Get yourselves along to The Great Satan of the (UK) retail world (AKA Tesco) and nab a bargain. I’ve just taken procession of a DAB radio for £15 and although it is a bit tacky (not quite blue & white stripy but almost) it works much better than the £60 one (admittedly Goodman’s) I used to have. The sound quality may not be as good but it does get a signal in my kitchen which the other didn’t - only in the lounge where I already have cable TV with all those nice radio stations on anyway. If you can’t get to a Tesco store you can order online but you’ll have to pay postage - unless they have some deal going, you’ll have to check, this is a blog not an advert.

The down side is my favourite music stations are Planet Rock (for the old prog rock hippy in me) & The Jazz (for the slightly cooler dude). Both of these are due to close down In fact there is talk of DAB being old technology and being phased out in favour of DAB+ (DAB is MP2 format, DAB+ is MP3?) which is probably why I’m buying in about now Whether this unit will handle DAB+ I don’t know, for this silly price I’m assuming not.

However, I mainly listen to talk radio so I will still have Radio 7 (old Radio 4/2 stuff - lots of great comedy) and the World Service which has some very interesting stuff. And if I need music, 6 music has some pretty good tunes too.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article3393148.ece

<snip/>men responded to music on an intellectual level, whereas female listeners had a more emotional reaction to songs and were not interested in track listings and production techniques. </snip>

Men have no emotions? Or at least have no contact with them? This kind of sexist twaddle could get you into trouble! 

Obviously it’s a generalisation and should be qualified as such but more to the point she is confusing primary & secondary responses. Blokes (and, to be gender non-specific, you can, in this context, have female “blokes”) tend to have a “do” response. Given a situation they want to do something with it /about it. Given a fine piece of music all you can “do” is play it, dance to it or learn about it - listening is too passive (& dancing is somehow passive?). Given the problems of playing and dancing learning about it is the easier option! Read the sleeve notes, google the band, collect the set, collect the set of the family tree (the bassist once seasoned for XYZ, get all their material…)

All that said it requires an emotional reaction to trigger the “do” response. The more a “bloke” is emotionally touched by a song the more they will do the anorak thing about it. But unless there is that initial emotional response… no “do” response.

The empirical proof of this is Abba - hugely technical and precise in recording techniques, worthy of many hours of anorakdom but how many blokes start their alphabetical collection with Abba?

I’m having the building work done so I can start my working from home. It’s so scary for a ditherer like me to commit to where the sockets should be & I’m trying to get it right (after having to crawl under my desk to turn the mains off for years last time I set up an office at home!).

I’ve got that far but I’m desperately trying to install enough cables before the plaster board goes on - two phone lines, cat 5 in & out (a feed from my router & a spare as I guess I’ll need a hub on my desk so I can take an out to feed the kitchen), speaker cables from the lounge stereo (I could do with screened lead going back to feed the stereo from the desktop but at a pinch I could use the speaker leads?) and last (and least flexible) coax from the video for a TV. I already had speakers & coax running through to the kitchen but I’m bringing them out to wall box so I can break in if I need to.

It’s the “now’s the time” pressure. I can run cables later but if I do it now it’s so much neater… Oh well, it’s what makes me (I hope) a good software engineer. When I’m laying the foundations I like to keep all the options open. It may be good software design but in building terms it’s stressing me out - what will I need next week? What if decide the desk should be the other side of the room? Which is exactly what happened to this office, where I now have to crawl under the desk to turn the mains off…

My daughter had a phone call the other night (no surprises so far) from the mother of a friend (more surprising) who was at the hospital with said friend who was having their stomach pumped (not totally surprising but fortunately not a frequent occurrence). Apparently the friend had got so paralytic they couldn’t even remember who they had been out with & the mother was trying random friends trying to see who had dumped him at casualty.The phone call scenario may not happen often in our house but teenagers getting the stomachs pumped is a regular pay off of our binge drinking teen culture. The huge waste of my money on policing & NHS plus the effects of “antisocial behaviour” gives me the right to complain before I begin to worry what these people are doing to their own bodies.