2012 — 2 June: Saturday
Suddenly, mysteriously, it's a new day.1
Time for bed, said Zebedee.
The need for speed?
I've been vaguely mulling over the question of "doing something" about my broadband. I use BT for my landline connection and Zen has been my ISP — the latter for largely historical2 reasons. I seem currently to be in a situation where (as used to be said of IBM mainframes) "you can buy better, but you can't pay more". For a little over half my present monthly payment, it seems (according to what Len assures me is the slightly pessimistic prediction of BT's own speed-checker) I could already double my download speed to 2Mbps.
And depending how far up their tariffs I wish to clamber, BT suggests that my line could (with "fibre to the cabinet") manage a downstream speed of 34.7Mbps and upstream speed of 5.9Mbps.
"Warp factor 10, Mr Sulu?"
Progress?
Pah! Don't talk to me about progress. Mr Postie just (10:15) dropped off a DVD and the DisplayPort to DVI active adapter. Plug it in; attach the DVI-hdmi dongle; plug in the hdmi cable; plug in far end of same to the DVDO Edge scaler. Last time at this point, recall, the BlackBeast Win7 desktop appeared on the 60" Kuro, but the two 24" screens on my desk went missing in (in)action... what with them being ancient legacy devices, and all..
This time? The two 24" screens remain active, but all I get on the Kuro is a big, featureless, blue screen. The sort of screen that screams "This isn't the video signal you seek. Try using the Force." And all current attempts via the Control Panel and the 'Catalyst Control Center' to detect connected displays yield only the two I'm already fully aware of. Rats! I didn't really ever want to watch videos from BlackBeast on the 60" Kuro, did I? Yeah, right.
Silver lining? It's only just occurred to me — now that I've brought the DVDO Edge scaler / hub back into play — that at least I can3 now also feed it with the RGB analogue video available from my little Sony Freeview box (that I use purely as a digital radio) from its delicious little SCART socket (providing I can first persuade a simple composite video output from it into the Kuro so that I can access the 'menu' settings to make sure the SCART is actually being fed with an RGB signal) and thus maximise the picture quality.
Win some, lose some. Wince. Tea, Mrs Landingham? It may stop me flinging a brick through the screen. [Pause] Actually, better make that a coffee. And a croissant. Days like this, I almost wish I hadn't given up smoking. (Shades of Lloyd Bridges, in "Airplane", if memory serves.) Aah, that's better.
Isn't it odd,...
... and annoying, how things that you're looking for tend to turn up in the very last place you look? This afternoon's example being the previously mislaid first edition of that Louise Brooks book I mentioned three weeks ago.
It was lurking, well-concealed, behind a minor-league pile of clutter in a corner less than seven feet from where I'm sitting. And its front cover does indeed illustrate the lady's hair style better than the second edition did. (I enjoyed the new Tynan introduction, however.)
I sometimes wonder...
... what Josephine Public makes of stuff like this, buried in one of my DVD player manuals?
Indeed, I sometimes find myself pining for those old analogue days!
If I only had a...
... system, I wouldn't have had to download that Skip James blues album to get my ears on the track "I'm so glad" — I've just discovered I already have a copy of that same 1931 recording tucked away on CD #1 track #11 of my "All the blues you need" compilation. Doh. In my defence, I would need at least 5,000 hours to work my way through all the music hereabouts. And a chap has other things to do besides listen to music. Allegedly.
Sleep, for example.