2011 — 20 November: Sunday

Next thing you know¹ it's not merely Sunday, but already 01:25 and I'm about ready for my next dose of sleep. Time for my hi-tech toys to cool off for a bit. G'night.

Having had the mellow fruitfulness, it's time now — it seems — for the autumn mists. Still, at least it keeps down the noise from the motorway. By this time (08:33) it's usually a lot more noticeable than today, even on a Sunday.

Since I "got out" of engineering a very long time (one might almost say 'a working lifetime') ago perhaps I ought not to comment. But I find myself agreeing with the letter here, as did Big Bro down in NZ who's asked me to suggest a solution. I can think of one, but it involves me learning how to tie a hangman's noose:

Royal Bank of Scotland awards £500m in annual bonuses. The newly announced Queen Elizabeth Prize for engineering intends to reward one individual every two years with £1m. Had the prize been £1m annually for each of the top 500 UK engineers we might get somewhere.
Otherwise, many of the best of our engineering graduates will continue to opt for the City. Aside from the questionable morality of Banks recruiting our best engineering and science talent, the process deprives the real UK economy of this talent and means fewer wealth-creating opportunities.

Dr David Rhodes in The Indy

Opinions vary, of course, on what (if anything) constitutes a "real" economy. Or even (as Brian pointed out to me) a "real" vegetable, if the US Congress is to be believed.

My efforts...

... so far this morning to persuade Len's Netgear media streamer to play nicely with all parts of my nefarious little network are not proving a total success. Of course, I could always RTFM, but where's the fun in that? It has no trouble coping with locally attached USB drives, from which it can play (for example) any of my recently-created MP4 files of a certain US TV show in excellent quality.²

Now it's currently chewing on 33,012 MP3 files for which it appears to be building an index. Fair enough, I suppose, but it's only 23% done with 23 minutes to go. No matter; Cerys invariably has some great music on her morning show on 6Music. Besides, it's time for a late "lemonses" cuppa don't you think, Mrs Landingham?

A (slight) superfluity...

... of socketry? I'm only using the hdmi, the Ethernet, and (of course) the mains power.

Plus the USB port on the front. Say what you will about the 'digital revolution', it's certainly simplified the tangle of interconnecting cables. Just don't mention hdcp.

Laundry? Laundered.
Mucky lunchtime grill? Cleaned.
Persuasion? Finished... I think, on balance, this may actually be my preferred Austen novel, though it's a close-run contest.

Speaking of USB ports... how cool is this?

Footnotes

¹ Next thing I know.
² One of the 'advanced' functions suggests it can achieve 39Mbps from the NAS upstairs where 40 Mbps is its supposed maximum media data rate. But that doesn't explain why it can only 'see' a subset of the folders on said NAS (which is a Samba server). I'm reluctant to tinker too much with Len's settings as he's unlikely to thank me for causing him too much work when the device returns to its normal home. And he's already advised me that NFS is better-behaved than Samba on his system.