h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'll leave the PC running through the night and streaming Radio 5 Sports Extra. I've got the timer on Audacity set to start recording at 4.20am which is five minutes before the cricket coverage begins tomorrow at 10.25am Old Trafford time. During the last two Tests I've been setting the alarm for 6am, switching on the PC and listening to the second half of the morning session, then getting up when they break for lunch, listening to the afternoon session, breakfast when they take tea, then on with the evening session until stumps, which is soon after midday here.

It's nice listening to a Test Match in bed in the morning, because of the time difference, but it's also a bit of an anti climax when it finishes at lunchtime and the rest of the day is still ahead. With a bit of jiggery pokery and clever use of the laptop I should be able to start listening to it at 10.30am Texas time while still recording the remainder on the desktop, then listening to that afterwards.

Probably. And it'll mean wearing earplugs tonight. Not because of the radio - the speakers will be switched off, obviously. I'll need those because after I turn off the a/c those PC case and CPU fans are going to start working a bit hard. Noisy.

and I always thought that and his daft mate, Steve, were mad for watching the cricket scores on Ceefax for hours on end (back in pre-internet days when we couldn't pick it up on radio over here)

I now can't hear (or read) the phrase 'jiggery pokery' without thinking of the track of the same name on The Duckworth Lewis Method's first album.

I assume you've heard it?


Geggs

Actually, no. I've heard very little of Duckworth Lewis. I did catch their performance on TMS a few weeks ago though, with Blowers rapping I suspect the only way I'd be able to listen to anything by them in Texas is on YouTube (unless I order one of their CDs from the UK), which I'll have to check out later. I must remember not to listen to anything on the PC until the recording's done. Speaking of which...

The first part of the experiment has worked and it's been recording for the last three hours or so. I turned the speakers on just for a moment during the luncheon interval to make sure, and there was the voice of Aggers. It looks like there's been play, so that's good. It would have been a bit of a pain to go through all this rigmarole only to have the first day's play washed out.

That doesn't mean to say it won't be on any of the other days, of course After all, this is Manchester we're talking about.

When the tea interval comes around, at about 9.40am my time, I'll stop the recording, convert it to smaller file, transfer that to the laptop and then start recording again, hook the speakers up to the laptop and Bob's your uncle. Come 10.25 I can start listening to the day's play, at the proper time

And we still don't have any kind of cricket smiley. For shame.

Oh, and I made a point of not looking at the scorecard when I checked the cricket page, so no spoilers please.

Well apparently when you take the speakers out of this PC's speaker socket Audacity stops recording It's a good job I checked the Audacity window, but I still lost about 15 minutes of play. I've had to dig out the crappy portable speakers I put away in a box somewhere a few months ago and hook those up to the desktop so that it can continue recording, and the good speakers are on the laptop. Bum.

The BBC Radio Player is being more annoying than usual this morning. It's hardly the best piece of software to start with - takes ages to load, drops out from time to time, often stalls completely and needs to be reloaded - but this morning I reckon I'm losing about 10% of the commentary by the look of the gaps in Audacity the recording When I get round to listening to it later on it'll be just like the old days of long wave - "And now long wave is leaving the cricket for the Shipping Forecast" "...Tyne, Dogger, westerly gale 8 with occasional plagues of frogs. Moderate, pretty nice, a bit naff in north... and now we return you to the cricket." "And welcome back to Old Trafford with the news that Darren Gough has just bowled the only triple hat trick in cricketing history and Australia are all out for 6, England having declared on 598 for 2."