What are you doing right now?

[SteveC]

Writing the questions for our next village quiz.

[sam]

The usual. Trying to think of a better way of saying something.

[T42]

Just had a cup of coffee with the sweep.  The same chap has been doing our chimneys twice a year since 1989 - 34 years out of the 43 he's been a sweep.  Horrible job: our house has two chimneys with ports for the brushes up in the loft and traps for evacuating the débris down in the cellar, with 3 flights of stairs between.  He should be retiring this year, but he's not sure if he will.  I'll be sorry to see him go if he does, for he's a pleasant chap: the dogs always loved him and even the parrot deigned to say hello. 

[rogerzilla]

In the Spoons at Gatwick.  It's 5.15am and most people are on lager.

[Clare]

In the Spoons at Gatwick.  It's 5.15am and most people are on lager.

Whereas you've gone straight for the vodka + Redbull?

[rogerzilla]

In the Spoons at Gatwick.  It's 5.15am and most people are on lager.

Whereas you've gone straight for the vodka + Redbull?

Just orange juice and coffee.  The middle-aged coven on the next table was having wine and chips.

[Tim Hall]

In the Spoons at Gatwick.  It's 5.15am and most people are on lager.

Whereas you've gone straight for the vodka + Redbull?

Just orange juice and coffee.  The middle-aged coven on the next table was having wine and chips.

One of the blokes at work used to manaager one of the airside Spoons at Gatwick, before The Covids. Unbelievable turnover figures. He went through some hoops to  get Local Beer, made by Local People sold there.

[Kim]

Optiquack homework, which is to say screenshotting an assortment of windows with different fonts and colours and making a collage at the right DPI for my ageing fondleslab to do a passable impression of my computer screen during the appointment.  I will also be bringing a folding ruler, as supplied by road-runner OTP.

+0.75 for intermediate vision my arse.  I've no idea what it needs to be, but it's definitely negative...

[T42]

Thinking of going for a ride since I haven't been out for a week.  OTOH the road's still wet and I don't want to get the bike dirty.

[Mr Larrington]

Trying to decide which saw blade to use. Whichever one I choose will, natch, be the wrong one.

[Wowbagger]

Drinking a coffee and spodding on here prior to going to see My Good Friend Penelope. I'm hoping to get out before the rain starts again. I feel disinclined to set off on a bike when it's raining.

[T42]

Drinking a coffee and spodding on here prior to going to see My Good Friend Penelope. I'm hoping to get out before the rain starts again. I feel disinclined to set off on a bike when it's raining.

Yeah, same here.  I've ridden through 24 hours of heavy rain in the past but setting off when it's raining is something I've only done on an Audax.

Everything's dry here now but if I go for a ride I'll probably get angina because I've drunk too much coffee.

One of my favourite cycling pictures:

[Pingu]

One of my favourite cycling pictures:

We've all been there

[Kim]

We've all been there

I think it was the week before last where I dived for the pavement and the relative shelter of a tree, from which to watch it hammer it down.  As I cleared the rain off my glasses, I became aware of the BMX bandit doing exactly the same thing under the next tree up the road.  We exchanged remarks about the weather using a kind of universal mime / semaphore.

[Pingu]

Mrs P and I (and a couple of others on the holiday) spent a couple of hours waiting for a deluge to stop under the roof of a former petrol station on Corsica a number of years ago. Upon resumption of cycling we met some of the faster holibobs people coming in the opposite direction saying the road was shut and we were getting alternative accommodation that night. Luckily that included the support vehicle and all our clean clothes and stuff. The really fast and hardy people had managed to get to the intended hotel before the road was shut and spent the evening meal in their manky cycling clothes 

[Paul]

Typing about the fact that I've just finished* tightening the screws on the handles of some pans. One of them has been loose for a few weeks (or, given the way my memory works now; months/years).

