2013 — 8 June: Saturday
This morning's initial cuppa1 is being accompanied by the last 30 minutes or so of "Sounds of the 60". I have scoured several of my habitual web watering holes without finding anything to detain me, so I shall soon be returning, with breakfast, to my already-now-indispensable Kindle.
There was a momentary...
... lapse of reason yesterday when the Rotel power amp, for no clear reason, tripped one of its protection relays. This was behaviour that went both unnoticed and unsuspected given the symptoms — breakup of a satellite radio concert that had been quietly playing in the background — while I initially focused my problem-solving attention on the (blameless) rest of the A/V stack. No harm2 done. And I've now made a bit more ventilation space available directly above it; I tend to forget it's quite a hunky 250 watts per channel chap.
Probably my bad. And the first time it's ever happened, too.
Many years have...
... now elapsed since the last time I had to repair an audio tape cassette. And today's mode of failure was the first time I'd been faced with this particular variant of these fiddly puzzles. Sony cassettes from about 30 years ago3 have a neatly-engineered shaped plastic curved wedge that engages with a same-shaped cutout on the rim of the spool, equally neatly trapping the end of the leader tape firmly in place. Until, that is, the wedge itself breaks.
It's taken me a while, but I've managed to carve a tiny piece of double-sided sticky foam tape into an approximate replica of the wedge and stuff it back into place. The tape is playing as I type. It's the second half of Bach's Preludes and Fugues with Andras Schiff stroking the (possibly non-PC) ivories. I, too, am now well-tempered once again :-)
Many months have...
... elapsed, too, since I last found cold roast chicken on sale in Waitrose. Yum. That's lunch sorted.
A late-afternoon email exchange finally gave me an opportunity to use the word "Indicia"; even if it was mild payback for "Bildungsroman". I love it when that happens :-)
It pains me to admit...
... it, and the latest infatuation will almost certainly wear off soon, but (so far) iTunes (11.0.4.4) has been behaving itself. Though quite why it's replaced a 64-bit version with a 32-bit version is anybody's guess. It was the only piece of software on BlackBeast that didn't have the wit to update itself automatically when I ran Secunia PSI this month. Even Adobe's Flash player managed that trick. (The only other piece of back-level software — I run a reasonably tight ship.)
I wonder if it's learned how to respond to a FLAC file yet? [Pause] Nope... don't be silly!
While I remain...
... personally 1000% confident (if not actually 1000% convinced) that nobody working in any company belonging to that nice Mr Murdoch would ever, under any circumstances, do anything even slightly underhand... I note that the saga of the ONdigital card encryption breaking has now been going ONdigital and ONdigital for well over a decade. Plenty of time, one would think, for its underlying truth to have been clarified one way or the other (unless, perish the thought, somebody somewhere is being slightly underhand?)
PC Plod is now on the case. (Link.)