2011 — 15 November: Tuesday
The sun is shining, the porch thermometer has crawled up to 6C, the orange juice is chilled, and I'm predicting a trip down into Soton before much longer.1 I shall breakfast and be off, methinks.
There's an amusing juxtaposition between two 'Grauniad' stories this morning. The one about Daniel Kahneman's new book (here) and the one about Warren Buffet's 'investment' in IBM (here). I once owned exactly one million times fewer IBM shares, and had to wait well over a decade for them to crawl back up to the price I'd originally paid for them — I got rid of them all in 1998, using the proceeds to refresh my complete A/V system. That gave us a lot more pleasure than share ownership ever did.
The down side of...
... no longer running my own email server is that, when Google Mail servers choose to misbehave, I get left in the lurch. Drat! Am I supposed to know what "server error #758" means, do you think? [Pause] The Google search is not very helpful. This is annoying. I have lost the ability to send email.
R.I.P. Jackie Leven
An excellent singer/songwriter, and just 61.
Back, after...
... a fairly hurried toddle around Soton (where I note the fee for a mere one hour of parking in Shed City is now £1-20 putting paid to the official li[n]e about inflation running at 5%), a lunch, and then another jaunt to the local petrol café and on up the road a little further to my sometime source of cheapish DVDs and Blu-rays.
Meta-fiction
The delicious joke here is that "Richard Castle" is a fictional writer of crime fiction. He has been tagging along in the wake of, and has become utterly beguiled by, an equally fictional (not to mention, gorgeous) NYPD Homicide detective named "Kate Beckett". He has turned his muse into the fictional NYPD Homicide detective named "Nikki Heat", and this (which I found in Waterstone's) ...
... is the second "real" book featuring her, supposedly written by him. If you think that's weird, you've simply not yet fallen under the spell. I heartily recommend the ABC TV show and, for a further meta-fictional ride, the episode titled "Nikki Heat" in Season #3. In this, we meet the actress chosen to portray the fictional version of the fictional detective in a fictional film based on the fictional book within the fictional TV show. It's a complete riot, with some of the best dialogue and funniest ensemble comedy I've yet seen in any medium, fictional or otherwise.
In computing...
... there's often more than one way to skin a cat. My browser's webmail interface to the Google Mail outgoing server may have gone castors-up, but the older email client on the Gateway PC turned out to be able to sneak past whatever the problem is, unaffected. Contact is thus restored, at the cost of a somewhat increased noise level2 with two PCs now busily pushing air around.
On that theme, by the way, Len tells me that the six real physical cores in my AMD may well actually transcode video files slightly faster than the four cores — each hyper-threaded — in his Intel i7 system. We won't know unless we work on identical files and transcode them to identical output resolutions, of course, but last night I was seeing frame conversion rates of 170 or more per second. I've yet to determine the optimum settings for display on the Tablet PC's screen, which is capable of 720p (rather higher than standard definition NTSC or PAL DVDs).
Nor is there any clue as to why some of this obviously heavy processing doesn't get offloaded to the more than capable GPU. I presume it's up to the application to "tap into the massive parallel processing power of your GPU with ATI Stream technology and tackle demanding tasks like video transcoding with incredible speed". I certainly haven't yet discovered any settings or controls I can tinker with. I shall be meeting Len for lunch followed by an in-depth hi-tech tutorial on Thursday.