2014 — 29 November: Saturday

"Mild and dry" this weekend? Let's hope so. Meanwhile, Big Bro1 — when not swimming in his pool, no doubt — is sending me a daily complaint about the missing 'molehole'. Its restoration is, however, out of my hands.

Completely :-)

It tickles me...

... to consider just how very little of 'molehole' actually is visible — or would be, if my Texan ISP was on the ball — on the tip, as it were, of the externally-exposed iceberg. This set of diary pages, for example, (as of "Day 2948") accounts for fewer than 3,500 files or around 20MB of deathless something-or-other. My interminable (and never quite fully up-to-date) book and recordings lists contribute another 42MB or so. But below the surface lurks a further 770MB of my data sprawling across another 2,000 files. All sitting on a stupidly-small SD memory card in a Raspberry Pi that would just about fit inside the sort of tobacco tin that Big Bro once kept his fishing bait in. Amazing.

Vodka to Molotov cocktails?

Mercy me.

But having met a similar fate to Moscow's iconic Red October chocolate factory, the downtown distillery near the Rimskaya metro station is now being converted into an upscale business district called Cristall-City that will include a hotel, a theater and a cluster of trendy loft apartments.
Originally opened in 1901 as Moscow State Wine Warehouse No. 1, the distillery was the initial manufacturer of world-renowned Stolichnaya vodka. During World War II, it adapted its production line to mass-produce about 7 million incendiary Molotov cocktails.
The distillery, which built a reputation in Soviet times for making high-quality vodka for the Kremlin elite, changed its name to Cristall in 1987.

Moscow Times


Beyond satire

Upun my word. Shoot me now.

Chinese pun control

Chris Morris is...

... an acquired comedic taste. I long ago acquired it. Three hours of Raw Meat radio.

Colour me... astonished!

The Marantz A/V amp I'm now using in the reading room has a pair of phono sockets on the back, labelled "Pre-out". One might naively assume that you can hook these up to, say, the analogue input sockets of, say, an adjacent minidisc recorder and thus be enabled to record whatever analogue audio signal is present on those output sockets. One would be wrong. I've scoured the entire bl**dy manual. The one diagram in it that highlights these sockets...

Pre-out socketry

... points you to page 81. But, can you imagine? Page 81 (and its neighbours, and the sodding index) all remain resolutely empty of any mention. And (in the short amount of time I had to check before "Raw Meat" began) it seemed that turning up the recording level of the minidisc recorder to its maximum (+12dB) value barely caused the input level meters to twitch. Grrr.

Normally, of course, you'd expect any analogue audio output offered up to a connected recording device to be at, or about, "line level". So, either I've overlooked some stupid default setting, or the amp's designer never imagined anyone would wish to use it to make a simple stereo audio recording.

  

Footnote

1  Who clearly hungers for something to read, down in New Zealandland.