2012 — 27 August: Monday
Somewhat after midnight1 I finally finished removing (from the wall) two of the four miniature power socket strips that have, for the last 20 years, served to supply my A/V stack. Now that the component count in said stack is a mere shadow of its former self the surplus socketry was beginning to offend me. Besides, it needed a jolly good clean.
All is now reconnected and still working. Oddly, the Netgear media streamer invariably needs its volume reset to zero from -19dB. Equally oddly, the Humax satellite wakes up on whatever radio channel I had it set to, whereas when it wakes itself up at 17:00 every day (if not already in use) it fires up BBC1 South TV.
The list of AWOL DVD titles is down to six, and I think I can safely identify Junior as the holder of three of them. Since that leaves over 3,800 disks present and findable, I shan't worry my little head unduly. Bed is beckoning quite urgently.
I learn...
... this morning that Googlemail even defends me against email from chums, if said chums forward spam to me — purely as an illustration of a reason (with which I already agree) not to host a blog to which the MSSSS2 can append comments, I hasten to add, not with malicious intent. Mrs Google's virtual Postie socks me in the eye, as it were, by adding this banner:
I also learn that another chum has £95 to burn, in this electromagnetic field near Milton Keynes. I flew there once, in 1978, on a little four-person expotition from ICL Beaumont to sniff around the offices of the Open University publications unit. I still recall two things: my pilot looping to try to make me vomit (surely an unwise manoeuvre in such a confined space?) and the apparently low page-production rate of the unit compared to ours. (If I'm honest: mine.)
I didn't initially catch...
... the name of the guest on "Essential Classics" this morning. It turned out to be Paul Bailey, whose biography of Quentin Crisp is somewhere in this house. Lovely title: "Stately Homo". But as for that "somewhere"... therein lies a sorry saga.
In the days before my conceptual CaseLogic breakthrough (some might say 'breakdown') my ever-expanding library of DVDs lived at one point in wall-mounted media boxes down here in the living room. In the post-CaseLogic era, and when rotated through 90 degrees, these boxes just happened to be the perfect size3 for those paperbacks that are taller than 'standard' and shorter than so-called 'trade'. The story of Mr Crisp is contained in a paperback of this size, so — as with others written by authors at the top of the alphabet (as it were) — was moved into its new stately home down here.
Fast forward to the state of my little cave after the new central heating system upheavals. Two of these boxes remain, but are now up in the books warehouse holding my small set of spoken word CDs. The others migrated into my bungalow chum's sunlounge to house his overflowing collection of CDs nestled among the orchids. As for the books... does the term "diaspora" ring any bells? Perhaps if I invest in an RFID tag system? Though I'd still have to find and tag them in the first place after which, of course, they'd never go astray again, would they?
As I whirl, like a...
... spectacularly slow-motion cleaning and tidying cyclone, hither and yon — this afternoon's "target" has been my set of classical music CDs — I unearthed the Nimbus Natural Sound sampler I somehow got hold of that was pressed for them by Polygram in Hanover in 1982. Its final track is a simple, undithered, 300Hz sine wave — not the most interesting music, I grant you — that in the course of 63 seconds increases from zero to a point 40dB below the maximum possible output level and then sinks back into inaudibility. I was delighted to find that the latest CD player and its DAC wizardry renders the inevitable stepwise distortion at the lowest output levels inaudible unless I turn up the wick beyond Spinal Tap's "11" to a rather silly +15dB.
And if I were to run the system at that wick setting for anything more musical, I might well make my ears bleed. So, when the newly re-mastered "White Dove" album from Emerson, Lake and Palmer finally arrives at the end of this week, I shall not be playing it at anything like that volume...
Just (19:06) taken another random hack at the ever-growing vine. The baby grapes are no longer so baby, though they have a fair amount of ripening to do yet, even for my palate. It's trying to rain, again, out there. Time to digest my evening meal and do some vegetating, methinks.