Sleepypete's Pillow

Blip count was about 3 per Babylon 5 episode … I guess that means my neglected Xbox will be seeing some service for further troubleshooting.

(If there's blips with the Xbox, then it's the amp. No blips means I upgrade to a 3d capable blu-ray player)

Something that’s caused me a lot of frustration over the last few months is the new sound system.

Don’t get me wrong – the sound quality out of it is awesome. It’s been a massive upgrade over what I had before. There’s just one small issue – when watching dvd’s, there will at random intervals be a break in sound for about a second or so.

So – what do I know ?

Music plays back 100% fine. This comes in through an optical fibre link via network streaming. I’ll have this going for many hours at a run, which proves there’s nothing wrong with the main circuits of the amplifier. I.e. it’s not an overheating thing.
Blu ray discs (I believe) play back just fine. And they look and sound awesome. Lossless DTS Master Audio is as good as it’s going to get. The sound field makes 2d feel like 3d.

I say believe there because I can’t remember (not) hearing the audio silence blip. Much more research required there I think.

Where’s it going wrong ? I firmly believe now it’s a dvd only problem. It’s been happening over multiple discs, like several Babylon 5 dvds, Titan AE, Attack of the Clones. The list goes on and I don’t believe there’s a link as the quality of the material is both at the high end and the low end.

High end – Attack of the Clones is as high quality a dvd (in terms of production) as it’s going to get.
Low end – Babylon 5 was a decent series but the quality of transfer to dvd is very, very patchy (more below)

What have I tried lately ?

New firmware in the blu-ray drive. Firmware is the instructions that’s buried in most electronics. It’s the electronics that Make Things Go. I’d been holding off on this because I didn’t want the new firmware to cause more trouble but I’ve finally bitten the bullet.
Reset to factory settings. It’s always worth a shot.
A Plan B. This means using a different cable to take the sound. Tried it – the quality difference is noticeable though. Sound through HDMI is crystal clear, whereas sound through the old style link seems muffled somehow.
Disabling all the Clever Stuff. This is the fanciness that turns on the TV or amp with the blu-ray player. However, one possible cause is “HDMI handshake” problems, where the blu-ray player and amp have an argument over what they can both do. Result – a second or so of confusion.

Next in mind is to use my Xbox360 as a dvd player. That will send the picture & sound via HDMI, the path that doesn’t work so well with the blu-ray player. This will prove once and for all whether the problem is in the amp or the player. I reckon it’s the player having issues with dvd, seeing as I believe blu-ray discs are ok.

I’m currently testing things out by watching a few Babylon 5 episodes, which brings me back to that More Later.

The script and story quality is very good with Babylon 5. The CGI was years ahead of its time and still comes over pretty well on a High Def screen. It’s very crude by the standards of today’s telly and definitely today’s games but still looks good. What’s surprising is the quality of the live action camera scenes. Most of the scenes are sharp but there’s a few where the high def shows up a huge amount of noise in the transfer. Things like the noise turning up as background snow in the image and sound that’s “not quite right”. It’s definitely Babylon 5 because I don’t see it in anything else.

Ahhh – more research required. Which means more watching of Babylon 5 episodes, hoping that the new firmware has cleaned up the sound. If not, the next steps are :

Watching a few episodes with the lesser quality audio
Watching episodes via the Xbox
Researching which 3d capable blu-ray player to buy

I hear growling noises … Time for munchies !

PS I could comment on “blip count so far” but my superstitious side is telling me that as soon as I do, the blips will start up again.

I have a suspicion … The time I find a lady cricket nut who's idea of fun is to watch some nutter do the headless chicken thing running around the cricket field, is the day I'll be forced to quit the game for good.

Mind you, if that coincidence does happen, it might not be long !

Girls definitely make life far more interesting (and fun) than it could be or would be (heaven forbid!) without them…..

Met a nice one last night, funny and a Star Trek/BSG geek!

