Craig Sawyers

I've fortunately got none in my Glenfarclas 105 cask strength I'm just drinking. But I like Laphroaig too...

Well that is truly great news! And so very like the chaos at every anodiser I've known.

I recorded it and watched it later. The BBC was in conflict with itself on Sunday - Final night of European Athletics Championship followed by Top Gear on BBC2, and bridging across those was Sherlock on BBC1. Why they could think that viewers who like Athletics and Top Gear would not want to watch Sherlock is a mystery known only to programme schedulers.

Well done sir! Bet that was what Tony Hayward said

Thanks for straightening that out! I dunno about the 3381's. But they all seems to be used as simple current mirrors, so probably not critical.

I think Inu had some initial problems getting the 740V batteries to lock, even after screening his BL's for low beta (at the high end of the GR range). Could be misremembering - so check back in the thread.

Since I'm still waiting for mains transformers, I'll hang on until it is complete. Give my regards to your anodisers

Anodisers never fail to amaze me. I use MetroPlating in Uxbridge Metro Plating - Sulphuric - Chromic & Hard Anodising - Alochrom - Aluminium Finishing Absolutely first rate, but I always drop off and collect, and check each piece. Good they are, very good, - but it is absolute chaos in there, a real bloody mess. This seems to be the standard way of working - I've visited several over the years. I'm lucky that I'm only about an hour's drive from Metro; god knows what would happen if they shipped. The only thing that would worry me about that is the delta cost of sending the final bits across the pond. How long will the replacements for the lost bits take?

Don't start me on a carrier rant - they are all as bad as each other. The Tekscopes mailing list is a regular litany of test gear bought off eBay that arrives looking like it has been thrown out the back of a moving truck (maybe it has). Or two identically labelled identical parcels I shipped to the La Palma observatory. One arrived OK, and the other was returned - somehow separated and the sender's address had been interpreted as the "to" address by some blithering idiot. Or the piece of gear coming from Ca to the UK. Never arrived. 8 weeks later it got back to the sender - our idiot parcels service Parcel Force (or Parcel Farce as it is known) failed to deliver the correctly labelled package, failed to leave a note three times (they are required to make three attempts, and leave a card if there is no answer), and then returned to sender using the cheapest and slowest method (pony ). And that is just for starters....

It's what I call the "good 'nuff" society, or JTL (Just Too Late) rather than JIT (Just In Time). Fingers crossed that these turn up.

They didn't ship by UPS by any chance?

You are one seriously lucky fella. Seriously envious! When Covent Garden did three complete cycles three years (Imagine Placido Domingo as Siegmund...) ago tickets sold out in an hour.

You bet. Two days on and I'm still reeling. Bunch of heavy-hitting singers from places like the Welsh National Opera, and a 65 piece orchestra. Tiny stage in a converted barn and an audience of 480. 5th row from the front slap bang in the middle. I estimate that the Valkyries were generating well over 100dB at the beginning of Act 3. Seating was purloined from Covent Garden when they upgraded. Staggering performance - can hardly wait for Siegfried. Do a google for the soloists: Jason Howard: Wotan Alwyn Mellor: Br

Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel

That is a real bummer. I'll keep my fingers crossed that someone sees sense about this.

Yes - one a day. But they don't fit in a mere evening - yesterday's die Walkure started at 3:30 in the afternoon and finished at 9pm. Intervals of 20 minutes and 80 minutes (so you could get someting to eat; picknick in the marquee). Siegfried is longer

Went to see Die Walkure yesterday. Superb, fabulous performance, that had reviewed well in all the national newspapers. Idyllic location on a country estate in Longborough Home. Plans are afoot to do Siegfried next year, Gotterdamerung in 2012, and then a complete Ring cycle in 2013. Inexpensive it ain't - to secure a ticket you have to become a "friend" by paying an annual subscription. That allows you to book tickets three months in advance of anyone else. Martin and Lizzie Graham, who own the estate and are Wagner nuts are quite open about this - they have to get money by whatever means to scrape a budget together, and ticket sales themselves supply less than a third of what they need to put a production together.

That is a real bugger - sorry to hear that. When you share your life with an animal it is really bad when something goes wrong. On the upside, higher pets like cats and dogs don't philosophise about illness or worry about the future - they are much better at coping and just getting on with life than we are.

Aah - meetings. I remember meetings. When I was a lad we used to 'ave meetings that went on for days. Or years. In the gutter. Eating gravel. And you say this to lads these days and they don't believe you......

That is a real bummer. Fingers crossed some employment comes your way real soon.

The other really good, and humerous one (not about parents) is Betjeman's poem "Slough". I don't know why he singled that town out for such a literary clubbing around the ears, but he clearly disliked the place in a major way. We live around 30 miles from Slough (pronounced Sl-ow, the ow being the sound you make when punched), and it is a bit of an armpit, but Betjman wrote the poem in 1937! It is just as relevant today. Slough Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It isn't fit for humans now, There isn't grass to graze a cow. Swarm over, Death! Come, bombs and blow to smithereens Those air-conditioned, bright canteens, Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans, Tinned minds, tinned breath. Mess up the mess they call a town- A house for ninety-seven down And once a week a half a crown For twenty years. And get that man with double chin Who'll always cheat and always win, Who washes his repulsive skin In women's tears: And smash his desk of polished oak And smash his hands so used to stroke And stop his boring dirty joke And make him yell. But spare the bald young clerks who add The profits of the stinking cad; It's not their fault that they are mad, They've tasted Hell. It's not their fault they do not know The birdsong from the radio, It's not their fault they often go To Maidenhead And talk of sport and makes of cars In various bogus-Tudor bars And daren't look up and see the stars But belch instead. In labour-saving homes, with care Their wives frizz out peroxide hair And dry it in synthetic air And paint their nails. Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough To get it ready for the plough. The cabbages are coming now; The earth exhales.

That Japanese manual seems to have very odd wiring for the XLR's. Pin 3 connects to RCA centre pin, and pin 1 connects to RCA outer on the output. The switched RCA inputs effectively short pins 1 and 2 to RCA outer and pin 3 to centre. That is counter to conventional XLR wiring where 1 is shield, 2 is hot and 3 is return. Kevin pointed me at some Neutrix XLR-RCA adaptors, which indeed do the conventional thing of shorting pins 1 and 3 to RCA outer and feeding 2 to RCA centre. Unless I am missing something?

We have an arcane system in the UK. In general ISP's use the BT network - so you need a BT line, which you pay line rental on. The speed of that line is location dependent. Although BT heavily advertise that their broadband connection speed is huge, we are more than the critical 4km from the exchange - so our max speed is 1.5Meg - regardless of how fast your ISP package is. And that is near Oxford - we are not out in the sticks. The alterative is to go to Virgin, who have an installed base of fibre. They supply up to 50Meg with unlimited downloads. But in the small print they say that bandwidth will be limited between 4pm and 9pm and 10am to 3pm to ensure "a consistent user experience". In other words, during normal working hours, only 9am to 10am and 3pm to 4pm are full bandwidth. Plus it ties you to Virgin as an ISP. But it is

If they have that proximity problem, you need to insulate the screw heads too or use insulating screws. Because the screw head shorts to the groundplane, and the thread is still right next to the -400V trace. I built my boards around 4 years ago, before I got heavily involved in head-case - so I used the pdf files on Kevin's site and made my own. Bit of a PITA because the holes aren't plated through of course, so lots of fiddly assembly work. Protected the whole shebang after building with baked-on conformal coating in lieu of solder resist protection. So it should survive being sprayed with salt water......