2011 — 1 June: Wednesday... rabbits!
Trouble seems never to travel alone, does it? Having left the NAS and Blackbeast chattering away to one another overnight, this morning I can no longer get a 'peep' out of my intranet web server. Still, the day is sunny, the tea is hot, the music is cool, and I've just seen a young lady making her way carefully home after (I presume) an interesting night out, but without benefit of shoes. Kids today, heh?
The mystery (if that's the right term) turns out to be a wholesale reassignment of TCP/IP addresses across my home domain since yesterday's little spot of tinkering with my wireless router as part of the process of getting it to play nicely with the NAS box. I have obviously missed a DHCP versus static address trick somewhere but was able to "find" my intranet web1 once I knew what new address to point to.
Breakfast, followed by some technical consultations, methinks. I need to return a few items to Brian this morning in any case before (I hope) meeting up with Mike for our next walk. Blimey, it's already 08:47, dagnabit.
The final front ear
Following our hyperspatial jaunt (restricted to the locality of Winchester because of continuing unavailability of Mike's satnav, which obviously ruled out any chance of using the Corbomite manoeuvre) I warped back here for some lunch, and found a package on my doorstep:
I had almost no access to TV when this was first shown in the UK. Besides, I was too busy being an engineering apprentice / student. I dimly recall beer featuring larger than TV in what spare time there was. So I've never actually seen any of these episodes despite being very familiar with some of the SF short stories from which the plots were lifted. I also long ago read, and then passed along to a real fan, Jerome Agel's "Making of Star Trek". (I note, in passing, that his similar book on the making of Kubrick's "2001" has a new copy on Amazon at $270.)
Look at the time
After a second unsuccessful expotition in search of local suppliers of gigabit Ethernet cable, I settled down (finally) to have another skirmish with Audacity. Now that I've fitted the 'Creative' sound card with its SP/DIF optical i/o, it turns out the only really tricky bit is getting the playback and recording 'devices' sorted out and made known to the application. After that, no problemo. So I was able to record a 38-minute interview I have on minidisc (from an original BBC broadcast that I first captured on cassette in the mid- to late 1970s) turning it into a 384MB WAV file, editing 10 seconds of garbage off the front, and then converting it into a 34MB MP3 file at 128Kbps fixed, which is more than adequate for a non-Dolby mono recording of such vintage.
Of course, if the BBC hadn't been so quick to wipe and re-use old tapes, I wouldn't have had to do this as I can't be the only person interested in hearing an interview with Charles Addams conducted by Philip French, surely? Mind you, having got used to ripping a 60-minute CD on Blackbeast in an elapsed time of three minutes or less, it's a bit of a wrench to revert to a real-time process.
While on the subject of old tapes, I have to say the Star Trek episode ("The man trap") I watched nearly half of cleaned up beautifully, but the wooden acting and stodgy script left a very great deal to be desired, and made for uncompelling viewing. Perhaps one day, when I'm old and grey... wait, I am old and grey. So, now that I've finished Season #3 of "True Blood", what do you fancy next, Mrs Landingham?
What do you mean, "do the dishes first"?