The problem with listening to music late at night is that sometimes you hear a song and you just want it to be loud and apparently that would be considered antisocial. In some way.
Blog
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A lack of indoor commitment isn’t necessarily a bad thing
It’s a Bank Holiday here in the UK. At least, it is as I write this. This means I could have been being paid in vast lorries filled full of money had I taken it upon myself to do a shift. Thankfully, my phone stayed silent today because otherwise I’d’ve felt very bad about not making myself available for a shift. However, making myself available would have entailed the horror of hiring a car; because Rebecca’s MOT was a bit of a failure. The rear brake cylinders seized when I changed the brake shoes (probably as I forced them back to a point they’ve not had to go back to for a long time). Attempting to un-seize them was unsuccessful – and in the name of time, she’s gone to the garage to have them replace both of ’em.
Frustrating because I’m currently trying to source a new rear Escort rear axle which will replace the whole troublesome object along with the brakes. So spending money fixing the brakes I’ve got is, well, not ideal.
Anyhow, so I had the day to kick around at home, and rather than do painting (which I probably should be doing) I instead built a new planter. I made it from scrap chunks of floorboard from the house and a pallet (plus a couple of random offcuts from making the decking). It took me from 11am until about 5pm; including the time to fill the base with gravel and then fill the planter itself with earth:
Unfortunately, having completed it I realised that what I should have done was made it about 60 cm shorter so that I could leave a gap between it and the other one, and you could have had a little path between them. That would’ve been nice. Err, but I didn’t. And it’s now full of soil. So that’s not going to happen.
I’m not sure how long it’ll last, because the floorboards were already pretty rotten before I started, and the screws I had kicking around were just marginally shorter* than I’d like. It was pretty flimsy putting it together, but once all the panels were screwed together it did that suddenly fairly stiff thing. Which is good.
Then I more or less hurled the plants from the kitchen in to it. We’ve singularly failed to harden them out properly, but they were getting desperate to be planted out, the soil becoming one giant mass of roots… so I just plunked them optimistically in the planter. The next lot of plants we’ll go back to egg-boxes full of soil; they work better at keeping the plants separate. Still, our neighbour stopped to comment on how nice it was looking, so that was nice.
Anyhow, then in an exceptional demonstration of restraint (which probably explains why after I did it I ended up spending £35 on a new laptop battery for my laptop**) I did not then come into the house and start sanding the door-frames. I won’t pretend I wasn’t tempted, but I’m trying to be better about not working until I drop, because it has been pointed out to me that it’s not entirely healthy to do that. All the time.
So instead I swept off the deck, made myself a cup of tea, fired up the chiminea and relaxed.
Y’know what, it was bloody brilliant.
I sat, I dinked on the net (courtesy of our new wifi extender. Yay), I drank my tea and I fed the fire.
I smell of woodsmoke, but I feel damn good about the day.
Then we came in and made the most incredible potato salad from ‘Plenty’, and now I’m listening to the fantastic Smoke Fairies album that Kathryn got me (along with their gig) for my birthday (we’ve also listened to another excellent album this evening – by Lyla Foy). I am, quite honestly, having a very pleasant day.
* Or longer, so I went with shorter because I don’t like the idea of cutting my hand every time I plant something.
** Although that might also be related to the fact my laptop battery has a reported capacity of around 2000mAh which is less than half its design capacity and that varies quite a bit; leading to the state of charge plummeting lead-balloon like when it’s unplugged. From full to empty in ~45 minutes. -
YA TA!
*have you ever looked at a sound forum? There is no middle ground whatsoever between ‘person who doesn’t give a shit’ and ‘total audiophile who cares about things only your dog can hear’)
Yeah, they always entertain me with their oxygen free rare earth element cables connected using unicorn polished gold plated connectors… In contrast I like to think I exist in the middleground and have retained a degree of sanity. We have ‘nice’ speakers and a ‘good quality’ amp (that got rave reviews back when it was introduced).
I have a decent vinyl deck. Our CD / DVD player is a ‘whatever’ item (I’ve only ever had one that made me realise there was a difference between cheap CD players and better ones, and that was back when finding a CD player for under £200 was incredibly difficult (it took me a year to save up for my £100 CD player made by *RadioShack)). These days I think you have to pretty far down the CD/DVD/Blu-ray ranges to get to something that sounds shit.
