Sunday 27 November 2011

accept no cheap imitation

The concert was very good.  It turned out that the Dvorak was his cello concerto, with Natalie Clein.  I love Dvorak's cello concerto, and I've never seen Natalie Clein before, so that was an unexpected treat to happen on a Saturday night in Ipswich.  In the second half we got Tchaikovsky's first symphony, which the conductor assured us was very rarely performed, and it was delightful.

There will not be any pick axing today, or any gardening at all.  I think the joint of my left middle knuckle is inflamed, though not infected.  At any rate, it is sore, worse today than yesterday, but before taking it to the doctor I probably should try resting it.  I can't imagine the GP would bother referring it to a specialist (I believe Chelmsford is rather good at hands) when I hadn't even tried giving it a day off to see if that improved matters.

In the meantime, let us add the salutary story of the new bedside clock to the saga of the plumbing.  The radio part of the Systems Administrator's clock-radio stopped working, so the SA went to a shop and bought a replacement, incorporating a digital DAB radio.  It was quite cheap.  After it was installed on the bedside table I noticed a bright unearthly gleam shining on the side of the pillows, when I went into the bedroom after dark with both hands full of a basket of laundry which prevented me switching on the light at once.  This turned out to be the new clock.  The old one had those red LED strips that fit together to make clunky rectangular digits.  Old fashioned and inelegant, but casting very little light.  The new one had a liquid crystal display, able to spell out much more information about what the digital radio was doing, but casting so much light in the process that you could see to match up pairs of socks by it.  The SA has cut down the amount of light by sticking tape over most of the display, so that you can just see the time in the middle.  I don't know who made the wretched thing, but it doesn't appear to have occurred to them to test it in an actual darkened room.  One advantage of buying domestic electrical goods on-line is that you can read the users' reviews first, since we won't be the first people to have noticed this design defect.

It doesn't only happen to cheap clock-radios.  The SA's brother used to work for a small British manufacturing company that made electrical components for the Eurofighter (or Typhoon, or whatever they call it nowadays).  They received an order for some LEDs to go on the cockpit control panel.  In upmarket manufacturing circles the brightness of these things is accurately measured in lumens, and they queried the technical specification because the LEDs seemed rather bright, but they were told to stop questioning the customer's requirements and get on with it, so they did.  So did lots of other suppliers, as it transpired.

Everybody shipped off their components and a demonstration control panel was built and installed in a flight simulator, and a military pilot came along to test it.  Tested it in daylight conditions, all fine and dandy.  Tested it under night conditions, great.  Then the poor test pilot put on his night vision goggles, and they switched on the test rig, and his eyeballs nearly exploded as the unbearable brightness of dozens of wrongly specified LEDs burst upon him, magnified to intolerable luminosity by the night goggles.  Told you so.

Addendum  The SA has fitted the new component to the upstairs loo and turned the water to the cistern back on.  When the tank finishes filling it now makes a small, strange wailing noise, as if a seal were giving birth in the bathroom.

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