2012 — 25 December: Tuesday
Yesterday's weird black fungus failed to carry me off (I threw out the jar as soon as I spotted it inside the lid). I fear gone are the days of believing in such things imparting super-hero powers. Besides, who wants to be a super-hero? The hours are terrible and the pay even worse.
I also see1 that a Big Brotherly eye is still being kept on me. The ex-Blighty NZ-based blighter wonders if he can have a set of small bits of printed paper, covered in dried saliva, delivered to me, should his auction bid for them succeed. I imagine I'm then supposed to use other similar (probably much cheaper) bits of paper to forward them down to him in hot, sticky NZ where he'll be able to re-stick 'em in one of his albums. Hobbies, heh?
Meanwhile, I've a brekkie needs eating to fuel up for the festive mud-filled walk. It's been getting slightly less dull grey out there, though is still fully overcast. It's not actually raining (probably because it's simply run out of the stuff temporarily). We shall find out, no doubt, but I shall be taking my waterproofs. That's if I can actually manoeuvre my car out past all the alien vehicles I notice have been parked hereabouts. It's quite amusing having an empty double drive while others' cars sprawl all around.
KBO. [Pause] It's now (10:10) raining, quite hard.
I heartily recommend...
... today's daily dose of "Dilbert" and the Xmas spirit, which Len drew to my attention just before I left the house.
It's now getting dark as I sit here in Technology Towers (after a nearly empty motorway return trip) listening to some gorgeous Beethoven piano (the 'Emperor') while the washing machine does its thing. This was after our 7.2 mile walk around Cheriton, pausing at the half way point for a pint. Parts of our route (which took us at one point past the site of the Battle of Cheriton during the Civil War) were more than usually muddy, but there was nothing insuperable. We followed it by a small but delectable traditional Xmas lunch back at Mike's, where he regaled Andrew and me with smoked salmon sandwiches on scrumptiously fresh whole grain 'brahn bred' with lemon juice and black pepper, plus a small glass of white.
Ace. A very civilised way to spend Xmas day, if you ask me. And, for tonight's entertainment — when I've finished picking all the teasels off my 'walking woolly' — I shall re-acquaint myself with the Coen brothers' 1990 film "Miller's Crossing" ...
... as it turned out not to be quite to Mike's taste when he bought it on Blu-ray recently. It's a film I remember enjoying with Christa on LaserDisc many moons ago. [Pause] Having just updated one of my data bases, I see I paid $39-95 for that title, on 1st November 1992. It was one (of many) LDs I bought in Orlando during the holiday trip that was my "prize" for being the IBM Hursley Lab's mole. Those were the days, heh?
Time (18:42) for a spot of the hot pot that is crock.
A repeat...
... of one of this year's Prom concerts, "The Yeoman of the Guard". I last saw that, with Christa and another couple, in the late 1970s in an outdoor performance actually staged at the Tower of London with Tommy Steele, of all people...
Video shenanigans
I've been digging a little deeper into the mysteries of video subtitles in material I've been ripping and transcoding (via HandBrake on BlackBeast) from DVD VOB files into MP4 format for convenient and portable playback on my Tablet PC, on the laptop PC, and for storing on the Buffalo NAS. In passing, I notice that my PC VLC player is again wearing its Xmas hat:
I've been able to confirm that I can capture two separate subtitle streams (dialogue, and director's commentary) when ripping, and can select either, or none, when playing back on a PC with VLC. But I've not yet worked out how to manage the same trick when playing back on the 'main' system and using my Netgear media streaming device. "Am I going deaf?" I (almost) hear you ask. Not at all. But modern Hollywood dialogue capture seems often to take second place to naturalistic ambient sounds and it can sometimes take longer than I wish to spend attuning my ears to accents and mumbled speech from that side of the Pond.
Plus, I like to understand the lyrics of some of the songs they stick on TV series.