Week of 10th November, 2008

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Monday, 10th November

Testerday was quiet - not much work to do. Barring, that is, adding extra audio tracks to some promos. This is done as a separate process, after the base clip has been ingested. And it's tedious. We have to add 6 audios (3 stereo pairs) to each promo - each track separately, in succession. For 30-odd promos. It's a bit like banging your head against a brick wall - it's so nice when you stop.

The Treo needed a charge again this morning - I think the GSM radio got stuck in high-power mode after last night. We'll see how it goes today and tomorrow. Otherwise the vendor is going to get some earache.

It absolutely hissed down today, and some of the drains got a little backed up - there were puddles near some drainage grilles, occasionally quite deep. Being a pedestrian under these circumstances can be a bit hazardous.

Demon's new Usenet service seems to be provided by Highwinds Media, on an outsourcing basis. At least, one of their servers is the last item in the routing path. And it's slow - you get one 60kByte/sec connection per IP address. That said, it works, and article retention seems to be much longer than Demon managed, before their servers were retired. Anecdotal evidence on the Web suggests 60+ days retention, but there were also flames about inadequate spam filtering (specifically HipCrime last year) and lack of response to complaints about same.

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Tuesday, 11th November

Armistice Day

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the 11th hour, of the 11th Day, of the 11th Month,
And at the Going Down of the Sun,
And in the Morning,
We will remember them.

On this day we commemorate the dead of the two World Wars of the last century, and other conflicts, on the date of the signing of the Armistice that ended the First World War, in 1918.

Shopping in Ealing, by bus and foot, this afternoon. Jenny had forgotten her lunch, again, so stop there first to hand-deliver. And then off to the shops. Nothing of major interest, just food. I did a little tech window shopping, but there was nothing that cried out, "Take me home."

The coming trend seems to be to offer a mobile 'phone contract, with outrageous talk minutes and texts, and a 'free' laptop with 3G data dongle - typically UKP35 or so a month, with 1 to 3 GB of data transfer bundled. I don't do that much regularly, so such a contract is over-expensive for my usage. A 3G dongle like Katy's, with 1Gb top-ups, valid for a month, pay-as-you-go, is more like it. There's also a firm cap on usage - no danger of running up a mega-bill, it's pre-paid, and when the credit runs out... This is with Three, and includes their network-locked Huawei E160 USB stick, with driver software for Windows on a flash drive inside, and a microSD slot in the side for storage. But it is possible to use the SIM in a PcCard 3G modem, should I so wish.

All that said, Katy still has't paid me for the dongle and data bundle, so technically it's still mine, but if I try to use it... Earache city.

Treo needed charging, again. This is not on. But before I throw it back at the vendor, I'll turn off the GSM radio, and use it as a PDA. The SIM will go back into the Nokia 6310i - which is still, in my opinion, a better 'phone. And I can put the Nokia in the car cradle, and use it hands-free. As a PDA, the Treo is better than the Palm Z22, which is cheaper, and at least as good as the Palm TX5, which is more expensive. The only fly in the ointment is the battery life - we'll see what PDA mode does.

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Wednesday, 12th November

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Thursday, 13th November

Last two days of this fortnight - and the weight of electronically submitted commercials is increasing. Today, such clips kept filtering through until about 10 p.m. - the last one would have been sent at just after 5 p.m.

All four new ingest desks are now working, although one of them is still missing it's ingest system computer. Each desk has 3 computers - a MAC Pro, a main network PC for e-mail, scheduler system access, and other such things, and an ingest system PC - and 4 screens - 2 MAC screens, one of which is shared with video monitoring: one PC screen, shared between main network and ingest via a KVM switch, and a dedicated PC-type screen connected to a Tektronix monitoring box for objective measurement of programme video and audio signals.

The glass partition between the new area and the rest of the ground floor goes in this week, which should reduce he incidence of random people using the area as a walkway - which is remarkably annoying. We're waiting for someone to not notice the partition, and walk into it - and serve them right, say I. They wouldn't like having people walk past their desks as an accessway to somewhere else. And once the glass goes in, we'll get the Flexicart robotic ingest system moved downstairs, as well. This is being done so fast because the engineers need the rack space upstairs for an upgrade of their own.

I've resumed carrying the Nokia 6310i as my 'phone, and switched off the GSM radio in the Treo. A 'phone, whether smart or not, that cannot survive 12 hours at work is essentially useless to me. But a Treo can serve as a Palm PDA, and I'll try using it that way.

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Friday, 14th November

A day off today. And I've made arrangements to pay the bill for the central heating flush-out. I stiil think that there should be a way of paying this by installments, but no - British Gas are insisting, "Pay up now."

To Betty J's house this evening, to install her new scanner. This is a Visioneer 9000 USB, which comes with Paperport 7, and a version of TextBridge forOCR. And all that works - you need 200dpi or better for OCR of 12 point text on this system. I'll dump the old machine tomorrow.

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Saturday, 15th November

To the dump today - officially, Recycling Centre - and leave Betty's old computer in the place designated for small electricals. And then on to my tame exhausts place, to get the noisy exhaust on Ally fixed. The problem turned out to be a cracked weld on the flange at the lower end of the downpipe from the exhaust manifold. On Skodas of this vintage, the Lambda sensor is installed in this pipe, and there is a history of stripped threads when you try to remove the sensor from the old pipe. This means a new sensor, which more than doubles the cost. I was lucky - the sensor came off clean, and was reinstalled on the new downpipe without problem. So now the car doesn't burble, and the intermittent flat spots seem to have cleared as well. Next up, check out the "no charge above 2500 rpm" fault, which will probably require a new alternator.

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Sunday, 16th November

Everyone went to a Christmas Craft Fair somewhere, so it's been a lovely quiet day.

First thing has been some experiments with VLF (3 to 30kHZ) radio reception. I fixed a 3.5 mm jack plug on the end of 5 metres of wire (7/0.2mm., PVC insulated, to be precise) and plugged it into the mic. input on the Dell laptop. Spectrum Lab, by DL4VHF, was the receiving software of choice.

I was in hopes of receiving signals from the Russian radio navigation system RSDN-20, known in the West as 'Alpha'. But no luck. Most of what I saw seemed to be harmonics of things, particularly 50Hz. Spectrum Lab has a built-in function to suppress this, by fiddling with the contents of frequency bins in the FFT, and it works. But the only signal I could see was at 17.3 kHz or thereabouts, seemingly A1A (Morse, and slow Morse, at that) and even that was weak. What it is, I don't know.

So I need a better aerial - a 5 metre wire doesn't cut it. I'll try a coil of 100 metres - I think I know where that is - but it'll need rewinding onto a non-conductive former. The cardboard and metal drum it's on would probably act as a shorted turn if I try to use it as-is.

The Treo is definitely behaving itself as a PDA. As a smartphone, for my use, it's a bust. But I've carried the Nokia 6310i for years, and it's still working like a champ, so I'll stick with it.

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