2012 — 2 May: Wednesday
Today's litany of failure1 includes the router/modem thingy (two power-off reboots to rediscover the outside world) and the downstairs Freeview TV/radio (one power-off reboot to restore any signals from Rowridge). I hardly dare switch on the kettle.
Pass the bucket
Emetic, or what?
Blair is an ominous role model. Cameron has already acquired his addiction to foreign policy, to the anaesthetic of red carpet under foot and pointless meetings about nothing in particular. According to his office, he has gone abroad 42 times in under two years. To this has been added a dangerously short attention span for domestic affairs, a tendency to assume a headline-grabbing speech is sufficient to short-circuit the dull grind of policy formation from consultation through to implementation.
And still there is no shortage of applicants and supplicants for the Top Job. Sociopaths, if you ask me.
The Good Thing about...
... nipping out to the shops just after they open is the lack of shoppers. The Bad Thing (when returning on autopilot along my 'normal' route) is the unlack of cars depositing youngsters (who seem mostly to have lost the use of their lower limbs, their awareness of traffic, their fashion sense and, in some cases, even their fear of tobacco) at or mere microns away from school entrances.
While my Life has undergone significant seismic shifts in recent years, I don't miss all the earlier parts :-)
As someone who...
... has a possibly unhealthy fondness for footnotes,2 let me share this delightful specimen:
Kepler's essay languished, untranslated into English, until 1966. My battered copy3 escaped (somehow) from the library of the Chelsea College of Science and Technology and ended up (priced 50p) in an Oxfam bookshop from which I rescued it in January 1992.
I can't say...
... that my visits to the care-home cheer me up, though at least today's showed dear Mama dressed and in her chair rather than semi-comatose in her bed. But she made precious little sense, and (as she was in no apparent distress) I didn't linger over-long. Besides, I'd nicked matron's car park space and she was due back any minute.
Before I'd set off, Mr Postie had dropped off the book of rejected "New Yorker" cover artwork that I spotted last Sunday and, what can I say?
C'est magnifique.
While I will reluctantly admit...
... that tinkering with digital audio/video kit is not always without its moments of interest, the whole game has become a helluva lot more fraught now that the pernicious HDCP has been thrown into the arena. As I've remarked, the delays and glitches caused by this crappy protocol handshaking its way up and down the equipment chain every time a component or signal source changes adds nothing but grief to the viewing and listening experience. The fact that Java underpins rather a lot of it is also more than a bit dispiriting. And, I might add, does little to deter the 'professional' pirates seeking to bypass the "protection" that Hollywood seems to think has been applied to their semi-precious material — but that's another story.
While trying to sort out reasons for a chum's lack of audio on some A/V files I'd supplied for him to try, I thought I'd pinpointed an explanation. They play perfectly, here, via BlackBeast and the Open Source VLC player. But they weren't delivering audio when played from my Buffalo NAS using the Netgear media streamer. The last time this happened with a bunch of files I fixed it by transcoding them, leaving the video parameters unaltered, but choosing a stereo downmix rather than the Dolby 5.1 surround of the original files.
It occurred to me, however, that I'd never seriously pushed hard at my NAS/Netgear setup to see if it was really so deficient in the audio decoding. Switch it on, set everything up. What's this? It's certainly not a full HD display. What's going on now? Turns out, if I power the Audiolab A/V pre-amp right down and reboot it, twice, while standing on one leg and invoking various deities, it mysteriously becomes capable (once again) of passing through crisp full HD video and well-behaved stereo mixed down inside the box from the Dolby Surround audio on these same files. (Thus obviating the need for any further transcoding. And very probably making the transcoding I performed earlier unnecessary, too.)
Good job it's only a hobby.
More musical musing
I've been amusing myself by comparing and contrasting different performances. Examples4 have included "Criminal world" (Metro v David Bowie) and "Mad world" (Tears For Fears v Gary Jules). And, yes, I've been winding the amp all the way up to '11'. No point in living in a detached house and not enjoying the audio freedom, is there?
I also surprised myself earlier by downloading Primal Scream's "Screamadelica" — for the "Loaded" track that had then just been played on 6Music — only to realise that I already knew about half the tracks on the album. For some weird reason, I'd thought Primal Scream was more akin to the rather thrashier sounds of Chemical Brothers or The Prodigy.
As I've said, I'm so unhip... My bad. I now want a copy of the "Spitfire" track from Public Service Broadcasting, but have to wait until the end of the month.