Week of 1st November, 2010

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Monday, 1st November

New fortnight starts today, on a noon-to-midnight shift, swapped from an early.

And the first item of business will be to get Splodge to the vet. in Hampstead.

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Tuesday, 2nd November

Two quiet days at work. Even longform material was not available in abundance, and as for shortform...

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Wednesday, 3rd November

Another visit to Mum's bank this morning, to recover her stored documents. Which were wills dated 1982, now superseded by the 2005 versions. So they went into the shredder.

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Thursday, 4th November

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Friday, 5th November

405th Anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot

On this day we celebrate the foiling of the Catholic plot to blow up Parliament, by a group of, arguably, terrorists, led by Guy (or Guido) Fawkes. We celebrate by setting off fireworks, and by burning Fawkes in effigy - although the 'Elf 'n Safety lobby is trying to limit, if not abolish, the practice. This year, of course, there may be a firefighters' strike, as well.

I don't think we're observing the anniversary, although I could be wrong... And even if we are, I'm working.

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Saturday, 6th November

Not overly busy. Certainly not 3 days worth of short-form material . We got that done before lunch today, despite having to redo some material because Phil the attachee, who is on 10s this week, still isn't paying enough attention.

I spent the rest of the time doing own productions, either electronic submissions or tape ingests, and live ingest work, generally for quick turn-around. And Phil didn't cover his ass about a live ingest yesterday afternoon. The official previewers are lackadaisical about late delivered work - they seem to do a runner if there's nothing in their queue - even though there are items that they can see will need to be checked for early the following day. And they only work Monday to Friday - which is, not to put too fine a point on it, a nonsense in a 24 hour live environment.

Be that all as it may, last night I had to preview an item for this morning. Official previewer should have done it, but... So muggins got the job. Done satis, in plenty of time for air, but still... We in Ingest seem to make a second career of recovering from upstream errors. And what thanks do we get? Not a lot... basically, "You missed this (=1 minute of problem on air) so you lose a month's Service Level bonus." No mention of the dozen gross egg-on-face moments we've averted. Like I had to reject nearly all of the "Coming Up" menus for the next week on one channel because of a repeated spelling error. Admittedly the caption was in English, and the promo troops are non-native-English speakers, but still...

Ah well, 'twas ever thus...

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Sunday, 7th November

Oops! I should have checked... Remembrance Sunday is next week. So I've moved my comments to the correct place.

The Winter Kempton Park Radio Rally is today, and I'm going. It being an on day, I've taken leave. There'll probably not be much that needs to be bought, but I need the outing, anyway.

On the day: Sure enough, purchasables were rare. But I managed to resubscribe to the Group for Earth Observation for another year - in the process collecting most of the quarterly magazines I'd missed from not renewing last time.

The primary focus of the group is weather satellite reception, primarily polar-orbiting APT and MeteoSat 2nd Generation geosynchronous multi-spectral imagery, but some people are researching the professional imagery databases, and results are printed in the GEO Quarterly, to stunning effect.

Another purchase was an 8GB microSD-HC memory card for the Blackberry, so that I can try using it as a music player. It already has a 3.2MP camera, good for point-and-shoot - after all, the camera you use is the one you carry with you - so arguably my Olympus FE-340 is surplus to requirements, but I can't dispense with the Perstel DR-301 until I know I have another music source. Not that music is as important to me as it is to the others, but even so...

The Amsat UK stand was showing a USB-based Software-Defined-Radio, designed to work with the Funcube CubeSat that is being developed at present. That USB dongle emulates the SoftRock SDR kit, to the extent of using the same software for demodulation, but comes with an additional applet that can control it's frequency agility across 50 MHz to 2000+ MHz (the SoftRock is fixed frequency, crystal contolled)

A year ago, I mentioned Hamsat, a BlueTooth-controlled AZ-EL aerial rotator capable of satellite tracking. This seemed to disappear very shortly thereafter, and even the website failed to resolve, such as it was, but now it's back, under a new name, here. May be useful when I retire, because it's something I can use to get me out of the house, and away from Jane while she's minding children. Or maybe even sooner than that...

But it was bl**dy cold. I didn't do anything special radio-wise - no APRS, or even need the talk-in station. But I did take 2 rigs - the Yaesu VX-8 and the Kenwood TH-D7 - not that I used either one.

This evening comes Jane, to say, "My new computer wants me to make a backup disc." I've said, "Do it later" until now, because normally Jane doesn't like being stopped from doing her thing by a computer. But she's baking tonight, so that's OK.

BUT... 3 times the backup wizard pops up. You follow it, until it says, "The files need to be prepared." You say, "OK". And then it says, "Please restart"

Three times!!! And I did restart. 3 times!!! On the evidence, when WIN7 wants you to make a restore DVD - Do It. Right then. The FIRST time. Maybe it'll work. I don't hold out much hope, but...

I've been coughing well these last few days, and on Friday finally Jane put her foot down, "Go make a doctor's appointment. Now!"

So I did. 3 p.m. Friday, if you please. After about 10 attempts...

And it turns out that it's my usual early winter virus infection. Slightly different in that I'm not hiccupping (yet) but it's the mixture as before, basically. Antibiotics probably not required, but available on request, if needed.

And by today, it's improving. Even without pills. So that's good.

 
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