Sort of a lucky day

A couple of weeks ago I broke the strap of my watch, a cheapish but reliable Klik radio-controlled digital. It happens to be the second time that this has happened, and last time the replacement strap cost nearly as much as the watch, so this time I went shopping for a new watch on eBay.

Ended up getting what appeared to be a rather nice analogue/digital radio-controlled hybrid for a tenner - the nice feature was that the whole of the face was the LCD panel, so you didn't get teeny numbers in an oblong box. The snag, unfortunately, was that the hands stopped turning round after the first day.

So I contacted the vendor and sent it back, and they sent me another. This one took four days but died last night. The stupid part is that the watch still works perfectly as a radio-controlled watch if you set the LCD part to display the time - it's apparently the motor driving the hands that has died.

So I contacted the vendor and explained my problem, he offered me a refund, apologies, and said he'd had another from the same batch develop the same fault, so it was obviously fairly generic. He told me to keep the dead watch, or throw it away, as I prefer.

So I got my refund, and despite having paid return postage the first time I'm reasonably pleased. Because the strap from the new one fits my old watch perfectly, and I've ended up getting a new strap for two pounds instead of ten...

In other news the TORECHWOOD DVD player arrived today and works perfectly, and it would have been the most painless AV setup I've ever done if it wasn't for the fact that I plugged the digital audio lead into the wrong socket and spent nearly half an hour going through the menus trying to figure out what was wrong. The picture is definitely higher resolution (and with real pixels, not interpolated junk), and the digital sound worked perfectly once I found my mistake. It's also region-free out of the box, which is always a plus. About the only down-side to it is that it doesn't have a digital optical output - I misread the spec on that - but only coax. The other outputs are SCART, stereo sound, composite video, and of course HDMI. It's a very slim (top to bottom) unit which is also nice - it fits neatly in the trolley under the DVD recorder, which has air vents on top so can't be covered, with enough room for air to circulate. It looks reasonably well made, about the only things I dislike are that the drawer feels a little flimsy and the remote is (as usual for cheap kit) a soulless black rectangle with horrible tiny keys that need rather more pressure than usual. Despite that it's definitely a keeper.

RIP Arthur C. Clarke

Sir Arthur C. Clarke has apparently died aged 90

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ijDA5bgxiHlTvS_r-SSjskS1Tq1wD8VG3BKO4

I met him once, and exchanged mail a couple of times when I was writing an RPG called "George E. Challenger's Mysterious World," but he was enormously influential on my reading and appreciation of SF, and for a long time one of my favourite authors. He'll be missed.