2012 — 5 August: Sunday
The weather this morning remains cool and moistly uninviting without offering much prospect of other than a bracing stroll. This too shall pass.
Meanwhile, as my...
... great music file tidy-up exercise continues — with the end of the tunnel now almost in sight, I hope — I had a mild scare1 yesterday evening. I suppose it's a bit ironic to be listening to the BBC Archive Hour programme about archiving and hear Robert Fripp talking about his digital backup strategies while in the midst of discovering that some of my own binary digits are apparently AWOL. I have yet to investigate more thoroughly.
Time for tea, assuming the kettle is still in the kitchen. It was, last night. [Pause] Crikey. Now there's a bright thing out there up in the sky. What could it be?
Is there anything...
... quite as rousing as a lovely blast of "Carmina Burana"? The November 1980 recording on Telarc of Robert Shaw with the Atlanta Symphony orchestra and chorus has been, and still remains, a firm favourite. And -4dB sounds about right :-)
Good deeds...
... never go entirely unpunished, do they? When I tipped my chum Tom off to the NPR "Tiny Desk Concerts" the other day and, more precisely, to one by guitarist Bill Frisell, he pointed me to a Frisell set of Beatles covers available as an Amazon download. Of course, as I was snaffling it, the fiend that is Mr Bezos also drew my (limited) attention to a lovely John Surman set of 'tunes' called "Saltash Bells" which is now burbling away in the background.
Post-prandial pondering
I couldn't help thinking — while deleting a duplicate copy of the Seu Jorge track Mania de Peitão (Large Chested Mania) from the second "Sounds of the World" compilation (because I already have that track on the "Cru" album) — that a mere two and a half minutes of music in highest-quality variable bit rate MP3 format still manages to clock in, as it were, at more than the 4MB that was the total size of the RAM in my Acorn A440 RISC PC back in 1989.
And, speaking of duplication, when I use Copernic to search for "Infirmary" (in a lazy attempt to pull out all occurrences of "St. James Infirmary" — why else?) here's what turns up:
- St James Infirmary by Allen Toussaint
- St. James Infirmary by Bobby Bland
- Hurricane by Bob Dylan (the word "Infirmary" occurs in the lyrics!)
- St. James Infirmary by Dr John
- Ain't necessarily the Saint James Infirmary by Frank Zappa, riffing on "It ain't necessarily so", of course
- St James Infirmary by Robert Crumb. Yes, my comix hero
- St. James Infirmary by Josh White
Let's not start worrying about the punctuation. And, before you ask, yes, I missed Snakefarm's wonderful "St James" because they felt no need to include "Infirmary" in the title...
From time to time...
... or, more accurately, once in a blue moon, I have a little go at reducing the value of entropy (some might well say the level of dusty "chaos") here in Technology Towers. Today's exercise has also more or less convinced me that my cute little sucker needs either a new battery or perhaps even a wholesale upgrade to a newer model. Meanwhile, I'm exchanging emails with Junior, who is trying to decide on a model of water softener. Mine (despite a series of lousy reviews on the web) has passed the two year mark so far.
Signal failures
I was about to consign an old "Computer Shopper" magazine to the great recycling bin in the sky when I spotted it contained a test of hdmi cables. Since I'm always game for a laugh, I started reading it. "[The] HDMI Compliance Test Specification states The Encoding Analyzer should be capable of recovering the data from any compliant HDMI signal with a bit error rate of better than 10-9." So, how does an error rate of one bit per billion stack up against a Blu-ray data stream?
Following the reasoning put forward by author Ben Pitt, you've got 24 bits per pixel, and [1,920 x 1,080] of the little devils, rinse and repeat 24 times per second. In other words "around 1.2 billion bits2 of video every second", just over one bit of which is permitted to be duff. He has the good sense to suggest that a one-pixel error in one second of viewing is unlikely to be noticeable.
I honestly lost the will to read any further at that point, but did check just in case it was the April Fool's day issue. It wasn't. Maybe I should go back into technical journalism?