Frenz | Shannon O'Neill

lunchpub?

I’m planning to catch up with an old friend over a pub lunch, but I’m not sure where to go. Anywhere from the CBD to the inner west would be fine. But not too yuppified. I was thinking the Courthouse in Newtown or the Strawberry Hills, but I’m not sure if they do lunch.

Any suggestions?

resync

ok, being noisy was fun for a while (i got as far as find candace – you’d have known that things were serious if i’d pulled out making orange things) but now it’s time to chill out with the cricket until my frenz arrive (soon please!). (there are also some cockatoos and baby magpies around atm which are making more annoying noises than even i’m capable of.)

i love cricket. i make no apologies for that, even though it’s just about the only sport that i follow these days. i know it’s a relic of the british empire, but as a game, i think it’s beautiful (i could go on for hours about the aesthetics of wrist spin alone…). especially test cricket: it has such a meditative rhythm, with room for as much or as little engagement or analysis as one wants. i like nothing more than having the cricket on as i go about my business.

like most real cricket fans i prefer to listen to the abc radio commentary while watching the television coverage.

one thing that foxtel doesn’t advertise is that if you get digital cable, the tv signal is delayed by a few seconds compared to the analogue broadcast, and if you get one of their iq pvrs (as i have) the delay becomes even longer, which ruins the radio simulcast.

fortunately i can patch the radio through my virtualizer pro (which i also use for this – at a street price of approx $180 it’s a great audio swiss army knife – highly recommended) with its 5.5 second delay, which makes the sync close enough to not be a problem. but it must be a pain for any cricket fan without this option. after all, sports fans are one of the target audiences for cable tv. it’d be great if radios had a buffer (like the iq, and other pvrs) which one could adjust in order to delay (and rewind) live audio – are such radios already available?

btw, the problems i was having with my iq box (randomly rebooting, recordings failing, etc.) have finally (touch wood) been solved. the signal strength was insufficient. a foxtel tech rectified the problem last sunday (at 7am). so hopefully my plans to use the iq as an a/v uber sampling device will now be practicable.