I always like to read at night, even if only for a page or two, before settling down to get to sleep. This remains true even on the rare occasions that I retire very late. It just seems to help one unwind. It is also encouraging to think that reading is a mind-expanding pastime and so, I believe, it is, even though my usual reading diet consists of material of the relatively light-weight thriller genre.

Just recently, however, I’ve ventured off into a book or two whose subject matter is the RFC (Royal Flying Corps) in World War I; the so-called Great War, though it was clearly anything but great to those involved in it. I’m currently reading a book called Winged Victory by V. M. Yeates. One of the things that makes this book so fascinating is that it is billed as a semi-autobiographical novel, V. M. Yeates having actually flown for the RFC in WWI. The second thing that makes it fascinating is the writing style which has certainly changed noticeably since this book was first published in 1934.

Vocabulary has also changed substantially, it seems, and I dare not stray far from a dictionary for occasional assistance. I know my knowledge of the English language doesn’t come anywhere near that of Sir Winston Churchill, who was supposed to possess an enormous vocabulary, and I’m unabashed about having to pause and look up the occasional word. I’m wondering if good ol’ Sir Winston knew the word I tripped over, quite literally when it came to my tongue, last night?

Where it fell the atmosphere was stained by a thanatognomonic black streak.
 

Strewth! I couldn’t even say thanatognomonic, far less define it. Where have I been all my life never to have come across such a fine word? I was afraid it would be so rare as to be omitted from my copy of Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary. My fears were unfounded, however. There, lurking unassumingly under thanatism I found:

thanatognomonic = indicating death.
 

Regrettably, having survived a year flying for the RFC on the western front in WWI, the mind-expanding V.M. Yeates was to die of tuberculosis aged 38 in 1934, the year his book was published. My vocabulary owes him a debt, though I’m not sure when I’m going to be able to slip my newest word into casual conversation.

[Aside: This little posting has driven the spell-checker absolutely nuts. What fun! :)]

Even a minor amount of snow seems to manage to cause relative havoc in England. It came as no surprise, then, that the 8 inches of pretty, fluffy white stuff that fell on the capital today should cause some serious disruption. Several airport closures including, at one point, both runways at London’s Heathrow. London’s Stansted airport is a nightmare even when everything is working so it must have been particular fun today. Some poor folks apparently made it there on trains only to find themselves stranded when further train services were subsequently cancelled. Even central London’s buses stopped running.

We were nothing like as badly hit as London, having a mere inch or so of snow. Nonetheless something else more local also stopped running. In England we are given to a quaint old plumbing custom of siting huge cold water storage tanks (I’d guess 50 gallons or so) in the roofs of our houses. Such a system looks a little like a disaster waiting to happen but someone must have thought it was a good idea. The tanks are kept topped up via the mains water supply regulated by a ball valve which turns off the supply once the tank is full. Or so it should. Just in case the ball valve fails to stop the flow, there is an overflow pipe which spews any excess water out through the eaves of the house. Or so it should. This morning Carol spotted a 30cm dagger-like icicle hanging from our neighbour’s house’s overflow pipe. Clearly the overflow pipe had been overflowing and, equally clearly, it was now frozen solid. Presumably, whatever had been happening to cause the overflow in the first place was still happening. Because of the icicle plug, excess water was no longer running out. Our neighbour is currently on holiday in Spain.

Armed with our neighbour’s key and alarm code, a swift investigation of their loft revealed a dripping ball valve and a full, though not yet dangerously so, cold water storage tank. I wasn’t keen on setting about replacing the faulty ball valve but I thought I’d might try unblocking the overflow. I’ve got a handy-dandy electric paint stripper which should have no trouble melting the offending ice plug.

Clambering up a ladder in the snow is less than enjoyable but up I went with my heat gun. I snapped the icicle off first so it wouldn’t spear anything if it fell, then proceeded to warm up the ice plug. After about 10 minutes the overflow pipe was considerably warmer than I was and out shot the remaining ice plug along with a gush of water which must have been been backing up behind it. Excellent, disaster averted; the water could run again. Clambering back down a ladder after 10-minutes-worth of snow has fallen on the ladder’s treads is even less fun.

Maybe Carol should have played the heat gun on me to thaw me out.

Having begun the week thinking that it was finally time to bite the bullet and upgrade my computer, things went a little awry when first Carol and then I lashed out on two new road bikes. Bang went twice the computer budget. I was left with a still pedestrian machine struggling with modern machine-hungry software and its 500Mb RAM. Still, at least I hadn’t had to grapple with Vista yet.

