The Lair

Twas the longest day yesterday. Midsummer. Where daylight for this part of the planet begins at around 0300 and dusk falls at around 2230. It’s great. The strange thing is, despite being widely regarded as a night person, I actually feel more productive in the long summer months than I do during winter. It might have something to do with the fact that I’m rarely bitching about how cold it is… oh, wait. I bitch about how much it rains during the summer, so we’re all square. But at any rate, productivity climbs during the warmer months.

And taunting the weak Europeans about their intolerance for a mild, sultry 30C daytime temperature is always fun.

I’ve had a high tech piece of kit sitting in my cube for the past month with no time (I’m a lazy bastid) to set it up. The general idea is that it functions as a PVR, a Personal Video Recorder. Clearly, it’s improbable that funding bodies would pony up cash for rebuilding a better tv recording and ad skipping wheel. Nonetheless, that’s almost exactly what did happen; and now my job is to make things slightly more appealing in terms of technical breakthroughs and so on. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the person who wrote the project proposal. Are the dots beginning to connect yet ? The promised version of this wonderful device is supposed to be a nicer, all singing all dancing PVR that will actually make toast, write my dissertation and display intelligence on par with sentient beings. (As an aside: notice that I picked widely differing jobs as examples. Writing a dissertation, for instance, apparently requires attention to detail but no intelligence) The chances of all of this happening in the given timespan, needless to state, are somewhere about as likely as finding a polar bear walking around in the Sahara desert. Translated: that means; yes, it could happen, but don’t do silly things like holding your breath waiting, will you ?

The real benefit from this device (for me, obviously) is found in the fact that it has – no, it needs – a television tuner card to function. A card that is freeview capable. Are you thinking what I’m thinking ?

Lots of things happening on television these days. There is Wimbledon. And the tea lady in the department, a kind old soul who is quite enthused about tennis, actually has tickets for the men’s final. Goddammit!. They cost the earth, however, so I’m not too upset. The good old BBC is doing the whole live coverage nine yards. Then there are the Aussies and their seeming fall from grace in the cricketing arena. Dissected and analyzed and exulted over by the British press like any Eastenders breakup or BigBrother eviction would be.. and televised only on freeview enabled sets. And this isn’t even counting extra goodies like the US version of Apprentice that’s screening from tonight. There is no way in hell I can watch all of those at their scheduled times and actually get a reasonable amount of work done. None whatsoever. Even accounting for the fact that I usually have the TV droning in the background while I’m working anyway. So…

In order to watch even more television and reduce myself into a drooling, gibbering, mindless wreck, I must get off my lazy ass and setup the MythTV box. Which means, I need to do more work. Work actually related to deadlines. Think of how … revolutionary this is. This is like a hypersomniac being paid to sleep.

So actually setting up the PVR quick is covered by laziness and impatience of the Perl virtues.