The cable linking that kit to the speakers was not the cheapest, nor by any stretch the most expensive. Mainly I picked it because it was hardy enough to run under the floor & through the wall without me worrying I needed to run it in something.
The things that amuse me the most though are things like the blind audio testing my friend did with some audiophiles where they couldn’t tell the difference between coat-hangers and their posh new cables. Or, and I’m not sure if I told you this story, a visitor to our house (who will remain nameless) has another customer he visits who has an extortionately expensive Swiss or French valve amplifier that can only be serviced by paying for an engineer to visit from said european country.
He’s got a £10000 record deck.
He’s got some of those ridiculous oxygen free cables.
It would not surprise me if he’s got an Acoustic System Phase Corrector.
He was showing it off to our informant, but after playing just one piece of vinyl he proclaimed that the problem with vinyl was that it was lots of hassle, and that he preferred to listen to MP3s on it.
*sigh*
* Well, actually it was a ‘Tandy’ own brand.
LOL, yes, you DID tell me that story, and my eyes roll as hard reading it now as they did then. Some people with money really ought to let others of us spend it for them. :P :D
Have I played you the Flander’s and Swann song “High Fidelity?” It’s about JUST this audio-nerd thing, and it’s awesome. If you can’t find it online I’ll upload it for you. :)
I have indeed heard it, and it’s just perfect. When I stole my parents vinyl collection I made sure to steal the Flanders and Swann, so I’ve got “The Bestiary of Flanders and Swann”, and both the Hats (At the Drop Of & At the Drop of Another). They’re quite delicious.
I’m currently using old junky bookshelf speakers in the living room off a 1975 JVC receiver that’s AWESOME. (It is, in fact, so awesome that I blew out my less junky pair of bookshelf speakers with it. Oops). I’d like to get better speakers, but that couple hundred bucks needs to wait for the studio completion.
(I had old floor-standing Cerwin Vegas, but they’d gone to college with both my uncle and my dad and been our family speakers, and they were partially held together with duct tape. Then my cat decided it would be nice to live inside one, and the other was starting to experience unrelated-to-cats low-end distortion, so I found ‘em a home on craigslist with a guy who needed to cannibalize the parts for his Cerwin Vegas. YAY NOT LETTING THINGS DIE).
Aye, all my old kit’s gone off to other people to be loved. My very battered amplifer (of similar vintage to your JVC one) had blown it’s power transistors 3 times, I think, by the time I decided that perhaps it should have a new owner. It was a shame, though, because it was lovely.
But I am weak, and I quite like having a remote (although I barely ever use it). After much faffing about and looking at amplifiers that I could justify I chose the Cambridge Audio. It’s mated with some Gale bookshelf speakers. I’ll probably get some nicer speakers when we land in the States, but these were the ‘quite nice, lower end of the budget’ speakers.
I really wish I could’ve saved my old speakers, but they’d essentially turned to dust.
The weakest point is the Raspberry Pi, because it can’t do two audio outputs simultaneously. I want it to have audio on HDMI so that when watching TV shows we don’t have to have the amplifier on; but I also want it to do audio via a USB audio device. I don’t really want to have to switch between them, because then I have to switch the TV on to select tracks which I’m waaaay too lazy to do.
I keep looking out for a really early Slim Devices Slimp3, but they’re depressingly sought-after.
My computer speakers are a very nice Bose pair (er, when I say ‘very nice” I mean “about $100, sounded better than anything else in store”, not “four digits, made with real phoenix tears”) and my digital music is FLAC, so that’s okay. Haven’t bought the cable to connect Fancy New Tech Digital Music to the old receiver, yet (in current set-up it’d have to go by way of the PS3 and that’s a thirty dollar part).
Ah, my office music setup is designed to make audiophiles weep. While I have my nice Sennheiser headphones for editing the podcast (which I really should record tomorrow), the amplifier upstairs is an ancient valve amplifier… which would be lovely, but it’s mono. So it’s Mono with two charity shop bookshelf speakers. It actually sounds remarkably nice, it’s got that warm valve sound.
The kitchen sports a valve amp too, of a sort. It’s got a Bush VHF61 radio :)
There’s something delightully silly about listening to digitally encoded audio being played through valve kit.
