Week of 19th December, 2005

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Monday, 19th December

 

More of the same, work-wise.

The GPSMAP76 works nearly as well with "Snap to Road" turned off, as it does with the function turned on. So I'll leave it enabled, for the moment at least. These Navtech maps are pretty good - the detail, at high zoom factors, is excellent. They show both carriageways of a dual carriageway, shopping roads that run parallel with the main road, and even street and locality names.

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Tuesday, 20th December

 

My aunt's funeral, today, at her local Parish Church, in Caldicot, just the far side of the Severn Bridge from here. I'm planning a day-trip - there and back in the day. It's about 120 miles each way. And the GPS is loaded with maps for both ends of the trip.

Later: It was an easy drive, traffic was not heavy, and I managed the journey, door-to-door, in just under 3 hours, including a search for the Church - the map showed the road where I knew it was, but the screen is just too small to read such detail when the road is visible, and when you zoom in enough to make road names legible, the road itself was off-screen. But no matter, I was there three-quarters of an hour early - arguably way too early, but better early than late.

And it seems that the downloaded maps overlay the pre-installed basemap - at least the basemap for areas I didn't download was still there. Whether it will be complete when I take the downloaded maps off, is another quesion - one I cannot yet answer.

It was a sad occasion, as all such things are, even though I didn't know my aunt that well. But at least I could meet and talk to my other relations. There are only two of my parents' generation still here, but cousins and children of cousins are legion. And since it's been many years since I last met some of them, there was a lot to catch up on - not least names.

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Wednesday, 21st December

 

It looks like the Sharp MD-X5 may be unfixable - the repair shop have done their best, and they suspect the Minidisc laser assembly. They won't change that without specific authorisation, if indeed it's still available, so I need to visit the shop to discuss it. In money terms, UKP100 wouldn't be excessive to fix this - you can't get a modern equivalent, without you spend UKP350 or more for Sony separates - one-piece boxen, rare before, are non-existent now.

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Thursday, 22nd December

 

Back to work - and tape-to-tape work is relatively thin on the ground. Not so commercials and promos - they're coming thick and fast.

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Friday, 23rd December

 

More of the same as yesterday.

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Saturday, 24th December

Christmas Eve

 

Sarah and Katy got back this morning, on a British Airways red-eye from JFK to London Heathrow - scheduled arrival 08:20. En-route predictions suggested an arrival time of 09:04 - they actually landed at 08:48, 3 minutes before I arrived at the airport.

They came groundside almost exactly an hour after landing, which was good because I managed to avoid having to spend for more than an hour's parking. Even so, the parking charge was UKP3.90.

Then they all went out - shopping, followed by the Blessing of the Crib at the parish Church. And then lunch at Jane's Mum's favourite cafe in our local shopping street. And a great time was had by all.

There was a posting in the Seti newsgroup that Berkeley have ceased accepting results for Seti Classic workunits. They stopped issuing new work on the 15th of this month. So Classic Seti is now dead - long live Seti BOINC. Except that I'm out of it - the machine I was dedicating to this task is just too old and slow. I managed to do just under 1800 work units in my 4 years involvement with the project, latterly 1 WU every 18 hours or so - peanuts compared to people who were doing WUs in 2 hours on each of maybe 20 machines (or maybe lots more than that - I believe Sun Microcomputer was running the Seti client on most of it's in-house workstations, and there was one guy who was posting brags to the newsgroup of upwards of 60,000 WUs completed)

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Sunday, 25th December

Christmas Day

 

Too much food - too much family, again...

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