AV systems: their care & feeding

ne of my hobbies was rejigging an AV system to make it easy enough for my little family to use without always yelling upstairs to lament the lack (shades of that old A. Bertram Chandler SF short story) of a matching pair of picture and correctly associated sound. Sadly, now that Junior has grown up and basically fled the nest, and Christa has gone on ahead of me into the next stage of life (or death, as we secular types tend to call it) I'm now the only user! Still, the mild compulsion (doubtless something to do with the supposedly "Extreme S"¹ brain rattling around inside my greying skull) to document the system² pictorially...

as my scarily effective Latin master Mr. Greenhalgh probably would have said.

...still yields easily to Xara's excellent vector graphics software first met in its Acorn RISC incarnation under the admittedly more descriptive name "Artworks". Mind you, if this was a DTP page rather than a web one, I'd also be happily using Saint Pilling's Windows variant of his OvationPro program and, in all probability, simply importing my original "Draw" version of the diagram. Unless I was still using my beloved StrongARM Risc PC instead of watching the dust collect on it. <Sigh>

One evening of network TV is worth...?

As Noël Coward remarked: "Television is for appearing on, not for watching". Although you still need something to watch, there's often little point in relying on the execrable output of our broadcasters, who lack both taste and imagination. I have therefore set about acquiring a library of DVDs (sometimes more in hope than was possibly wise, as pointed out by NZ chum Brack³).

Mild web health warning:

The consolidated list is here, but be warned it's quite hefty. I can access it directly on my local network via my local Apache server. You, on the other hand, are dangling on the other end of a tangle of electric string. Be(a)ware.

Footnotes

¹  At "56", not as extreme as my late wife's score was ("59"), funnily enough, but still somewhat ahead of Junior's "30".
Simon Baron-Cohen, in his 2003 book The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain argues that there are three kinds of normal human brain: "empathising" (type E), "systemising" (type S), and "balanced" (type B, somewhere in between). Systemising is "the drive to understand a system and to build one." At its extreme, Baron-Cohen suggests, the systemising brain can be autistic (what he calls the "extreme male brain"). This possibly also explains the focussed enthusiasms of people with Asperger's syndrome. But I'm not as bad as the main protagonist in Barbara Jacobs' 2004 book Loving Mr. Spock — in my humble opinion!
²  This — discipuli picturam spectate — was the first Latin sentence I remember, from my first Latin lesson in 1962. I've long been a believer in "code re-use"! (And I would have put the footnote callout on the sentence itself, had it not decided to play havoc with the link to the picture — nasty HTML!)
³  He had (before I removed all the cover artwork scans from the server) the temerity to say "I will now have to spend more of my precious time searching for other monstrosities amongst your DVD coverlets - it would be a useful discipline if you had to have actually seen a DVD before putting up the cover, an implied endorsement I feel". The nerve of the guy! Particularly as he's right, of course. <Sigh>