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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Thursday 25 January 2007 (Day View)

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25.01.2007 – Thursday 25 January – Hot & Cold

Morning

• It’s hot—very, very hot. Moving is not a thing that one does. When one does have to move, one can at least slide in one’s sweat, which saves having to move the legs. Such is Brisbane in the summer. Apparently it’s raining nicely up north, while using water will soon be a capital crime here. People won’t be robbing petrol stations; they’ll be mugging schoolchildren carrying water bottles. Speaking of schoolchildren, I’m hungry and should eat something so I don’t waste money buying something I didn’t really want when I get to work.

Midday

• Marjorie popped over to pick up a letter.

Night

• I decided to pop up the road to Woolworths for some corn and beans, just before a torrential downpour—complete with lightning, like the old days before the rain stopped. By a clever combination of hiding under eaves, carefully preplanning street crossings, and running, I managed to keep from getting totally soaked. Getting rather damp wouldn’t normally be too much of a problem on a hot night like tonight, but the next few hours, in the humidity controlled and very, very cold fishbowl were, well, very, very cold. I managed to survive by a combination of incessant eating (who would have thought Mexican chilli beans, corn, milk, Milo, cream, custard and muesli bars would be a lifesaving combination?) interspersed with more traditional survival methods, such as shivering, hand rubbing, and visiting the warmer areas of the building.

2am

• I should probably be sleeping, but not really feeling like going to bed. I’ll try soon. In geeky news, I added a dynamics processor to my sound card, which is currently normalizing my music as I play it—meaning I don’t have to keep adjusting the volume each time I play a new song, which was getting annoying. I’m surprised how well it works actually. I’ve now got two physical stereo channels out—one to my headphones and computer speakers, the other to the TV and speakers in the lounge room—and separate (software) outputs for music, DVD’s, and all the other random noises things make. This lets me flexibly mix what goes where—I can play a DVD to the TV while listening to something else at my computer, and I’ve got a six channel mixer, ten band equalizer, parametric equalizer, generic bass and treble booster and am separately routing DVD’s low frequency channel… all on hardware on the soundcard, without using any CPU on the computer. Geeky, but good—and now I really should get to bed.
  Oh, one other geeky thing I’ve done tonight—now that IE 7 is out, and has CSS support for “position: fixed”, I’ve fixed the top menu of most of my nedmartin.org site. I’ll test it tomorrow in IE 6, and convert the rest over if it works.