Well, that wasn’t the most pleasant way to while away the time whilst ironing. Yes, I am a new(ish) man: the ironing’s my job. It’s the least I can do. (As always, there’s a comedy quote – Denzil in the sadly missed Absolutely: “No, Gwynned, the least I can do are nothing at all!”. Great site at Absolutely Andy – including a petition to get them to release a DVD – I’d buy that!)

Aye:

[youtube]4W-tX_Bjbo0[/youtube]

So anyway, the habit that has developed is that I iron while I listen to Forest games on the internet, but of course Sunday’s FA Cup game was on the telly. With our league position being everything, we really could do without the distraction of any kind of cup run. Really. I’d rather we threw the game and got on with the business of getting promoted. Failing that, a nice easy win would be OK, but a replay is just another chance for your best players to get injured and less preparation time for the real deal: the next league game. Still, sadly, Charlton will probably present too much of a challenge, even if we win on the 12th.

I got so frustrated, I broke the flippin’ iron.

Honestly, E, you’ll have to try harder than that.

Seriously.

Here I am trying to read about Perforce at midnight on a Friday night, while E watches telly. “Ooh look”, she says, “there’s Shane Ritchie in the background”.

Answers on a postcard as to who’s the sadder..

When I was last in the U.S. I picked up a Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro. It’s a little USB flash drive-sized audio output interface. It has a single 3.5mm jack socket which works either as an analogue electrical output, for headphones, or as an optical digital output. Snazzy. It was pretty cheap – can’t remember exactly how much, but little enough for me to think that if it delivers better quality than I already have on my laptop, which let’s face it isn’t hard, then it was worth it.

Now, if you’re going to get one of these, there are some things I found out the hard way:

1. When you plug it in, turn the volume way down. When they say it includes a more powerful than usual headphone amplifier, they ain’t kidding. I know laptop musicians and DJs use this gizmo as their headphone out for monitoring, and it’s really up to that job. Believe me, with reasonably sensitive headphones like my Etymotic ER4-Ps, you absolutely do not want a Windows alert sound in your earholes at full blast. It hurts.

2. Don’t install their driver. I know that sounds like an odd thing to suggest, but here’s the thing. Yes, if you install the supplied “aa_micro.exe”, you can play with the daft simulated surround sound gubbins, and faff about with the EQ, but if like me you’re only interested in good quality music playback, none of that matters a fig. More to the point, there’s a real problem with the noise floor when you have the driver installed. The quiet bits in any song, whether it’s mp3, flac or even uncompressed, will sound like cack. Now, Turtle Beach try to explain the lack of sound quality away, but I’m not buying it. Even when you have your sound levels adjusted properly (see point 3 below) it still has the really annoying small-amplitude artifacts. Luckily, Windows XP has a perfectly usable driver on hand – the device when you first plug it in is recognised as a “C-Media USB Audio” device. This driver works perfectly for straight stereo playback.

3. Get your volume levels in the right range. If you’ve been used to using the bog-standard audio output on your computer with most of the levels on maximum, you really need to change them. Like I said before, the Audio Advantage is very likely much, much louder so you’ll have to turn things down – but believe it or not, there’s a knack to that. If you just turn down the master volume, you’ll get the artifacts mentioned above in the quiet parts of the music. They’re much less obvious when the driver’s not installed, but they’re still there. Instead, I do something like this – open the Sounds and Audio Devices Control Panel, and hit Advanced in the Device volume panel:

Now you’ll see the mixer controls, where you can set individual levels for the different inputs to the sound card. Your mp3 player like iTunes, WinAmp or whatever plays back through the “Wave” channel. Normally these controls are just for balancing the different inputs when they’re too different to each other, but what you’ll use them for here is to reduce the overall level coming into the final mix, so that the master volume slider can be higher. Without setting the Wave input to about 60%, the Master slider literally had to be at only a few percent before the music was at a comfortable volume for me – and that leads to the nasty artifacts. So your settings should look something like this:

Finally, the volume level in your music player app should probably be around the 50% mark:

And now I’ve done all this, what do I think of the quality? It’s nothing short of superb. It took a lot of mucking about with settings to get it right, which is why I’m posting this, but once you’ve done all that experimenting, you are rewarded with much more detail and openness than I’ve ever heard out of a built-in sound card or even fairly expensive PCI add-on cards. The little USB gizmo and my Etymotics bring out all sorts of things I’ve not noticed before. Some of that’s great – details in the nuances of voices and instruments, layers in the mix and so on, and some of it’s bad: for the first time I can honestly say that I can hear a marked difference between 128kbps CBR mp3 (stuff I ripped years ago), r3mix VBR mp3 (what I switched to – joint stereo, averages about 180kbps and is much better) and FLAC (what I’m steadily re-ripping everything to right now – keeping Seagate in business via the consequent explosion in disk space I need)

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Their news coverage is great – the BBC can still be trusted to provide top quality reporting by talented reporters. When compared to other networks, it’s pretty unbiased, too.

What the hell is it, though, with their studio production? Did some editor pipe up at a meeting and say “What we need here is Look East, only worse. Cheesy links, amateurish shuffling between stories and at least one sound, lighting or camera snafu every 15 minutes.”

Sadly, I am just about old enough to be Lewis Hamilton’s dad. The chatter has already started about whether he’s old enough to be in F1 next year. As the adage goes, “if you’re good enough, you’re old enough”. Talk about in at the deep end, though – straight into McLaren alongside the reigning world champion. I wonder if he will get to play with all the toys.

I must say it’s really convenient that the F1 season starts again just after the superbowl. Gotta have some sport to obsess over on a Sunday!

Well, last year I predicted that Lauren would meet Vicky Pollard, and she didn’t. Oh well. In fact, neither Catherine Tate nor Lucas and Walliams made an appearance on Children in Need, as far as I can tell. It’s a good job I don’t make predictions for a living. They got my tenner, and more, so who’s counting?

With champagne and fish and chips at work this lunchtime to celebrate us moving into our new office, I’m feeling somewhat discumbobulated this evening. Eleven hours of Thanksgiving NFL games should sort that out :->

If you’re in the U.S., enjoy your turkey!

I went to pick up E’s engagement ring from Powell & Bull in town. Got some champagne and roses, went home, put it on her finger, and saw on her face… there was something wrong.

Cobblers. It’s the wrong design. The one we saw was an emerald, with a lovely round, faceted stone. What E likes, though, is aquamarine. So we ordered it, the makers (in London, apparently) said it would be ready in 2 weeks. I got the call this morning to say it was available to pick up, and off I trotted with a spring in my step. What they got sent, though, was an emerald cut stone. It’s nice, I suppose, but it looks a little bit too showy – maybe a bit too much like dress jewelry. Oh well. E’s going into town tomorrow, so back it goes and I guess we’ll have to wait another two weeks or so.

Bum.

Well, finally the migration to WordPress is done. It’s been a long while between importing the posts from my own home-grown CMS and getting the rest of the work done to move things over. There’s still a few things on the WordPress version that aren’t as good in some ways, but the whole point about moving to something like WordPress is safety in numbers: somebody, somewhere has written a plugin or a howto page to address nearly every need.

The theme isn’t quite right yet, but it’s close enough for rock and roll.

The day-job is designing and writing software for the graphic arts industry. When I’m not doing that, apart from spending quality time with my wife of course, I might be taking photos, running our weekly five-a-side footy game, walking our collie cross rescue dogs Johnny Badger and Little Dot, cooking or eating. I’ve also been known to design the odd website – get me talking about that and you’ll hear a lot about standards compliance and accessibility.

You can read my shared items on Google Reader – mostly yummy recipes.