I did buy fairly nice in-wall speaker cable, but we’re talking “The decently thick stuff from the big box hardware store” not special-for-audio-nuts cable. I looked up in-wall speaker cable before I purchased it, and saw people insist the wire lengths had to be the same… then someone else came along with math and showed that probably only mattered when you started to run speaker wire the length of a football field. :P
Ha! Yeah. They’re all nutcases.
And yes, this is not real audiophile cable. It only came from Maplin, who I’m sure would like you to believe it’s nice cable. But it’s just copper in some plastic. It’s not even shielded. If I was running it miles or near lots of mains stuff then I’d worry more, but it’s not noticably hummy :)
…clearly what this all boils down to is that we need to get into the job of selling Acoustic System Phase Correctors. :P
Handily our local wood recycling place has a large stock of them going cheap, so we could get quite a stock ;)
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Elementary
E and I watched the first three episodes of Elementary over the weekend. I’d heard repeatedly that it took a few episodes to hit it’s stride and we shouldn’t decide we didn’t like it until a few in…
…and I have no idea what those people were talking about. It was solid gold from the word go. We both loved it.
Isn’t it just fucking awesome?
I adore that show.
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YA TA!
*have you ever looked at a sound forum? There is no middle ground whatsoever between ‘person who doesn’t give a shit’ and ‘total audiophile who cares about things only your dog can hear’)
Yeah, they always entertain me with their oxygen free rare earth element cables connected using unicorn polished gold plated connectors… In contrast I like to think I exist in the middleground and have retained a degree of sanity. We have ‘nice’ speakers and a ‘good quality’ amp (that got rave reviews back when it was introduced).
I have a decent vinyl deck. Our CD / DVD player is a ‘whatever’ item (I’ve only ever had one that made me realise there was a difference between cheap CD players and better ones, and that was back when finding a CD player for under £200 was incredibly difficult (it took me a year to save up for my £100 CD player made by *RadioShack)). These days I think you have to pretty far down the CD/DVD/Blu-ray ranges to get to something that sounds shit.
The cable linking that kit to the speakers was not the cheapest, nor by any stretch the most expensive. Mainly I picked it because it was hardy enough to run under the floor & through the wall without me worrying I needed to run it in something.
The things that amuse me the most though are things like the blind audio testing my friend did with some audiophiles where they couldn’t tell the difference between coat-hangers and their posh new cables. Or, and I’m not sure if I told you this story, a visitor to our house (who will remain nameless) has another customer he visits who has an extortionately expensive Swiss or French valve amplifier that can only be serviced by paying for an engineer to visit from said european country.
He’s got a £10000 record deck.
He’s got some of those ridiculous oxygen free cables.
It would not surprise me if he’s got an Acoustic System Phase Corrector.
He was showing it off to our informant, but after playing just one piece of vinyl he proclaimed that the problem with vinyl was that it was lots of hassle, and that he preferred to listen to MP3s on it.
*sigh*
* Well, actually it was a ‘Tandy’ own brand.
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College in two sentences or less.
I love how it’s not something like “wear something smart”. It’s just like “wear something”.
accurate
Back when I was at uni (the first time) touring student houses, one of the most surreal experiences was being ‘shown’ around a house at enormous speed. This process involved the woman who was showing us round literally opening a door, announcing that it was a bedroom/lounge/kitchen then slamming it quickly. Most of the rooms were in almost total darkness with the curtains drawn, and in one lying spreadeagled on the floor was a semi-naked man.
She then hustled us through the kitchen (containing a washing machine and tumble direr literally packed full of newspaper) before kicking us out on the street and staring at us until we left the road.
Strangely, we decided to stay in University accommodation instead.
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I often find myself wondering if what I’m writing is terrible. I mean, I can actually read it again without going ‘oh dear god that’s awful’ which is an improvement on stuff that I’ve written in the past.
But then I wonder if I thought that about stuff I’ve written in the past. Did I at the time manage to re-read it and not think it was awful?
The only things that give me slight hope are that I’ve read published stuff that I think is worse than what I’ve scribbled down and that I’ve left it months now, returned to it, and not wept at the ineptitude of it.
So perhaps it’ll turn out okay*
* After copious editing.