Enter good ol’ Amazon, God bless them. For a relatively modest £20 I could purchase two new 512Mb memory modules to replace my machine’s old memory and upgrade the poor, struggling computer to 1Gb RAM. Furthermore, my purchases were eligible for free, supposedly unhurried, delivery. The memory arrived yesterday a mere two days after I had placed the order. I am beginning to wonder why anybody would pay the premium for express delivery. I’m very fond of Amazon. Today I’ve opened up the box, ripped out the old memory modules and replaced them with the new ones. As you can see, my machine still works.

If the memory does its job, things might be a little less pedestrian now. If only I could upgrade my memory. 🙂

We’d been wondering about getting the train into London today to see the Darwin exhibition at the Natural History Museum. The day dawned very grey-looking and, although the weather forecast was advertising bright spells in the afternoon, it didn’t really grab. We vacillated. By the time we’d stopped vacillating time was marching on so it was just as well that we’d decided not to go.

Carol very wisely fancied a safety helmet for her new bicycle. It seems particularly wise when it comes to road bikes because tread have they none; their tyres are essentially slicks. I’m sure safety helmets also make sense on mountain bikes which have bags of tread but we’d thus far avoided them. Given Carol’s mass of tight, curly hair, I was a little concerned about finding a helmet to fit but, undaunted, off we set back to Phil Corley.

You can pay quite a lot of money for a cycle safety helmet. Prices, though not readily visible, seemed to range from about £30 to £150+. It’s possible to buy a perfectly reasonable, albeit cheap, bicycle for the top end of that price range. The bicycle has moving parts which require some mechanical precision. Safety helmets, even those that are expensive, seem to be a pretty simple polystyrene core with a hard plastic outer shell. I know you’ve only got one head (well, unless you happen to be Zaphod Beeblebrox, of course) and it deserves decent protection but the cheap bicycle seems much better value. Nonetheless, Carol found a helmet without a price tag which, after a little adjustment, seemed both to keep her mass of curly hair in check and to fit comfortably. We breathed a sigh of relief when the nice young man at the checkout told her that it was at the lower end of the aforementioned price range. Sold!

Maybe it was time I joined the safety-conscious set. Perhaps I wouldn’t look any sillier than usual with one of these contraptions on my head. I certainly don’t have any hair to get in the way so picking one might be simpler. Apparently not; the shape of the helmets seemed to vary quite considerably and it became clear that you really need one to match the shape of your cranium. I found one: a pleasantly subdued, understated matt black with no garish decorative artwork “adorning” it. Being a Specialized branded helmet it was a little more expensive but not outrageous.

“Do you want anything else?”, enquired the nice young man at the checkout, whose sales figures we kept enhancing.

“Well, you see that matching matt black Specialized Allez 2009 bicycle just over there … could I try it?”, I enquired.

Unlike the Trek that I had tried previously, this one felt right immediately. Comfortable is, perhaps, not a word one should use with regard to road bikes but its geometry seemed to match my geometry and it soon felt like mine. It was more than the Trek but, what the hell, money’s not fashionable at the moment and you can’t take it with you. The nice young man’s sales figures were further enhanced and it is now in our garage keeping Carol’s new toy company.

Yes, you’re quite right, neither of the bikes is in the £150 cheap category. 🙂

Soon after my recent grovellings around on the floor and messing around with what seemed like 223 cables behind several back-to-wall cabinets to commission our new TV (Telly Tales), something odd happened. Whilst skipping through the TV’s various inputs and landing on the Sky decoder input, a window popped up on the screen saying something along the lines that our Sky digibox was about to go into standby. Curious, we thought, in unison; we don’t recall having seen that before. We pressed “back up”, as advised, and thought little more of it.

On Saturday we were off out to a friends engagement party but there was a film that I wanted to record (Witness – Harrison Ford who, incidentally, has not cracked a smile since Star Wars) so I tried setting it to record. Off we went to the engagement party.

We returned in the wee small hours of the morning and, upon entering the lounge to turn the lights off before crashing out, I couldn’t help but notice an ominous red light on the Sky digibox. The blasted thing had gone into standby when it was supposed to be feeding the ever-morose-looking Harrison Ford into the VCR. Bother!

