Post Turkey

Sunday, November 30, 2008
22:21

A very fine Thanksgiving weekend! Spent a good portion of the day at Dad's. Hadn't seen step-brother D for what, years? And had never met his wife or seen their new kiddo. It was that group, me and MB, Dad and Sue, and Carrie and family. A good day. Had some time to hang out and talk w/ Dad before dinner. Dinner was delicious. We left around 7-something? and headed back to Ballard, then went over to Howard and Diana's for a bit. TM and Chris and Meleah were there too. Everybody was completely stuffed (us included - they offered us some cheesecake and I've never found cheesecake that unappealing in my life). Had a fun couple hours hanging out there. H&D's cat Jupiter is under the weather - it stopped eating, they are nursing it back to health; it still looks fairly ragged. Doesn't have much of a sense of balance. It climbed (down, from the back of the sofa, very slowly) into my lap, which was cute, but we left shortly thereafter.

Friday - worked from home. Used the wiki to write up some musings about SSDs etc. That was really useful as a few nebulous ideas about how to make use of them came into clearer focus, and turned out to be non-starters. So, needs more thinking. A good idea came to me this morning while I was sleeping in. Friday night was a quiet night in, we had leftovers, then talked about some things with MB.

Slept until noon on Saturday. . .went to Java Bean for brunch with MB. We then hit the road for the Science Center - the primary goal being to see the Lucy exhibit. Well, it was sold out, so we just got tickets for the regular stuff. Which was good. I went there a lot as a kid. Some of the same stuff is there, and some of that is still interesting, some not. The butterfly house is wonderful. That was worth the price of admission, no sweat. MB and I also got to do the giant human-hamster water-wheel thingy! heh. By the time we were done there it was dark, and we drove across the bridge to Bellevue to do some shopping. MB was looking for some specific bits at the container store, and then I tried in vain to get some things at Home Depot - a programmable line-voltage thermostat (only one model stocked, not the one I wanted), and some grout (couldn't get less than a 10-pound bag of black grout - I just need to touch up a 6" seam!). Then back to Ballard, and a very yummy dinner at Lombardi's. MB had smoked-salmon pesto ravioli, and it was kind of an epiphany for me. I'm not much of a fan of smoked salmon, but it was so perfect in that dish, wow.

Another fairly lazy day today. We went to the farmer's market - will be going back next week to actually buy some gifts. Stopped at Sonic Boom on the way back to pick up the last two DCD remasters. Did some online xmas shopping, mostly successful. Ate leftovers, did some house cleaning. Walked to RCV and rented Sideways which was really good. Now, journalizing.

November

Sunday, November 23 2008
17:52

Almost a month since my last entry. . .where to begin. Moving backwards might be the easiest. It's been a lazy Sunday for the most part. I replaced the left headlight in my car today. Now that I have all the quirks in that process figured out, it's almost easy. The last headlights, headlights of wonderment and brightness they might be called, lasted a paltry 5 months! What crap. So, back to some "lower rung" lights this time. MB is currently off at yoga. I spent some more time comparing SACD to CD today - first fighting with WMP to get it to actually burn a disc using the ripped WAV files from the hybrid SACD that would be used (A Mozart clarinet concerto). Anyway, once that was done, very interesting. There is a definite difference, on that recording, between the straight-to-SACD and the other formats. (The SACD layer has each track twice: once straight to SACD, once from analog tape to SACD; the CD layer has each track twice as well: once as an SACD to CD transfer, once from analog tape to CD). Took me a minute to realize that there was a channel flip between the two layers! ugh. Anyway, once that was sorted. . .the native SACD track sounded best to me. The clarinet had more coherency and definition. This might be due to a bit of a frequency emphasis in the presence region, but if I assume that the EQ was the same between masters, then I could ascribe that to higher data rate. I couldn't compare SACD-to-CD and tape-to-CD directly, but I didn't notice much difference compared to the SACD. Doing a disc flip, and listening to the SACD-to-CD on both players, I couldn't discern any difference. The Marantz and Rotel CD players are pretty indistinguishable from one another, to me. (The Oppo DVD/SACD player sounds noticeably more two-dimensional than either).

Spent a couple hours today fruitlessly trying to get a better-quailty audio file from my Triangulation MIDI file. Sonar refuses to even interface w/ the Windows MIDI system on the new box, but that wouldn't sound good anyway. I downloaded a Bosendorfer virtual piano / VST plugin, but despite success from the Import tool, it doesn't show up in Sonar. So, that ends that. Maybe I should just go for recording it via guitar, the next time I have an entire spare weekend. . .

Last night: watched Clue with MB. She'd never seen it before. . .what a fun flick. Very silly. It's really held up - everything about it (except for Mr. Boddy's dialog sync, I wonder if they used someone else's voice entirely??) holds up over time.

Had a great time at the L4D release party at the Garage Friday night. Lots of people, open bar, good times. Played "shuffleboard" once w/ CC and her boyfriend, and AF - weird stuff. I'm not very good at it. Bowled a lot - including the best game of my life, a 151. I kinda got a 165 later, but that includes an assist from a coworker who bowled a strike for me when we thought it was his frame. My approach that seems to work is: just throw the ball straight down the lane. Even if I'm trying to pick up a single pin off to the side: don't try to hit it, just throw the ball down the lane. It usually hit it. Anyway, I had lots of fun and got home after 1. Missed MB, who was in Portland at a conference, though.

She also missed the show Thursday - we were short her, and Travis. It went OK, was kind of a funky show but not as bad for me as some have been recently. A very small audience. Our promotion engine isn't working, it seems.

Monday night: L4D release. The Steam group went out for some before-hand dinner and drinks for a bit during the afternoon, the the switches were flipped and buttons pressed at 9 PM upstairs. Everything went really well. This might have been the first release where we didn't have any major issues (whether in Steam or in the game) to iron out the night of (or yet, really). Spent lots of time in subsequent days playing with random folks on Public. For the most part, lots of fun.

On the 15th MB and I hosted a Hellboys release / listening party for TomR, who was in town on business. That was good - lots of people. We heard the album -- which has absolutely awesome cover art -- four or five times. The party went from 7 until a bit after midnight. I was a bit worried that it would be a crazy kid-fest like the election-night party at Dean's, but only one kid was brought and he's a pretty mellow (and interesting) guy.

Let's see. . .mentioned already going to Dean's for election night. . .that was a good night! all the adults were biting their fingernails, but very hopeful and excited, the kids all picked up on that and were just tearing around the house like crazy. It was such a relief once it looked pretty clear Obama would win, then almost surreal as McCain conceded.

Going to Dad's for turkey day. . .last I heard, David was going to whip up a gourmet meal, but now it sounds like he's just doing the mashed potatoes? Oh well, I was looking forward to his cooking. MB and I are bringing the wine.

I need to get busy with some Xmas shopping. . .the folks have declared "don't get us anything!" so that people can save money - which is very nice, and I'm tempted to say the same, but I think it's too late. I definitely have to get Carrie something nice, as I missed her birthday.

In random news, I'm looking forward to getting my hands on some of those new Intel SSDs. . .I think hard disk drives' days are numbered, for sure. I'll guess that, in two years, most home PCs on the market will have SSDs in them, and two years after that, the HDD market will be pretty much dead -- or, at least, most of the market will be for replacement disks for places like Google that have zillions of them, and dozens failing per day.