A nice night.

I just got home a few minutes ago from tonight's date with Ambrose. We were going to go to an Italian restaurant up the street called Spacco, but on the way there we passed a 50s-style diner called Mars and Ambrose said he wouldn't mind eating there, so we went there instead. (I'm not that fond of the food in there, and it hasn't improved since the last time I ate there, but the blueberry pie was excellent. As was the company. :) )

Following dinner, we went for another long walk, taking the same route as last time but in reverse. At one point we passed a store that was selling slipcovers, and I said that one particularly garish one reminded me of my acquaintance Rosalie from the bridge club, about whom it's been said, "She's rich enough to own her own colour, but she looks like she dresses in the dark." Don't get me wrong - I like her and her husband, who once offered to see if his company's IT department needed anyone when I was looking for work - but she doesn't believe in wearing something that has only ten colours in it when twenty colours are twice as good.

Well, guess who we bumped into over on Mt. Pleasant? Rosalie and her husband Isadore, just leaving the bridge club. I stopped to say hello, and introduced Ambrose. They asked why I haven't been playing bridge lately, and I said that I was thinking about picking up a copy of Rosalie's recently-published memoirs and bringing it over to the club to get her to sign it. She said, "Make sure you read it first to make sure you like it!" I've glanced through it in the bookstore already, though, and while I'm not a big non-fiction reader, it looks worth reading:

( The summary from Indigo's website )

Besides, all of the proceeds from the sale of the book are going to charity.

Anyway, if there's still a group from the Polaris concom going to see "Geek-Gasm" at the Fringe Festival on Sunday, Ambrose said he'd be interested in coming along. If not, we'll touch base about getting together next week. Hopefully we won't both be exhausted again after our respective busy weeks at work...

Testing, one, two... is this thing on?

I may have a working stereo by this time next week - I finally called up Bay/Bloor Radio today, and talked for a few minutes to someone in their service department. He had me pop the front off of my speakers (I didn't know you could do that) and push on the woofers. He said that if they recede slightly, the problem is likely with the receiver. Since they did, I put my receiver into a cloth bag and schlepped down to the store to have him look at it in person (which was much easier than schlepping my speakers downtown would have been). He plugged it in, and apparently there's supposed to be a click about five seconds after you turn it on, when the capacitors are charged (something else I didn't know), and lo and behold, there was nothing. So I left it there to be fixed, and I should have it back in a week or so.

Crawling around on the floor for an hour unplugging everything and plugging everything in to my computer's speakers to find the fault wasn't exactly fun, however. Unfortunately, I couldn't plug my stereo speakers into anything else to test them because they don't have RCA jacks - they have something called "stranded wire" which connects to post terminals (I'm just reading the manual here, so don't ask any questions ;) ), and I don't have anything else that has that kind of input terminal. Similarly, I couldn't plug my computer's speakers into the back of the receiver, so I'm trusting that a 30-second diagnosis by the guy in the service department was accurate. (They're pretty good at Bay/Bloor, mind you. They're expensive, but since that's where I got the stereo in the first place, it made sense to me to take it back there.)

I don't know what I was thinking when I set my system up the way it is - the electrical outlet is barely reachable behind the entertainment unit if I'm lying on my back in front of the unit and reaching through the smallish hole in the back without actually being able to see what I'm doing. (At least the hole is low enough that it's more-or-less right in front of the outlet.) I'm thinking that when I set it up, I didn't have quite the amount of weight on the attached bookcases and just moved the whole unit slightly away from the wall... but I wouldn't dare do that now.

While I was at the store, I browsed at LCD flatscreen TVs and iPods as well, but I didn't buy anything as I wanted to compare Future Shop's and Best Buy's prices. (FS and BB's TVs seem to be slightly cheaper, but their iPods are more expensive.) I also need to measure the TV shelf to make sure that a 32" flatscreen TV will fit (my current TV is 26", but a 26" flatscreen's picture looks small, probably because it's 16x9 instead of 4x3). I think there should be no problem, given the size of the footprint.

The guy at Bay/Bloor had a theory that my TV's colour has gone off because of the proximity of my stereo speakers - the magnets may have killed one or more of the colour guns. It's possible, I suppose, though one would think it would take less than ten years to die if that were the case... but there's another argument in favour of getting an LCD TV. Apparently they're not affected by magnetic fields.

But it will be nice to be able to watch DVDs in stereo again, not to mention to be able to listen to music on something better than my computer's speakers (which aren't bad, but they're not the same quality at all).

Oh, and memo to self... stop buying books until you've read the ones you have. There's an Indigo next door to Bay/Bloor Radio, and they were having a "buy three, get one free" paperback sale. I ended up getting another Dresden Files book (I still haven't read the one I bought last year), an omnibus edition of the first two Blood books by andpuff, and antipope's Iron Sunrise (I thought I already had Singularity Sky, but when I got home, I didn't see it on the shelf). Oh, and I did pick up Rosalie's book while I was in there, so I can stop into the bridge club some time this week and get her to sign it. However, once my stereo is fixed and I can watch DVDs again, when will I find the time to get all that reading done? I must have twenty or thirty books that I haven't gotten to yet... I may have to cancel my Globe subscription and start reading books on the bus instead.