26/05/2003 @11:48:54 ^01:57:46

If I Leave The House Today I Will Have Done So Every Day For A Whole Week!

It's true you know. As regular readers know I spent four days last week having a job. Then on Saturday I felt sufficiently motivated to go out and buy some wires (and more as it turned out) and of course on Sunday I went to the cinema with a bunch of people (BDave, Matt, Warwick, FDave, Amy)

Cables, cables, cables (and CDs)

I am a sucker for punishment in many ways; one frequent one is the distribution and/or public airing of records from the anARCHy tracklist (whose 10th birthday, I might add, is rapidly approaching... oh man...) Furthermore, I am fed up of having to copy stuff between my computers via floppy disc, so I figured I'd give the RISC OS serial cable networking page a go. So these are the cables and the plans:

• 3.5mm jack - 3.5mm jack: You take the output from the A3010 and put it into the stereo. Then you plug this cable into the stereo headphone socket and the soundcard in my linux box ("anarchy"... it's just so wrong as a hostname...) The stereo then acts as a post-amplifier for bass and treble, and I can record audio like it is heard from my speakers (instead of really quietly out of the A3010's headphone socket; I believe this was one of the causes of the complaints about sound quality I got the last time I made mp3s of my stuff)
• 3.5mm jack - 2 phono plugs: I must admit this is pure lazyness. I've already got two of these; my stereo has two audio inputs, so I have the two computers most needing of decent audio output wired up (the other one has some ancient portable speakers) But the thing is, whenever I want to record audio off the radio (twice a week, sometimes more) I have to go behind the stereo and the computer and swap both ends of one of the cables... Now I don't have to, because both inputs and both outputs are connected by different cables... Just have to be careful I don't get the whole thing into a loop and blow itself up, heh
  Actually I bought two of these because I mentioned to Amy I was going and she asked me if I could get her a cable "to connect the computer to the hi fi". So I did, because I am weak and pathetic and can't say no to girls. But at least she paid me back the money for it
• Null modem cable: Okay I might only be able to copy stuff at eleven kilobytes per second, but RISC OS networking hardware is gratuitously expensive and I don't copy stuff between the computers often enough to justify the cost. I have to also work out how to put the networking stuff back on my Risc PC; in 1996 I never imagined it being connected to anything else, so I deleted all the networking stuff on the hard disc. It's not like it's gone forever but it needs careful investigation, and I only have two weeks else I can't take the cable back to Maplin and get a refund.

On the way back, I dropped into a couple of record shops. For the first time ever I saw a copy of a CD I've been after for about a year, namely High Contrast's True Colours. I couldn't afford it, but I bought it anyway, and I'm glad I did, because it's fantastic:)

The Matrix: Reloaded

I should code one of those "(read more...)" things into my site, so I can post spoilers but you have to click on the (read more) to view them. All I'll say is this: it was good, the special effects etc were cool, but there was a lot of content there that I felt was simply put in for gratuitous appeal to people's base instincts rather than actual plot advancement. But I guess that's Hollywood for you.

Hmm, let's try screwing with the colours. This won't work in Lynx, but I don't think anyone uses that to read my site any more, not since Amy got her computer and emerged from the cupboard...

For example, there was that whole long scene in the cave... And some of the fight scenes just felt tacked on, like this is here because we want a car chase, because car chases look cool, not for any other reason... And don't even mention the bit with the cake, talk about any old excuse to animate-- well, you'll know when you see it. On the other hand, ssh 10.2.2.2 -l root>(link) made up for it... until I realised that by going "hey, fantastic!" I had just been in the biggest spot the nerds moment ever in a cinema... I looked round at the contrast between the split-melon grinning geeks and the blank stares of the normal people, and I felt incredibly embarrassed.

Anyway it was fun. Afterwards we went to Fiona's house for a while. On the way I put a traffic cone on my head. Amy said she wanted to fly like Neo so I picked her up and chucked her at a big wall. It was hilarious.

Can we maintain the record?

Can I manage to leave the house every day for a week? Well, apparently Matt is DJing at Underground in Top Banana tonight, so I might try to get myself invited to that. I know I have work again tomorrow so I'd have to go home early, but that's not a problem. Top Banana is well known to be really, really shite and so at least in theory it would be really easy to leave. We'll see.