Upon a little investigation it seems that Sky, in its infinite wisdom, has issued a software upgrade that puts the digiboxes into standby after four hours of inactivity during the day and a mere two hours of inactivity overnight. “Inactivity” = not pressing a button on the Sky controller. This, Sky claims, is in an effort to become greener by saving a few amps and, thus, the planet. This wonderful software upgrade caused me to miss the smiling face of Harrison Ford. How will I live? How, in fact, will I ever record anything again if I need to remain present to press the odd button every now and then on the Sky controller?

Fear not. Further Internet rummaging and footling about in the Sky menu system revealed, under “Services”, a new “Auto Standby” setting which defaults to ON. I imagine the geniuses at Sky think that we mere mortals might keep leaping in and out of “Services => Auto Standby” switching it between ON and OFF whenever we want to record something. Well, will we? Of course not. Setting a VCR to record is already complicated enough and fraught with danger; the last thing that process needs is the added complexity of an additional step. We will, of course, leap into “Services => Auto Standby” once and set it to OFF, which is where we came in. I guess that’s it for the planet, then?

If Sky really wants to be green, stop Rupert bloody Murdoch swanning around the world in his private jet.

For some reason recently, my poor old Sony Vaio desktop PC is beginning to struggle. I’ve been getting relatively frequent messages telling me my Windows swap file is too small, for one thing. It’s also taking quite a while to perform several operations. Sometimes that doesn’t matter ‘cos I can just pop downstairs and make a cup of tea. Sometimes it doesn’t matter ‘cos I can pop downstairs and make an espresso. Sometimes it does matter ‘cos I don’t want any tea or coffee. Its struggling is hardly surprising, I suppose, since the poor old thing has a mere 500Mb of RAM. I could double the RAM to 1Gb but that’s the limit it can support.

My poor old machine still runs Windows XP and I’ve been resisting a new computer, partly in a desperate attempt to avoid the dreaded and, apparently, very resource-hungry Windows Vista, partly because I’m keen to avoid the hassle of re-installing all my software on a new machine. Be that as it may, I’ve spotted what look like some reasonable deals on much more powerful machines of late and I must confess that they have been turning my head. So, today we went out for a look around PC World.

I spied an Acer Aspire that I liked the design of. It sports 4Gb RAM and has a very respectable 640Gb hard drive, all of which should do nicely until Bill blasted Gates figures out another Windows generation to chew all that up and spit it out. What I really liked, however, was the clever placement of four front USB ports. They are positioned on the top of the case, about 10cms back from the front edge and angled slightly upwards making them very accessible from a chair when the machine is standing on the floor, as would be the case in my situation. The USB ports are perfectly placed for iPods and pen drives. Other designers should take note.

I wandered away to consider my options. After all, it’s nearly £500 and we’ve only just splashed out on a new TV. Another large purchase after only one week is not my natural style. As we were beginning to head home, Carol waited for me to get in the wrong lane and then exclaimed that she’d like to look at some road bikes. Mea Culpa, I’m afraid; late last year I had expressed interest in a road bike for myself to augment my mountain bike. I seemed to have planted a seed which had germinated.

We had a brief look in Halfords but, not only do they have very few adult road bikes on display, they seem reticent to let one try them out. They seem to expect people to part with £500 on spec. without checking either size or comfort. We left and went on to Phil Corley which is a much more professional organization, has a large range of all types of bikes and is happy to let you ride up and down the road on them. Mr Corley was, like many other bike shop owners, a successful cyclist and clearly sells to people who are more than occasional leisure riders. Were I to spend £4,999.99 on a bike I would expect an engine!

For somewhat more than the computer which I very frugally didn’t buy, there was a particularly sleek-looking Trek1.2WSD road bike designed specifically for ladies and which, as luck would have it, had just the right size frame for Carol. Somehow, this smart new machine has ended up in our garage.

I think I’d better order that 1Gb of RAM.

Just after the turn of the Millennium, we ditched our faithful old Sony 19″ 4:3 TV in favour of one of those newfangled wide-screen, 16:9 TVs. This, despite the mixed format broadcasting that was prevalent at the time. Still, hopefully that would get sorted out as wide-screen TVs became the norm.

I know it was just after the Millennium because it seemed that 99.9% of all TVs on sale were silver and, since all the rest of our entertainment kit was beautiful black, I really didn’t want the telly to clash. My good friend Howard (RIP) was in the same boat and, mentioning the silver plague to a sales person, was told, “silver is the Millennium colour, sir”. Ye marketing Gods! Howard eventually tracked down a German company, Loewe, who seemed to be the one and only company to buck the Millennium trend and who actually made black televisions. He bought one.