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Hey big spender
It’s been a big couple of weeks for us in some ways. So let’s start with the small change. I’ve finally got back to doing some work on the house. I ‘liquid sanded’ upstairs bannister rail. It took a not insignificant amount of time out of my day. In addition I’ve filled the nicks and cracks in the paint on the kitchen doorframe. I’ve still got to sand it and run a bead of caulking around the door shut, but it’s looking better. It’s actual progress, so I’m not going to complain.
I also tackled a short section of the picture rail upstairs and a bit of door frame. Unfortunately, I was somewhat short on the old masking tape front, so I didn’t get as far as I’d’ve liked with that. Also, like a lot of things in this world it’s sort of… well, how long is a bit of string. Anyhow, I’ve started. I popped a coat of paint on part of the bannister too, so I get to see what it looks like when it’s done.
Well, at least, possibly. I still need to paint all the off-white bits, which means buying some off-white paint, so I need to see if the paint I selected meets both our tastes. I’ve no idea what it’ll look like when I paint it on with the red, so we’ll have to test it and see how we both feel.
But actual progress in this area is good, because it’s been kinda static for a while.
We also now have a network that extends the length of the garden, more or less. I think it’ll probably just make it into the garage. My phone has network to the garage door, but seems to lose it somewhere in the garage. But I reckon that if I held it up higher it’d work. Which means that it’s probably worth trying to fix the PC in the garage.
So that’s the small stuff.
Oh, and I’ve been adding to my story. Another 2 chapters down, which is pretty cool for me. Still no idea if it’s even readable to anyone but me. But hey.
I’ve also been looking at starting to sort the garage – which means buying a new tool container (probably a rollcab). Which is why I’m currently trying to exercise some restraint because whilst the ones I really want I simply can’t afford (they’re in the 300-400 quid category), I’ve found a ‘direct from the manufacturer’ company that does an adequate looking one that I really quite fancy. It’s still £90 quid though.
On the other hand, being able to find tools in the garage would be awesome.
But the big news is that we have finally bought sperm. We had a meeting with the clinic and it seems we’ve finally managed to jump through all the relevant hoops. We are both now considered ready to try and have kids, and thus we picked our donor, after many happy hours on the internet of going ‘uh, no, not him’ we settled on the one we liked. And this morning we transferred an insane amount of money for 1.5 mls of sperm. So, uh, that’s quite exciting.
And terrifying.
Mainly terrifying.
I keep having the “OHMYGODBUTI’MBARELYABLETOADULTNOW” moments, but I’m pretty sure the terror’s a good sign. Of some sort.
Yes.
So there’s that.
Uh, which is why I need to finish decorating the house. Because I always remember a friend at work who bought shelves when their kid was born, and finally erected them when the kid was 17.
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“okapi!” Or, to be less of a jerk, “speed”. :)
Hey, Okapi is an awesome word! And I’ll have you know I immediately thought of something!
(Something besides “Okapi is really fun to say” and “Okapi are really cool lookin’ animals,” that is).
What I thought was: “I know a song about that!”
This is not surprising to people who spend much time around me. No one even asks for proof, anymore. They just sigh and roll their eyes and hope I don’t sing the song I know — missing out on an astonishing variety of clever songs.
See, it’s my goal in life to know a song about everything.
Granted, I accomplish part of it by being a bit broad in my understanding of the definition of ‘about’. The song about okapi is actually a song about a gnu. A gnu who wants you to understand that he is absolutely totally definitely not an okapi.
I’m a g-nu, spelt G-N-U
Call me ‘bison’ or ‘okapi’ and I’ll sue.
G-nor am I in the least like that dreadful hartebeest,
Oh, g-no, g-no, g-no… I’m a g-nu!The song is by Flanders & Swann, who were famed in England for their comic/clever song act back around the heyday of my fake borrowed british grandparents (I know this because the faux grandparents in question where absolutely shocked that I knew who they were). They have an entire album of animal songs, which is really great if you want to know a song about everything!
I deeply adore Flanders and Swann. One of the great things about them is that despite the fact I’ve had their albums on my playlists since I was about 6 I still keep getting new things from their satire as I listen to it now I’m older.
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There’s a point after my last night shift, when I’ve been up all day, where I lose the ability to make any real kind of sense and turn into some sort of burrowing creature who’s main aim is to see how far into the corner of the sofa I can get.