But one loose handle isn't really enough to justify the trip to the garage for the screwdriver that will reach the screw. So when I recently (fcvo recently - see memory, above) noticed that another one was a little loose, and then noticed today that a third was ready to be nipped up, I went for it.

Very satisfying. They have all passed the jiggle test.

Aren't (some) pans brilliant? They don't ask for much and - aside from washing them and tightening the screws every 5 years or so - they just carry on holding food while it gets hot.

(*I've often thought that this thread should be called the What have you just been doing? thread on account of me being a bore like that)

[Feanor]

Making a start to ripping many CDs to FLAC into a media library (a shared network drive) so I can stream them via the various Sonos things without using any cloudy spotty crap.
After a bit of initial faff setting up EAC to use the FLAC encoder, it all Just Works.
The Sonos devices see the media library, display the cover art, and play the .flac files without complaint.


EAC ripping to FLAC by Ron Lowe, on Flickr

[Pingu]

I remember doing that. Load CD. Get tracks and cover image. Various chugging noises from CD player. Eject CD. Rinse and repeat for days on end.

[ian]

Nostalgic, I did this when I got my first ever iPod. It was never any measure of fun, but I felt like I was striding between the eras again. Behold, the age of digital.

I gave up buying CDs some years back, now Apple hold my soul in escrow in exchange for lossless, spatial audio* in Dolby Z or somesuch which streams nicely to my Sonos (actually from my phone, via Apple Play, I don't get on with the voice thing after The Christian Rock Experience). Not as awesome as pressing the 'metal' button on a cassette deck, but it'll do.

*while it has some capacity as a gimmick, I confess it's pretty awesome if you dance around the living room in AirPods. Clothes are optional but check for errant dinner guests before embarking on this course of sonic self-entertainment.

[phantasmagoriana]

One day, I will rip my CDs so that I can stream them. I think I first tried in about 2005, then gave up, technology moved on, and I don't have the files any more. I still have the CDs, which haven't been played in many years.

Which reminds me, I don't think we even have a CD player any more.

[ian]

We still have a cassette player in the Ford Ka (even at age eighteen, there was no excuse for Ford not fitting a CD-player) that delights any millennials or gen-zeds we get in the back seat. Of course, once we have explained we then have to kill them. Quite honestly, have these people not seen a horror movie either?

[Feanor]

Clothes are optional but check for errant dinner guests before embarking on this course of sonic self-entertainment.

Back in the first weeks of lockdown, the National Theatre offered up some of it's content for free.
I watched Ian McKellen on Stage - a wonderful production.
He seamlessly shifted from open discussion with the audience into character, be it Gandalf, or one the cats from TS Elliot.

The following morning, at early o'clock just out of bed I found myself parading around the main room here, which is mostly glass, and could unkindly be called a used car showroom. I was wearing nothing but a pair of red underpants, holding a copy of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats aloft, eventually standing theatrically on the sofa reading 'Gus the theatre cat' in the manner of the man himself, when I noticed the Gardner and his sidekick looking in...

[T42]

We still have a cassette player in the Ford Ka (even at age eighteen, there was no excuse for Ford not fitting a CD-player) that delights any millennials or gen-zeds we get in the back seat. Of course, once we have explained we then have to kill them. Quite honestly, have these people not seen a horror movie either?

We probably still have a cassette of Queen's 'A Night at the Opera' in the glove box even though our car's "Infotainement Centre" only has a CD deck and a USB input. Glove-box denizens tend to get moved en bloc from one car to the next. Sometimes I'm surprised there isn't a crank in the boot.

Anyway, what I am doing right now is stinking.  Not long back from a hot & humid 5k plod and ICBA changing.

[Wowbagger]

Drinking a glass of red, having just send photos of our skinny dip to my pal Sherry. We do like to record these things for posteriority.

[Mr Larrington]

Gasping like a stranded fish, sweating buckets and cooling off on the sofa with the fan set to 11.  But two of the three door hinges are attached at both ends