There’s a quote by the late Robert Heinlein (and by lots of others too) :

“What a wonderful world it is that has girls in it”

I’m struggling at the moment, through the after effects of things like new shoes, the cold and the various long term niggles that I carry around with me. I try to keep my shoes going as long as I can, because I know that when I do change, there will be a few weeks where they will dig holes in the back of my feet (achilles area). Gets a bit sore and distracting. I have other niggles too, like the continuing saga of the audio blips on the amp … (they’re still happening but I have progress and an idea).

So – struggling on the whole but surviving with a little help. Where’s the help coming from ? Well, I wanted to give a special mention to the online people, which brings me back to that quote …

When I’m in Warcraft, there’s often calls of “Ice – come on Mumble”. “Ice” is my nickname to the Warcraft people, short for Iceangel. Mumble is the voice chat software we use when people in the guild are doing things together. Usually that’s instanced dungeons where 5 of us will team up to spank the bad guys. Or there’s just generally kicking back and having a natter.

I’ve been very lucky in that when the guild on The Maelstrom server broke up, I was welcomed into the Violence Reborn guild as they moved to a different server. The core of VR is Swedish although, as is the norm for online game guilds, it has turned truly multinational. We’re all Horde out for a good time. We also stick by each other, which can be tough when you start getting involved with the wider WoW community (think toys escaping from prams). We have fun with our mistakes, whereas people picked up at random just leg it or get an “it’s not my fault, must be your’s” attitude which isn’t helpful.

The blokes in the guild tend to be fairly quiet (although if you start talking WoW Theory, they turn Juggernaut), it’s the ladies who make the guild what it is. It starts with the Swedish accents. But it’s mainly the free spirited, uninhibited Wanna Have Fun attitude they bring in. They don’t take things too seriously, never forgetting that it’s a game and games are supposed to be Fun.

They’ll quite happily drag the boys along with them too. There’s two cases recently where I had the privilege to be included :

Instance run with Shidra and Alex. Alex was being a bit quiet, this was the Shidra show. There was me, trying to learn the place we were in and the rest of the group were nattering away as if they were wanting to get the words out before rationing came in. And it was insane too. I started grinning early and by the end of the activities, I couldn’t help myself, the Cheshire Cat Grin and laughter was threatening to turn my noggin into a Flip Top Head.

The other one is just the other night, which starts with an “Alex is singing on Mumble” in guild chat. Gotta check that out, so I join the voice comms server. Within minutes, I’m grinning from ear to ear again and laughing along with the rest of ’em. And that “drag the boys along with them” thing ? Yep. Couldn’t help myself, I joined in late with the singing too. And my mic headset is so dusty from disuse, I have to get Rentokil out to fight off the Dust Bunnies before I let it near my head.

A little laughter is good for the soul, so you can probably imagine the boost that comes from being involved in this select group of people.

The Mercs had one or two ladies around too, although they tended not to stay too long. I suspect they didn’t want to stay around because of some of the drama the guild had (some of which was centred around me !). Caira was pretty special though, would love to know how Caira & Auraka are doing now.

It’s not just in game though. It’s the people on Facebook and the people at work. I still seem to be a favourite of the Canteen Girls (although that has implications on my waistline). I’ve been lucky with work as well as with the VR people, it’s a pressure project but we all pull together to get through the work and solve the problems. There’s one of us who’s trying to give up smoking at the moment … I’m passing on tubes of mints (I keep ’em to moderate excess stomach acid) to help her beat the cravings. She’s probably through half my supply by now but if it helps liberate her from smoking, it’ll be so Worth It.

Wait … Why am I still writing this blog post when I could be in game seeing what the VR Girls are up to ? Cya !

PS English is the second language for a lot of the VR people, they tend to talk in Swedish in places like Facebook. Which is where Google Translate comes in … It doesn’t translate everything but it does a great job. Oh – and even though it’s a second language, their English is far better than some of what I read and hear from people born and raised in this country …

Ahh – what's the difference though between reading a book again and watching a movie or a TV series again ?

