect on our own relative lack of prosperity despite the not-quite-subsistence-level IBM salary. There's a very neat summary in today's "Observer". Source and snippet:
"You can still buy a house in Germany for the same price, in real terms, as you could in the 1970s," says Hartwich. "If I look at the example of my parents — they were in no rush to buy because they could live very well in rented accommodation. They put their money in a bank account and bought their first home when they were in their early 50s and it took them six or seven years to pay off a small mortgage. They were extremely relaxed about it."
In Britain, by contrast, new building has been severely limited and property prices have risen steadily as a consequence. There is a waiting list of 1.8 million applicants for social housing and the houses we have built are the smallest and costliest in Europe — "rabbit hutches on postage stamps," as the economist Alan W Evans once put it.
Exactly so. Personally (of course) I largely blame the unsainted provincial bigot who ruled the roost for a while in step with her US significant other. No names, no pack drill, but you can probably deduce who I mean. In truth, though, the problem predates even that lovely lady by well over half a century.
Ironically, now that I have the Title Deeds to my house safely tucked away somewhere, I can observe that interest rates are lower, for longer, than at any time for quarter of a century when I was struggling to clear a mortgage that actually never exceeded £35,000. Madness. The system is so broken...
Learning a little something...
... every day. As I remarked, I live my life to a musical soundtrack. So, having temporarily dismantled the A/V stack while I change the shelf system it lives on, why not use the "giant iPod"? After all, it's got the totality (almost — but that's another story) of my music collection on it. Fire it up. Nice, reassuring chord from the system. Fire up iTunes. Update available; do I want it? Yes, I suppose so, though iTunes updates have been a perennial and rather tedious theme during my three-plus years of this particular PC. Wait while it goes through the entire update rigmarole despite my having answered an explicit "yes" to the explicit question. Wait, again, until I next pass near the screen, where I deduce the system is now hanging while waiting for me to quit iTunes so it can complete installation. (Fair enough, though it could have "bonged" at me.) Wait, again, while it does its spray-bits-all-over-the-hard-drive thing.
Ready? Seems to be. Need a re-boot? Apparently not. OK. Fire up iTunes. Select a likely track. Click on it. Listen to the sound of silence. Now what? Why's the volume control greyed out? System preferences? Nothing there. OK, it's set to digital out (as it feeds my A/V stack at the other end of the room). Pull out the optical lead. Got it. Turns out analogue play from the internal speaker(s) is muted while it outputs an audio bitstream. Good — once again I have music while I "work". And it's pretty good quality, too.
It's 12:09 and the lure of my next cuppa is growing stronger. Plus it's grey and raining out there. Yuk.
Next up: the lure of the recently discovered pack of sausages I popped into the freezer and promptly forgot all about. That, a nice microwaved Bramley, and a few bits'n'bobs. What more could a (hungry) chap want at, crikey, 14:05 to assist him in his on-going search for the external USB-connected sound card? The one that invariably crashes the Gateway with that unalluring Blue Screen of Death should I ever forget to power it on before the PC. Hardware and software, heh? You gotta love 'em.
Pardon?
That delicious new little Class D amp also does a grand job when fed from the iMac and piped to the two "Rock Solids" I still have at the rear of the room. Ever onward. I've moved the tall glass bookshelf up into the books warehouse. My next task — helped along by my next cuppa, now that I've cleaned up the disgusting mess that my new grill was in, post-sausage — is to bring down one, or both, original hi-fi stands and connect everything back up again. Simple! What could go wrong? It's 15:56 and nastily grey out there still.
The road goes ever on...
Saint Pilling (he who wrote a DTP program for the RISC OS world and then ported it to Windows) has just had this to say:
I seem to be using Linux more and more. So you never know. It'd not be too bad to do a full Linux version, but I fear for how long it would take. Windows took longer than writing the whole program for RISC OS. If I could put in say three months and finish it, then I would, but three years is not on.
Meanwhile, my son draws this to my attention. The Apache module is installed on my ISP's servers just waiting for me to trip over it. The idea is it makes my web pages load faster, but I could be wrong :-)
To my delight, and...
... I admit, my considerable surprise, I've fitted my complete A/V stack on to just one of the two stands.2 Of course, I now have to undo it all so I can move that one stand along half a metre into a more suitable location, but that's a price I'm willing to pay. However, not until I've eaten something — it's 19:40 and I'm starving. I've also decided against coupling up all the analogue audio outputs to my old control unit to feed to my new little mini-amp. That has sounded so good all afternoon on its diet of mp3s from the iMac that it's now going to be its station in Life, as it were.
Compare and contrast! [Pause] Suddenly it's 23:42 and my bed is starting to look attractive. Silly me. All I hafta do is hook up the mini amp's input to the line out of the minidisc recorder and set that to record. That way any digital input I select on the system at the pre-amp gets routed to the recorder, and is then available both as digital and analogue signals from the output sockets. Feed analogue to the mini-amp and reconnect the electrostatic headphones — bingo!
G'night.