2013 — 3 November: Sunday
Distracted1 by a snippet from Vivaldi's Violin Concerto in D picked a few minutes ago by Martin Handley for his "Sunday Breakfast" show, I've just downloaded the "99 Most Essential Vivaldi Masterpieces" from Amazon for a ridiculous £5-59. It may not include the Rachel Podger version I just heard, but (at that price) who's arguing?
Next task: snaffle the very enjoyable jazz they were playing late yesterday afternoon on that same wondrous station. Since all these BBC Radio 3 digital downloads can be obtained as 320kbps by using...
get_iplayer --type=radio --mode=best --get "Programme title"
... unlike their podcasts (which can be a mere 64kbps and mono2 into the bargain) they are well worth the effort and extra bandwidth.
It will then be time to do something in the breakfasty line while I admire the rain. Again.
The exchange...
... here with the wonderful John Waters reminds me:
... that I never actually finished watching that film because it wasn't entirely to Christa's taste :-)
Having finished...
... shifting and re-arranging what now feels like half a tonne of books well out of range of any further leakage of wind-blown rain up in the Books Warehouse I can tell by the general feeling of shakiness that I'm somewhat overdue my next batch of calories. Not to mention, I will be needing a fresh shirt for the remainder of the day. But then, it is 13:52 already, too.
I couldn't...
... bring myself to chuck out the box without first capturing the artwork:
Artworks, long before it was renamed
I wonder what else I'll find up there? I've already uncovered Christa's other, more comprehensive, address book and the little hose attachment I bought to fit the big Dyson for turning it into a powerful, miniaturised (PC case interior) dust-sucker. I've only been looking for that for the last five or six years...
Hell's teeth. It's already pitch dark out there. I've been re-jigging my A/V stack and seem to have liberated several interlinks without losing any function. I decided the switching complication of using the DAC stage of the Audiolab CD player wasn't worth the inaudible increment in quality over the DAC in its slightly older pre-amp sibling. Nor did it seem worthwhile using the analogue output from the CD player when a single co-ax digital link from it is much tidier.
18 years ago...
... to the day, I was told in the IBM Hursley Lab that I was to get a new toy, after using the same beat-up old Intel 386-based PC for about five years. It turned out to be a 100MHz Pentium with a 17" screen, 32MB of RAM and 1,000MB of hard drive. Good grief! That was just before I transferred (initially on an over-casual assignment3) into the Java Centre to be a (then) new-fangled webmaster thingy.