Week of 2nd June, 2003

Last Week

Monday, 2nd June

Jenny has been asked to obtain the orchestral score of Ralph Vaughn Williams' "English Folk Song Suite" so that the music can be rearranged for a school string ensemble, of which she will be a part. We've been looking, on and off, for weeks, with no result. Comes now news from Bangor - Sarah could get it from the Uni. library if required, and she has the publisher details. It's from Boosey and Hawkes, the one company we didn't try, so I visited the website, and bought. UKP8.99 plus postage.

Incidentally, the website, while functional, is slow, and the screen shuffles about annoyingly - characteristic of inconsistent underlying table width settings - did no-one preview it before putting it into service?

On Friday came the news that Jenny also needs to listen to the music, so I've got to get a CD - easier said than done, but Amazon gave me a list of 30 hits, some of which didn't seem to mention Vaughn Williams at first glance. Further research showed that hit number 2 was the one I wanted - the Folk song suite is on it, movement titles all complete. So I ordered that as well.


Spam check - 25 messages, 19 rejected by rule, 1 valid.

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Tuesday, 3rd June

Morning spam check - 33 messages, 25 rejected by rule, 2 valid.

A little light shopping this afternoon, including an external disk drive enclosure for one of the spare 2½ inch HDs I have had going begging since I tried to re-upgrade Fujisan after his disk crash last year. It's a Tsunami DD-200, USB2.0 interfaced (they also do IEEE-1394 and combo USB2.0/IEEE-1394 versions), which I bought from Morgan in Greenford. I put the 6GB Fujitsu MKH2060AT drive into it, and it installed immediately. I'm using the supplied keyboard socket adapter cable to power it - it claims to be USB bus powered, but I've not tried that yet. Alternatively, you can plug in an external power brick (not supplied)

Later:  the Tsunami drive will not run USB bus-powered. External power is required.

Evening spam check - 6 messages, 4 rejected by rule, 2 valid.

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Wednesday, 4th June

A light day - and not much in prospect for tomorrow. But then, it's getting on for summer, and everything goes quiet then - before the Autumn rush, that is.


Mum was discharged from the respite care home this morning, and is now back in her flat. I'll go down this weekend to make sure all is well.


Spam check - 35 messages, 27 rejected by rule, 2 of the 8 remaining were valid.

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Thursday, 5th June

Sure enough, today was light, work-wise. Although a guy from the Channel X co-ordinating facility visited this afternoon, to try to ascertain why we have to dub all his output for spec. compliance, despite his heroic efforts. Easily enough explained - there are two main reasons, record machine lineup (they record 6dB lower than we do) and the peaky, syllabic emphasis on the Country X dialogue track. Problem 1 can be fixed by offsetting the recorder using it's front panel controls, and we gave him a sample of our desired lineup level on tape. Problem 2 requires some automated dynamics processing - a compressor - which he has available.

Hopefully, we'll have less problems in the future - for the moment he's going to try doing a couple of less-urgent (because we're ahead with the relevant series) jobs under the arrangements described today, to see if he can duplicate our preferences. If this works, we should be able to save most of the final correction processing - which would be good.


I think Katy is angling for a new computer. She keeps saying that Armadillo "is broken", but doesn't specify the fashion of said brokenness. The only problem I've seen is Armadillo's tendency to white-screen at irregular intervals - which I think is related to screen settings, and which I cannot duplicate. Jenny is asking for a computer as well, but has said that she would accept Armadillo, if I buy a new machine for Katy. Jen did say that she'd like to be the one who doesn't get the hand-me-down - as the youngest, she does tend to get the cast-off kit.


Spam check - 39 messages, 31 rejected by rule, of the 8 survivors 1 was valid (and that questionable - it's a mailing list from an online ticket agency, which I don't recollect signing up for)

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Friday, 6th June

To Wales today, to visit Mum, and make sure all is going well after her sojourn in the care home.

Later: An easy trip, barring heavy rain and spray until I got to Swindon or thereabouts, and a couple of minor tailbacks due to roadworks. Total time, door-to-door, 3¼ hours.

Mum looks much better, more like her old self, although she's still thin. Her memory is still poor, and I don't think that will ever improve.

The care agency girl arrived on time, and we had a nice little chat.

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Saturday, 7th June

A lazy morning. Then we waited for the agency call, which was late - the rostered carer is sick, so another one came - and then out for a drive, to get Mum some fresh air.

We went to Port Eynon, on the south-west corner of the Gower peninsula, and spent an hour sitting on the seafront (not the beach, be it noted) watching the various sport boats coming back to shore, to be trailered back up the beach and towed home.

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Sunday, 8th June

Back to London, today, after a quick shopping run to replenish Mum's fridge. The drive was easy enough, just a little slow around Slough, where the M4 is being resurfaced (and will be until September, so the signs say)

Jane is frantically re-organising the house, in readiness for another influx of students on Wednesday. And she's fulminating at me because I didn't tell her about the workday change next week - for the pop festival coverage - and she's booked the Thursday to go out to dinner with a friend. I can't win.

She also told me to confiscate my Mum's cigarettes, and tell everyone not to buy more. This is a safety precaution - Mum is prone to going to sleep with a cigarette in her hand, and the furniture and carpets in the flat show evidence of this. But I didn't, and that's another strike against me.


Spam check - 102 messages, 78 rejected by rule, of the 24 survivors 4 were valid.

Sarah 'phoned - she starts a field trip, near Carmarthen, tomorrow and wanted a route to drive. She has no route planning software, but I do, so I said I'd e-mail her a route.

And, of coure, Mr. Murphy stuck his oar in. I have been using AA Milemaster, with the road network data files held on CD - even with 5.5GB of disk, data space can get short at times. But I couldn't find the CD. But I did find another covermount CD with ANDRoute 2.0 on it. So I uninstalled AA and installed ANDRoute - which works, by the way. It doesn't list the route data in a form that you can copy to the clipboard, which is unfortunate. But it does have an option to e-mail a route. Which option, of course, only understands Micro$oft. But the e-mail it created was pure text, so I could copy and paste the route data into a Turnpike e-mail, and send it. Which I did. Hope it gets there in time.

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