As well as not wanting silver, I don’t like TVs to dominate a room, hence the old 19″ Sony. The starting point for many companies’ wide-screen offerings seemed to be a relatively enormous 28″. Mercifully, Loewe, as well as making a black model, also made a 24″ model which would not look too much like the monolith from 2001, A Space Odyssey sitting in our room. It was not cheap but it was about the only option matching our requirements. I bought one. It turned out actually to be a smart TV in that it automatically adjusted its picture format to match an individual programme’s broadcast mode, either 4:3 or 16:9.

It also turned out to be not the most reliable TV in the world. The sound began breaking down in 2003 so it was off to TV-repair-man. More recently, Just before we went to Spain, it seemed to be developing another fault. On some channels the picture format kept jumping between 16:9 and 4:3. So much for German reliability. So much, also, for thinking that we’d sort out the broadcasting format within 10 years; it’s still a complete mess. Foolish boy!

Upon returning from Spain the jumping picture format seemed worse and, since the old two-ton-cathode-ray-tube approach is now completely defunct, we decided against TV-repair-man this time in favour of going for an LCD TV. At least the furniture would breathe a sigh of relief.

These darn things keep getting bigger. There are some smaller models but the opening size now is basically 26″. Fortunately, that size pretty much matched our old Loewe in terms of overall width and height dimensions so it would still fit our space without dominating. Our history was pushing us towards Sony but their pictures didn’t seem as sharp as some. Maybe Sony has had trouble transitioning from CRT to LCD? Panasonics seem to have a good reputation and they looked very good. However, we spotted a 26″ Samsung that looked every bit as good as the Panasonics and much better when one’s field of view included the price tag. We bought one.

Installation time. This is always something of a jigsaw puzzle: how to get a VCR, DVD player and a Satellite box hooked up to one TV with more hidden cables than a Boeing 777. Everything had worked on the old set through two scart leads and a coaxial aerial cable. The new TV has all that (and more) so I tried “simply” swapping like for like. The grand turn on and … nothing: nothing on the terrestrial channels; nothing on scart-1 (no signal message) and nothing on scart-2 (no signal message). Whoops – much head scratching. The connections were made on the TV’s connections panel but it wasn’t seeing anything. It seemed like the set wasn’t connected internally to its own connections panel for all signal sources to fail. Just before I was going to box it all back up and, completely deflated, return it as a duff unit, I spotted that my efforts had disconnected all three cables from their respective source units, the aerial, the DVD and the Satellite box. They were indeed connected to the telly but not one of them went anywhere useful. Unbelievable. I might have suspected one disconnection but not three. Remaking the connections, it burst in to life. Relief!

As well as two scart connections, this set comes equipped with a composite video/audio input (three leads), a progressive scan component video and audio connection (five leads), as well as some more newfangled high definition connections which I don’t need. (Apparently, it’s needed for Blu-Ray. Live and learn.) Just for fun, using too-short a lead, I tried my DVD player through the composite video/audio connection. To my surprise, It worked. That meant I could connect all three items individually. Though I didn’t have the required cables, my DVD player also has progressive scan component video outputs for the five cable connection. That should provide a better quality signal. I went to buy the component cables.

Now, will somebody please explain to me why I have to spend £30 for cables to connect a DVD player that costs only £30 itself? It’s barking! Nonetheless, we went for it, brought the cables home and connected the DVD using them. The grand turn on and … nothing (no signal message). Try remaking the connections and … still nothing. Retry the composite video version and … fine. The all-singing-all-dancing component video output from the DVD player just doesn’t seem to work.

I used my expensive new cables for the composite video and, after a couple of days of head-scratching and fretting, everything is now working. It can’t sort out the picture format (4:3 or 16:9) automatically, though.

One last footnote. Having failed within 10 years to sort out programme broadcast formats, we are now producing ever-larger TVs and barreling headlong into the brave new world of “high definition”. Even high definition apparently has three different formats (resolutions), or so the John Lewis sales person told me. Wonderful, yet more broadcasting confusion. So, we will soon be able to watch programmes in high definition on a 50″ monster that over-fills most folks’ lounges.

The real problem is that most of the programmes are crap. We’re always fixing the wrong problems.