The northlondonhippy

Archive for February 16th, 2008

A-hoy hip­py­fans, there be hip­pies here!

Well, one hippy, actu­ally and I’m not even a real hippy. Sue me for false adver­tis­ing and then request a full refund!

My month of lit­tle work­ing isn’t pan­ning out as I had planned. Who’s sur­prised? No mat­ter how much free time I have, its never enough, but then it’s never really free either.

How do nor­mal peo­ple do it? You know, peo­ple who work Mon­day through Fri­day, 9–5, every week. How do they man­age to keep it all together with noth­ing but the week­end to do their real life stuff? It bog­gles my mind.

For the bet­ter part of the last 20 years, I’ve man­aged to avoid the Mon-Fri rou­tine. The life of a shift­worker is much more fun and there’s noth­ing I like bet­ter than hav­ing days off dur­ing the week. Except maybe easy sex and hard drugs, but then they go hand in hand with lots of free time and the soul of a junior-satan.

Don’t you have the soul of a junior satan? Guess its just me then!

You see, I under­stand the inher­ent dif­fer­ence between good and bad, I’m just a bit capri­cious when it comes to decid­ing which side of the line to choose. I make up my own mind, using my own moral com­pass for guid­ance and my “true north” prob­a­bly dif­fers from most people’s.

I often choose the path of least resis­tance, but then at my age and so lack­ing in ambi­tion and direc­tion, what else would I do?

I spent an entire day this week swap­ping out my shitty, cheap old stereo for a brand new, shiny sil­ver AV Amp. I bought a Pio­neer VSX-917v and saved 60 quid wait­ing until after xmas. That’s when I first scoped it out, back in Decem­ber, but elected to wait and it was a wise decision.

My old stereo, an 8 year old Tech­nics, was a combo CD player, cas­sette deck(!!) and radio receiver, but all I really used it for is the amp, which had SKY+, a DVD player and my mac mini con­nected to it, all with stereo ana­logue con­nec­tions. For the last cou­ple of months, the sound has been cut­ting out, only restored by a well placed, mea­sured slap on the top of the unit with a flat palm. I’m sure that’s the best way to fix any­thing, anyway.

The cut­ting out was steadily wors­en­ing, so I ordered the Pio­neer unit a cou­ple of weeks ago and finally got around to installing it last week.

I bought some dig­i­tal audio cables, TOSlinks for the mini and SKY+ and a dig­i­tal coax­ial for the DVD player. The new amp was too big to go on the shelf where the old stereo lived, which meant I had to tear down the entire set-up and re-cable it all from scratch. Yawn.

It took me a few hours to rip it all apart and clean out the years of dust trapped in the inac­ces­si­ble bits and a cou­ple more hours to rein­stall, con­fig­ure and test every­thing, but even­tu­ally I had it all work­ing well.

The new amp will sup­port 7.1 audio, but my liv­ing room won’t. I can’t even fit 5.1, because I have no space for the rear sur­round speaker. Right now, it only has 2 speak­ers con­nected, but I have a sub­woofer ordered and the space cleared for it when it comes.

Every­thing worked great the first day it was con­nected and I was very pleased with the sound qual­ity. I kept the Tech­nics speak­ers from the old set-up because they are small, but decent and are bi-amped, which the Pio­neer also sup­ports. I am very happy with the sound and expect the sub­woofer will make it sound even better.

On the sec­ond day, Mrs. Hippy dis­cov­ered a burn­ing smell com­ing out of the amp. It turns out, the amp runs ridicu­lously hot and needs to be well ven­ti­lated. It’s cur­rent home, under­neath the shelf where my TV lives, has pre­cious lit­tle space between the top of the Pio­neer and the shelf. Ut-oh. I have to move the Pio­neer. Yawn.

My house is small, and my liv­ing room is smaller. I don’t have any other options for plac­ing the Pio­neer amp. I have to magic up a 50cm x 50cm space, and I think I’ve found it, all I need is a small table to put the amp on…and IKEA sells one for £7.99. Now, I just have to get myself to IKEA, which is hell on earth with extra-added yuppies.

I don’t want my new amp to burn up, it sounds far too good. Right now, I have a small fan aimed at it, which doesn’t really help with the ambi­ent noise lev­els, but does keep things cooler and smelling less like an elec­tri­cal fire! Hope­fully, I’ll have the whole thing sorted out in the next day or so.

I meant to wake up really early this morn­ing and visit IKEA, but I didn’t. Maybe I’ll go later today, if the spirit moves me.

I also need to buy another set of cables…longer ones. Repo­si­tion­ing the amp puts it out of range of all the new cables I bought.

Noth­ing in my life is ever easy, not even the sim­plest of tasks. Swap­ping out an old stereo for a new ampli­fier shouldn’t become a major engi­neer­ing project. And I should be taller, too!

I’m still dig­ging excel­lent cof­fee every day, though, which soft­ens the blow on every­thing. Right now, I am sip­ping a freshly made cap­puc­cino, crafted by my own hand not five min­utes ago, from freshly ground beans that were grown in El Sal­vador and roasted 10 days ago. Yumm.

This week’s cof­fee bat­tle has been over frothed milk. Froth­ing milk prop­erly takes prac­tise and skill and I woe­fully inad­e­quate at cre­at­ing micro­foam, which is the goal of baris­tas. Micro­foam has a vel­vety tex­ture and is pourable, you should never need to spoon it into the cup. It shouldn’t have peaks either and shouldn’t be stiff like whipped egg whites.

I’ve yet to work out the secret to per­fect micro­foam, though I am try­ing all the tricks sug­gested online, from chill­ing the metal jug, to using full-fat milk. Actu­ally, and this makes no sense to me at all, I am hav­ing bet­ter luck with skimmed milk, which defies logic and every­thing I’ve read online. Go figure.

Don’t laugh, one day my cof­fee brew­ing skills may save my life. When TV news finally chews me up and spits me out, Star­bucks here I come!