Danny Deckchair might sound like a dreadful confluence of Lawn Chair Larry and Eddie Murphy.

But really, it's a very good film. Highly recommended.

Dangerous. But it's a great picture nonetheless.

A minor milestone: my "feeds" workspace, which has a Groove Forms tool fed from my bloglines subscriptions using a little Groove Web Services application, reached 20000 records today.

Twenty thousand newsfeed items, in exactly 9 months (about 100 per day).

The design center for the forms tool is around 10000 records. Performance is still just fine (this is my main newsreader application).

:-)

Since buying a Squeezebox, I've been slowly hatching a plan to remove the stereo rack from the sittingroom. Everything on the rack is a "legacy system" now -- turntable, cassette deck, CD player, integrated amplifier -- and will soon seem as quaint as eight-track or reel-to-reel.

All I need is a power-amp, with reasonable heft and minimal (15db?) gain.

Daniel recently pointed me at diyaudio.com, which is a treasure trove of project ideas, and frequented by a fascinating mixture of clueless Darwin-award material and radical guru innovators. The chip-amp approach tickled my fancy -- there are a few very interesting designs there too, but I want to stick with something ultra-simple.

The electronics should be straightforward, but I also want a nice-looking enclosure. Something to match my minimal skillset, but which will look good underneath the Squeezebox. So, armed with a few sheets of paper and a pencil, a sketch emerged. A copper box with wooden legs.

How to source the materials? Newburyport's Port Sheet Metal does copper, but only up to 48oz sheet, which isn't substantial enough for what I want. Luckily I found Admiral Metals, only a short drive away. They have a warehouse and walk-in shop, with offcuts, sheets, flat bars, rods, and various other bits and pieces. Copper, brass, aluminium, steel, and more. The offcuts selection was wide enough for me to pick up a couple of 9x11 x 0.1875" plates and some 2.5" x 0.25" flat bar -- sold by the pound (and this stuff weighs about 20lb, altogether!). Vastly cheaper than onlinemetals. If you're looking for metal (or just up for a tactile experience) I'd unreservedly recommend giving Admiral a visit.

Now I just need the wood. And a few months to put it all together.... :-)

At the High School last night. Pop quiz:

Say you put on a concert, and it's quite popular -- people start arriving at least two hours beforehand, and form a queue. Do you
[a] Open the doors some time before the scheduled starttime of the concert, so people can take their seats and the line move?,
[b] Split the head of the line across two doors if necessary, to allow lots of people to enter quickly?, or
[c] Wait, then split the line three-quarters down just before opening the doors, so latecomers get in at the same time as the two-hour-plus waiters?

Beardy man and ditzy girl decide [c], of course. (Who are these people? The promoters? Hmmm.) Note: method [c] guarantees that many of your longest-standing (literally) fans are extremely annoyed even before they get through the door.

Then, of course, nothing resembling a decent seat left. When punter complains about this, given the multiple choices available to your Neanderthal brain, would you choose to insult said punter and call him an asshole? Beardy-man does. We leave.

Heptunes, we won't cross paths again. Not if I see you coming.

Mr. Thompson, I don't know what your latest record is like, and I likely never will. It's good that you play gigs in Newburyport - the 2003 show at Nock was great - and we're all big fans, actually. But we'll not be seeing you play live again, not here.