2016 — 25 February: Thursday
Power is on1 and my cuppa is hot and freshly-made.
Last night's...
... temptation was, indeed, to try out the digital audio signal from the Xonar. Not a peep? You guessed right. Meanwhile, Kodification of my film titles is now complete, and I'm left to pick up the few bits of "TV Show" material that have crept into the online DB Kodi uses for films. A typical example being several of the BBC plays of Shaw and Dickens. Although these are clearly "mini-series", they sometimes get treated as if a single film title, and end up in the DB.
As you can see...
... I've already reached the letter "H" in this latter task...
And there's clearly a minor bug in the Screenshot. It forgot to discard the outline of the area I was in the process of defining for capture before clicking its little shutter.
It takes about...
... the same time to read this cautionary tale as it does to game Amazon into declaring you a #1 best-selling author in your carefully-chosen, obscure category.
It occurs to me that even my fastest-written book — a self-teach guide to COBOL on the ICL 1500 Series minicomputer (which is probably obscure enough, these days) — took me one full, very busy, weekend. Though it never troubled any best-seller charts, it paid me £2,000 when that was still quite a worthwhile sum to put towards the cost of a new Honda Civic (back in early 1980).
Hired by the CIA?
A beautifully-written essay. Source and snippet:
My first round of interviews involved the delivery of memorized briefings (mine were on the takeover of the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia and the death of an important tribal leader in Baluchistan, which is another way of saying I had a subscription to The Economist). At the time, I had a phobia of public speaking that was crippling even before a civilian audience; from this experience, I learned that I could operate while terrified.
Umberto Eco...
... came up in passing during yesterday's little fresh-air ramble. (We were contemplating contenders for the Jones' Kindle while on an extensive upcoming tour of Scotland.)
That we encounter the past primarily through texts only made this more troubling. Texts are, after all, made up of language; and as Eco came to realise as he turned to look at media culture, language is anything but objective. It is a patchwork quilt of symbols, metaphors, euphemisms, omissions and distortions, all of which reflect the relationships of power in the author's society, and which are understood by readers — or historians — in light of their own experiences of social dynamics.
I came naïvely late to the realisation that history is largely a process of "making things up".
Although...
... what I should be doing right now is...
- experimenting with a borrowed mini-DisplayPort to full-size DisplayPort lead to see how the NUC copes with driving two quite hi-res screens at the same time while (say) playing videos, and/or
- fixing the unwanted muting of the SP/DIF channel on the NUC's external USB Xonar sound card by correcting the misapprehension2 alsamixer is currently operating under...
... what I'm actually doing (besides digesting my evening meal) is listening to today's sonic arrivals. I began with this 1975 version of "Peter and the Wolf" narrated by Viv Stanshall and performed by an interesting set of musicians:
Not for the purists, but I enjoyed it. (Fiona Talkington played a couple of extracts on "Late Junction" on Tuesday night.)
Then, having enjoyed what I'd heard on "Record Review" nearly two weeks ago, I've been bopping along to this pleasant pair of CDs featuring some pretty ancient songs by Guillaume de Machaut:
Hyperion have done their usual splendid job on these recordings. Although I've neither seen, nor often thought of, Walerian Borowczyk's film "Blanche" for 43 years or so, this music is very evocative of it.