2014 — 1 February: Saturday — rabbits!
A sluggish start1 to a nice, sunny morning. Who's making my breakfast today? Erm, that would be me.
Again :-)
And stuffing the next crockpot? Yep; me again.
What about the post-stuffing, post-breakfast, early afternoon, pre-lunch cuppa and (perhaps) a biccie? Guess who.
Yelling at the radio during "Any questions"? Still me.
Well, I never knew that!
About sleep, that is. Source and snippets:
Deep sleep sounds restful, but during it our brains are actually working hard. One of the main things the brain is doing is moving memories from short-term storage into long-term
storage, allowing us more short-term memory space for the next day. If you don't get adequate deep sleep then these memories will be lost...
During REM sleep an extraordinary thing happens. One of the stress-related chemicals in the brain, noradrenalin, is switched off. It's the only time, day or night, this happens. It
allows us to remain calm while our brains reprocess all the experiences of the day, helping us come to terms with particularly emotional events.
We get more REM sleep in the last half of the night. Which means that if you are woken unexpectedly, your brain may not have dealt with all your emotions — which could leave you
stressed and anxious.
Stressed? Anxious? Who, me?
Not when I can eavesdrop here.
Damn' that hdcp!
I've just proved — yet again — that this infernal protocol brings absolutely nothing to the video watching table that I could possibly want. Since I have two hdmi inputs available on the new Oppo Blu-ray player, I've hooked up the Humax Freesat PVR to the one on the back and the i-Can Freeview STB to the one on the front. I just viewed the Freesat EPG, perfectly successfully via the Oppo set to "Rear hdmi input", to confirm the time of tonight's showing of the final two episodes of "The Bridge, series #2" on BBC4 HD. I then selected "Input source" on the Oppo, tabbed up 'through' / 'past' the "Front hdmi input" to arrive back at the player itself (from which to select Network), and bang! Blank screen; frozen2 BD player.
Full power off and on recycle required to restore 'normal' service. I ask you, how user-friendly is that? This blasted protocol is thus locking me out of my own, non-protected, video files on my NAS until I've performed the Oppo equivalent of the old three-fingered salute, and waited for it to settle down. They are not even high-definition video files that it's "protecting"...
Which bit of "high definition content protection" is at fault? Six years further along this undeniably rock-strewn hi-def video road, and the system is still getting annoyingly underfoot. I have an hdcp-compliant screen, dammit. So what's the problem?
I suspect...
... only BBC4 would follow two hours of Swedish / Danish noir thriller (and very good it was, too) by two hours of the music of ABBA. Nice to see John Grant's opinions being solicited. I couldn't believe I had not a single ABBA track anywhere in my collection. Well, with "Gold" and "More Gold" MP3 downloads that is an omission I have just rectified.