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New goodies

One of the products of Saturday’s spending spree arrived last night: a midrange Denon 7.1 home theater receiver. I think the power supply in my old Aiwa is about to give up the ghost, as the display has dimmed significantly, and the system turned itself off on me once or twice. Also it never really delivered enough power to my speakers in the first place. The new one, though… it’s like I have a whole new HT setup. One really nice feature of this unit is that it comes with a microphone that you place at your listening location, and the amp automatically calibrates the speaker levels and delays. Much more accurate than my previous adjustments by ear, and much less work than the tripod and meter approach favored by Welsh. Unlike all of the other consumer electronics gear I’ve purchased in the past, this one will finally grant me happiness and personal fulfillment.

I’m going to try to freecycle the old amp (unless anyone else I know wants it). No sense in contaminating some third world water supply with electronic waste.

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Free books

On a whim I bought EFFer and BoingBoinger Cory D’s Eastern Standard Tribe when I saw it in a local bookstore. It was actually much better than I had expected, after that really bad excerpt from his next book. So I read EST in dead tree form, and I liked it! Of course one neat thing about Cory’s novels is that he releases them under various Creative Commons licenses, so you can download them at no charge if you are so inclined. After finishing up EST, I downloaded and read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which is a novella-length Disney commercial masquerading as SF. Not good, but at least I didn’t pay for it. The book does have the distinction of being only the second book I’ve read entirely in electronic form (the first: Animal Farm).

Saw Sin City over the weekend. Probably one of the best conversions of a comic book to film. And don’t call it a graphic novel kids, you aren’t fooling anyone. The movie is violent, but all the blood is in black and white, which curiously didn’t affect me whereas Kill Bill made me queasy.

Google maps: now with satellite imagery!

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Kites

I leave for the Mall this morning, because I am bored, and because yesterday I spent nearly the entire day on the couch avoiding the rain and buying lots of things on the internet. So they are having this kite festival today, as part of the NCBF. I intend to take pictures, but my camera’s battery is dead. I stop first at a roped-off field where two guys are facing off in a trick flying competition. One guy makes his kite walk on the ground – neat! (I could probably do that too, but not on purpose.)

It is a blustery day as it always is when the cherry trees are in bloom, so I plan to walk around a bit, then head inside, maybe watch an IMAX film or something like that. Halfway to the Capitol, I’m watching someone dump their frog-shaped kite into a tree, when I nearly bump into Steven of the alumni club. This is a lucky coincidence, apparently half the young alumni are also here, flying kites with varying levels of success, or watching the others’ triumphs and failures. So instead of going inside I stick it out a bit longer and join the watchers. A bit of the old vicarious thrill takes over as we watch young kids and grown-up kids struggle with kites of all shapes: colored diamonds, boxes, squares, cylinders, an airborne menagerie of dragons, turtles, pteradactyls, insects, a fleet of airplanes, rockets, and even a pirate ship. Wes’ simple black and neon diamond tangles with the nearby box kite and the mighty Superman…at least seven or eight times. Knots ensue.

Soon the wind gets the best of everyone so we head to the cafeteria of the new Native American museum. The food is good but it isn’t cheap. I believe the cashier’s small talk is an unspoken apology for the pricing. She is no doubt accustomed to sudden frowns of tired visitors when the total is announced and wallets are emptied. So we eat our authentic Native American foods and drink our not so authentic Coca Colas, then lunch is over and we part. I return home to reoccupy my couch.

Well, at least I did something this weekend.

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Braindump

I helped a lady carry her luggage down the escalator this morning. She told me she had a hernia condition and that I was very kind and which way does she go to get to the airport. I said, “Blue line, this platform.” I’m a nice guy right? Wrong. She walked down to the end of the platform, I stayed somewhere near the middle, then I proceeded to watch her get on the next Orange line train, without making an effort to stop her. So, I’m a jerk. (Someone else told her so she managed to get off the train in time.)

The coolest thing Georgia Tech has ever done: hooking the laundry machines up to the Net. Too bad they just bought some company’s software instead of rolling it themselves.

Accenture (aka Andersen Consulting) is (still) running an ad campaign sporting Tiger Woods (“Be a Tiger” – PDF). Who sees these and thinks, oh hey, Accenture will do to my IT infrastructure what Tiger Woods did for the PGA? Also regarding the linked ad: I didn’t know golf normally involved so much theory. But, yes, Stephen Hawking himself has written several papers on the composition of bunkers (“Hawking Sand”) and their impact on the dynamic subspace domain of score gradients. Of course the real story here is that they are trying to make an impression on the decision makers, who play golf four days a week. Hire us for your consulting work and you can pretend you are good at this ridiculous “sport.”

My favorite unix utility is dd. Most recently, it saved all of my music on my multitracker’s dying hard drive. What did I do before unix, copy /b?

I hate the April 1st internet scene. Except for this awesome tutorial — that one is cool.