Craig Sawyers

So very Australian

Yes - it has gone from seas of mud to seas of frozen mud. It is hovering around freezing just now, but for the next couple of days looks like sub-zero, snow and a high wind - with windchill -20C, which is getting dangerous. Coming in from Siberia, allegedly. We're going to the Peak District on a long weekend walking on Friday, and hopefully by then it might have warmed up a bit. Or not. http://www.mwis.org.uk/english-welsh-forecast.asp?fa=PD&d=2018-02-28 Paricularly: "Frequent snow; risk lightning. Whiteout." and "-7C: exceptionally cold. Will feel as cold as minus 22C directly in the wind" and "Unusually low mountain temperatures, and increasingly upland easterly gales Wednesday to Friday, will result in severe, perhaps extreme wind chill."

This has been a very full few days, to put it mildly! Looking forward to a rest, frankly Today to see Julius Caesar at a new Theatre not far from Tower Bridge in London https://bridgetheatre.co.uk/whats-on/julius-caesar/ With a great cast including Ben Wishaw (Q in the latest Bond movies) as Brutus and David Morrissey as Mark Anthony. Absolutely stunning day out with first rate actors.

That is so freaky listening to Alec Guinness describing his sixth sense about Dean's demise. That must have been the original 911, where the front wheels left the ground at around 120mph. It was known as the widowmaker. Took several generations of 911 designs to tame the darned thing so it was no longer lethal.

Opera up Close production of The Magic Flute http://www.operaupclose.com/calendar . Massively superb and hilarious update of the Mozart classic.

Have a great day Dan!

Well, that was fascinating. There were people there who had indeterminate but massive wealth. Founders of hedge funds, international road and infrastructure construction, bankers and so forth. The Countess Wessex was both charming (she was in PR before she married Edward) and disarming. I had the whole "Your Royal Highness" thing worked out in my head, but she totally threw me by coming into an entrance behind me, and I was the first person she saw in a full room - put her hand out for a handshake and said "Hello - delighted you could come". You could almost hear me brain rattling around wondering what had just happened; I think I babbled something. Carole said "Yes - that is absolutely typical of her. She is completely not up herself, unlike Prince Charles who gets really upset if you don't follow protocol" The house was built in the 1880's for Queen Victoria's youngest son, who died in the 1940's, after which the house spend long periods unoccupied, and of course progressively degraded. Took several million to restore. We had dinner in The India Room, which is lined with carved paneling in the Indian style. Actually everyone was really good company. Had a chat with Susan Hampshire, who has aged really well (no facial work), and still has the glorious honey-like voice from TV and film. Impossible to think she's now 80. It was only afterwards that it was found that five of the ultra-wealthy had chipped in £25k each, and two substantially more. Sort of as loose change. One guy, a self made man from Mauritius, has pledged to become a philanthropic fund raiser for Brendoncare. Quite an evening!

Looking at the guest list, the only one I recognise is Susan Hampshire, the three time Emmy award winning actor. Her husband has dementia, hence her interest in Brendoncare.

This is actually for tomorrow. My wife runs https://www.brendoncare.org.uk/ as CEO. Their patron is HRH The Countess Wessex, wife of Prince Edward, youngest son of the Queen. So tomorrow we're off to Bagshot Park (their home) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagshot_Park as a fundraiser for my better half's latest project https://www.brendoncare.org.uk/care/our-care-homes/otterbourne-hill . Dinner for 42, with five great and good expected to fork out UKP150k. The ones that could not make it, chipped in UKP10k. Should be interesting! I'll let y'all know what it is like.

Although it is a massive pain in the ass, particularly with large boards, I stuff one part at a time. And then use a highlighter to cross it off on the BOM and component layout. It just saves so much grief trying to find the stuffing error, or lead you've not soldered. Even so I've stuffed PNP's instead of NPN's recently (pulled them out the wrong tube). Took an embarrassing length of time to find that error. Fortunately low power, so nothing fried - it just failed totally to work.

Happy birthday - and get well soon!

Currently 10% of global power generation is consumed by server farms, cloud computing, crypto-currency, data centres and so forth. Google and Amazon alone count for a good chunk of that. To control that nonsense new installations are located either in cool climates (Like Iceland!), near the sea (to limit air conditioned cooling), and current plans are to site under the sea (security and having lots of cooling *right there*).

Weird shit in Ca - either forest fires or freeze. Keep calm and carry on Here in wet old UK every footpath is a sea of mud.

^ What a disaster.

That is really sad, Todd. How awful. RIP Carol.

Happy birthday Steve! Have a truly great day.

Iron the Terrible - wasn't he a medieval Tsar

That is one of the most disturbing things I have seen

Happy birthday!

Oh - OK. Geddit. I was thinking about how you could possibly know that I know Paul Messenger and Martin Colloms, or that I was CTO of Wharfedale in the early 90's. I clearly overthought your comment

Huh?

And another belated Happy Birthday! Hope you had a great one.

The solder tab on the body connects through to the cable connector shell. Unless the body of the connector is connected to chassis that gains you nothing. You need to connect pin 1 to chassis as directly as possible. Reducing the loop area is the aim of the game. To do individual grounds at each XLR you have to clean the paint or anodizing off around the fixing screws so the solder tabs at that point are shorted to chassis metal. I do that with a Dremel before I start installing hardware, so it is easy from there. It also ensures that the shell of the XLR (and hence the shell of the cable connector) is tightly grounded too.

Is that a Moog modular?

It is just that it can give rise to difficult to understand problems. Like a phone doing a cell search on maximum power, and suddenly zzt zzt zzt. The best papers I'f found on this are the Rane Notes http://www.rane.com/note151.html and http://www.rane.com/note110.html and http://www.rane.com/note166.html The nub of it is: connect each pin 1 to chassis ground as directly as possible in heavy gauge single strand wire - the goal being zero length. Even a very short direct connection inside the box is not ideal. Many professional amplifiers use a two terminal tagboard on the rear panel for + and - signal, and a screw terminal to the case. So pin 1 is grounded outside the case and shield current never penetrates the case. Pain in the ass for domestic gear where you want to disconnect it easily, but OK for permanently installed studio gear.