2011 — 7 December: Wednesday
In the next six months1 3,500,000 of my fellow subjects (we're not citizens, remember, here in the Benighted Kingdom) will take out short-term, high-interest loans to tide them over to pay day. Sound familiar? Remember New Mexico...
Guess who's just added Copernic desktop search back into the growing program mix on the rejuvenated BlackBeast? By the way, guess who also needs to edit the list of dynamically-assigned static TCP/IP addresses in his ADSL modem/router/switch thingy? I should have realised that BlackBeast's MAC address is hardly going to survive unscathed through CPU and motherboard replacement.
Next up (though it can easily wait until after our chilly walk today) will be the AnyDVD tool and my Poikosoft mp3 generator. Followed by HandBrake. Followed by a tiny test of the video transcoding with a close eye kept on the CPU core temperatures. Cool. (Or, possibly, hot.) We shall see. I will also need the Foxit PDF reader and the Libre Office suite. Then there's the HP laser printer driver and the Canon scanner driver. The software road goes ever on...
As does the...
... country road around Middleton. "Bracing" should adequately describe the amalgam of fast-moving chilled air, as we walked through 6.7 miles or so of the invisible stuff. Quite a lot of mud, too, but nothing our boots couldn't cope with.
I didn't realise my beloved hat was quite this jaunty, however:
That's five layers maintaining my core temperature cosy.
Video mission accomplished
On the core temperature front, I've just re-ripped (or should I say transcoded?) one of the titles on a standard definition NTSC DVD using exactly the same 'handbrake' settings as before and am pleased to see that a) the frame processing averaged 89 per second, and b) the CPU temperature only momentarily even touched 49C while the average CPU usage hovered around the 97% mark. And nor did I have to turn up the settings on any of the fans. Indeed, not only can I still not hear the main fan (on the Zalman) but the CPU temperature fell by 20C within less than 20 seconds after the encoding finished. So: pretty cool.
When I first let BlackBeast loose on the same file back in mid-November (in its previous AMD six-core incarnation) I was seeing CPU temperatures a little over 75C at one point (and the AMD Phenom II was not supposed to be allowed out to play — as it were — above 62C). During subsequent video file playback the CPU temperature remains below 30C and processor usage barely touches 2%.
In rather more...
... serious news (though by no means unexpected), I've just had a remarkably clear and very sensible conversation with a nurse at the care-home who was calling me lest I be in any doubt of dear Mama's current "very poorly" state of health. It ended with my promising to call her GP next week (when she returns from holiday) to discuss both a "Do Not Resuscitate" philosophy (for want of a better word) and any future policy towards antibiotic treatment of chest infections such as the one that is currently demonstrating — all too clearly — that being a frail, mindless, little old lady of 95 winters in a UK winter is not a barrel of intelligently-designed laughs.
The nurse fully agrees with my assessment of the (essentially null) quality of 'life' the ol' girl is currently 'enjoying'. And I might add that it's certainly a quality far below that enjoyed by Christa even when she was in the hospice for her final ten days in November 2007.
There truly is a time to live, and a time to die... and to all things a season (as I rather believe the 'good book' has it). Though I'm no expert. Not a visit has passed without dear Mama telling me she wants to die, and Monday's was no exception. I'm not upset by this. (By contrast, I was, of course, devastated during Christa's illness.) But when you're 95, frail, ill, and miserable, death is no Bad Thing.
Life goes on... and I have a date with a hot grill out in the kitchen. I'm starving.
Guess which...
... Novatech technician neglected to reconnect the two, convenient, USB sockets on the front of BlackBeast to any of the 14 or so USB ports on the fancy new motherboard? Grrr.