Movie = 2 hours

Book = 5 days

Also, I tend to have *many* more books stacked up to be read than movies to be watched…

Ahh – what's the difference though between reading a book again and watching a movie or a TV series again ?

Saying that though, the little touches that do setting up for later are usually harder to see in a movie unless they hit you over the head with it.

I hardly ever re-read anything. I like the thrill of the new too much. If you know what's coming next where's the suspense?

I think I have a new trend starting – abandoning books …

But that’s happened twice now over the last couple of months. I think my fixation with David Weber has been broken by a certain Jack Campbell. On the one hand, you have David Weber who is occasionally brilliant with well structured and decently paced books. However, there’s also the David Weber who buries the good stuff in his books in a mire of non-interesting, non-important filler. I gave up on Shadow of Saganami after 300 pages out of a 1000 and I don’t think I’ll go back to it.

That’s one danger of spoilers actually. The giving up with it was born partly out of looking at the sneak preview chapter at the back which is taken from the next book and then me looking up some of that in wiki. Because of that, I have a synopsis of this book and the next, without having to wade through the filler. After 300 pages, nothing had really happened.

On the other hand, there’s the Jack Campbell set of 6 books which I raced my way through. They’re about 350 pages in each, all structured around Big Fleet action happening in a star system as the Lost Fleet is making its way through. And by Big Fleet, there’s several hundred warships in this Lost Fleet. These books keep it simple and the filler is kept to an absolute minimum. Combined with the star system based action, that means the pacing is excellent. Hopefully there will be more to come from this one.

Hey ! How about this Red Mars book ?

It’s part of a trilogy of about 5 parts (where’ve we heard that before ?) by Kim Stanley Robinson. You can tell there’s a huge amount of research gone into this trilogy in the engineering and planetology detail that forms its core. There’s a lot of good stuff here and it hangs together well with the “could this work ?” feeling always being positive. However … a good story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Occasionally a bit of the middle gets shunted to the start to kick start the beginning.

What KSR forgets is that End thing. Red Mars ends with an excellent cliff hanger and from what I remember of Green Mars, that ends well too. The last book is a major disappointment though, as it’s a collection of travelogues inside the KSR Mars solar system. There’s no real End here, although you could say that’s the point in a Life Goes On kind of way. However, it feels like the trilogy could have finished after 2.5 books as the last is mostly filler with the Actual Story Detector reading negative all the way.

Anyway, I’ve given up on this one because :
a) I’ve read it before (and enjoyed it)
b) There’s better Mars books (will read the Ben Bova one again sometime)
c) I could see the travelogue signs creeping into Red Mars

There’s the conflict between wanting to know what happens in it and not particularly wanting the tedium of finding out. That’s one reason I read a few books in between attempting a Turtledove WorldWar book. I’ll put this one in the A to Z but it may well get replaced by something like Return To Mars or something else beginning with R.

Next book is Titanicus by Dan Abnett, where the God Machines walk on Orestes. It’ll be the second book I’ve read by Dan Abnett but whereas the first was centred around the humble Imperial Guard, this one tackles the opposite end of the scale where you have huge war engines 100m tall striding across the battlefield.

I started it last night and am already well over a hundred pages in.

Right – I have a job to do and it’ll involve raiding a village under attack to recover supplies.
Will Raid For :
Food
Mini Eggs
Pizza
Or to listen to the Hot Swedish Girls.

Heh heh heh – last car I got, I didn't actually test drive. Which probably told Carcraft that I really needed to get rid of the last one … The Honda looks interesting. The Mazda RX-8 would have been good too, if it hadn't failed the Cricket Bag Test.

It's a shame the high street lost Zavvi/Virgin. HMV were always more expensive and now they've lost the competition, they've got no incentive to give proper prices. Most of my recent stuff has come from Amazon because High St shops don't seem interested in stocking what I want to buy.