www.lewiz.org

My new Quad 11Ls arrived at work yesterday and I was in time to collect them and take them home, thanks to a lift from James. I got them out of the box and they sure do look nice—the rosewood was definitely a good choice. But the thing that I noticed the most was just how big they were—a lot bigger than the old pair of “desktop” ‘speakers I had. In fact… they’re so big that the side face is about the same size as the viewable area of one of my 17” TFT displays!

I’ve got no idea how I’ll fit them on my desk, along with the 44/405 (and maybe FM3) and a Marantz CD player.

Some time ago I bought a cheap Marantz CD player on eBay with the intention of stripping it down and installing a PC into the case. It all started to go wrong when I realised it would be a lot harder than I thought to squeeze it all in, so I gave up. For almost two years the various internal system boards have been lying around in a box. Today I finally bothered to try and reinstall them in the Marantz case. It’s been very successful considering I’ve lost all of the original screws and had to do a fairly makeshift job. Early tests suggest that it actually works fine… but because I couldn’t find a suitable cable I had to test with my sister’s laptop and her microphone socket. Anyway, I’ll take it all back to Blackwater with me and give it a test there. The only major sticking point now is the fact that I’ve lost one of set of the black plastic buttons that go onto the front: annoyingly it wasn’t the useless buttons that never get used, it was the play, stop, pause, skip, etc. Damn.

Mmmmmmmmm. My Yamahas (big) are in the living room (a good thing), but so too are the other people I live with. I’ve not got any ‘speakers connected to my PC and this is something that has been bothering me. I notice today that Weymouth Hi-Fi are doing a fairly impressive deal on Quad 11Ls: delivered for £229.

This leaves two big problems: WHICH COLOUR? and how to handle the fact that I’ve only got one amp/pre-amp and CD-player. But that Quad CD99-P and 99 Stereo Poweramp sure is looking nice…

I’ve got this great little 1GB iRiver MP3/Ogg player. It appears as a standard USB mass storage device (i.e. you can add music from Explorer—no fancy software) and takes a single AA battery in return for almost twenty hours of glorious stereo sound.

The catch? 1GB is starting to feel a little limited. I’m not sure why. It was always enough for the last two years and I bought it at a time when much larger players were commonplace. But, times change, people come and go, and I need more flash storage.

What is there though? I need a player that has at least 2GB of storage, although four or six gigabytes would be even better. It doesn’t have to appear as a UMS (USB Mass Storage) device, but it is an advantage. Flash over a small hard disk is good too, but not essential. What it must support is a standard throw-away battery instead of crappy built-in battery. An AA is good, an AAA would be even better, so long as it lasts at least ten hours. Ogg support is a high priority, but I could learn to live with MP3s.

Does such a device exist?

How come this album sucked when it was released? It has to be the best album going for writing lexical string parsers!

As for the third year project… work goes on slowly. I can now happily parse a filter string, which I have designed to be much like SQL: FROM rssuri,rssuri2 WHERE BODY="regular expression here" AND SUBJECT="another regex" DURATION 30m DISPLAY ON COMPLETION.

I’ve spent a bit of time umming and aaring over what my project will do. I reckon now that making it into an RSS client server is best in terms of it not totally sucking at being a crappy desktop RSS reader and providing me a decent reason to make it a multi-user reader… not to mention that I reckon it is also the best way to get some more marks.

By client server I mean: my RSS hoojum sits on the server and users connect via sockets (or a web interface, if I’m feeling really frisky) and say: “yo, whassssuuuuuup! I want you to email me with all of the articles you can fetch from the BBC, CNN and the DoJ that contain “Michael Jackson” in either the subject or the body. Let me know of any updates every two hours. Thanks a lot man! Tootles! (FROM bbc.com/rss,cnn.com/rss,doj.gov/rss where body=”Michael Jackons” or subject=”Michael Jackson” display every 2h)” Then, the hoojum parses that lot, sets up some threads to poll the feeds and does some filter magic and spews out an email every two hours, if there were any documents that matched.

What makes the whole thing cool (o_o) is the fact that feed data can be shared between users, meaning that bandwidth isn’t wasted, and any queries that are placed upon the data do not need to be duplicated. This is where in theory I can make some ace marks. The only flaw is that I have absolutely toss all idea how to share the data between matching threads to allow computation to be reduced. I guess I will ask Alvaro, my tutor, about this later on today :)

Whatever you were planning to do this evening, don’t. Well, unless you were planning to sit down in front of the television and watch BBC2 as they broadcast the first part of Martin Scorsese’s Arena: No Direction Home, a Bob Dylan biography.

It’s on at 9pm and finishes at 10:55pm. I don’t want to say too much but this is probably the biggest thing to be on TV for quite some time. So far all reviews are excellent and I don’t think it requires any real prior knowledge of Dylan himself.

The things that keep me going…

Coca Cola and Pepsi, although lately I’ve taken to drinking Fanta Orange. Don’t touch the luminous green stuff or the equally bright red stuff. The other orange drink they have here is nice too.

My shoes… Merrell something. They really are waterproof and are fairly comfortable. A little too tight at times but better than any other shoes I’ve used as heavily as these before. I’ve noticed that the sole is wearing down a lot, which might mean they are pretty much useless in a month or two more.

Coldplay’s X&Y album, which I don’t even own. I downloaded the MP3s back in England and have them on my iRiver iFP899. At first I wasn’t keen at all but I listen to the album almost exclusively and still love it, which is impressive.

My Lonely Planet guidebook. Well, sort of. It is so-so but nowhere near as good as the books dedicated to a single country. I have the South-East Asia on a Shoestring edition, which just doesn’t have the space to cover what I need.

My camera :)

I’ve been tagged by Paul. It’s all quite exciting really—I’ve never been tagged before. Basically, I have to list my top six songs (not an easy task) and then nominate one person for each song to do the same (a harder task).

Anybody that knows me must know pretty well how into my music I am… but equally that I probably couldn’t narrow my favourite songs down past 50, let alone to a top six. I’ll have a go, but if anybody ever asks me again I can guarantee the entries and order will have completely changed!

• Sinnerman—Nina Simone
• Kashmir—Led Zeppelin
• Isis—Bob Dylan
• Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World—Thomas Newman
• November Rain—Guns ‘N’ Roses
• Masters of War—Bob Dylan

Well, as you can see, I’ve wimped out after finding myself absolutely unable to put these into any sort of order. So, here you have six of my top tunes. Now, the harder part—I’d like to find out what Crums, DWL, Louise (?), inomine and Xiaoxiao can come up with. Since I don’t think any have blogs, just leaving them as comments is probably easiest.