I’ve been having one of those days where I really should have just stayed in bed. I have no desire to relive it all in gory textual detail here, but I must say that it wasn’t just one thing in particular. It was more a general swath of suckiness. I’m glad I love tempting fate otherwise I wouldn’t be writing any of this since the day has still yet to come to it’s conclusion and I have to drive somewhere in 20 minutes. Actually in a moment of defiance against the day I bought a lotto ticket which is something I very rarely do. Spent my “tax cut” on it no less which was doubly amusing to me. Time will tell how well that idea turns out.

Otherwise things have been going okay though. My toe is not completely healed yet, but it’s much better than it was. My Japanese language study has also got off to a reasonably good start. I’m not pushing myself too much at this point, just getting used to making the effort again. When I want to read a small piece of text I manually translate it. When I’m watching some anime I actually try to understand the conversation rather than just falling back on the subs the way I have for the last 2-3 few years. I’ve also been surprising myself with how much I do actually remember from my previous studies. It’s a nice feeling when I find I actually understand something with no help from dictionaries, the internet, etc.

In other good news I finally managed to track down a transformer (the electrical kind) I needed to finish my adapter to connect electrostatic headphones up to a power amplifier. For well over a year I’d been looking for the correct part. I do already have one of these adapters (a STAX SRD-7 MKII), but it has some flaws in the sound quality and hopefully my design will remedy this. There’s been a pair of custom-made audio transformers (3Kg each) sitting here for what seems like an eternity now ready to go in this device. I’m looking forward to the last parts arriving so I can actually start building it.

I have been doing a lot video encoding lately. Still mostly for learning purposes rather than practical application at this point. For a while now I’ve been getting results comparable to what many others are doing, but I’m finding there’s still plenty to learn and improvements to be made. Lately I’ve been experimenting with Variable Frame Rate encoding (VFR), obtaining the perfect aspect ratio (to the pixel even if it’s an odd number) and finding that colourspace conversion is sometimes necessary in situations I’d thought it wasn’t. With all of this I’m now spotting quite a few situations where other people are doing their encodes incorrectly or in a suboptimal way. I just hope that continuing down this path it doesn’t ruin my ability to watch video uncritically any more than it already has been.