It’s been cold here. The low last night was 4 degrees F. The temperature graph for the last 24 hours is kind of fun:
Brrrr!
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Monthly Archives: November 2006
Audio Damage Plug-in Bundle Available from Cakewalk
Cakewalk, long-time and well-known vendors of music software, is selling a bundle of Audio Damage plug-ins during the holiday season. You can pick up the package of Reverence, DubStation, and Phase Two for a discounted price. The relevant website is here. I believe that this offer is only available to registered Cakewalk customers, and that only the Windows versions are offered.
On a related note, I’ve been having a good deal of fun with their Rapture synthesizer plug-in. It’s worth checking out if you haven’t done so already. Its website is here.
Wow! Wasn’t That Exciting?
I really don’t follow politics at all, but yesterday was certainly an exciting day. I’ve been waiting for the last bit of good news to be confirmed, and the NY Times just did so: “Allen Concedes in Virginia Senate Race; Democrats Win Full Control of Congress”. How about that. The Democrats have control of the House and the Senate. Finally we have some light at the end of a dark tunnel.
It’s also really cool that, for the first time ever, the Speaker of the House is a woman.
Yeah, sure
Here’s a product listing that demonstrates why audiophiles are often looked upon with some derision. I honestly cannot tell whether or not this is supposed to be a joke, but the rest of the site looks serious. I am quite sure that the only effect that knobs have on a stereo’s sound quality is psychological.
Vote Democrat to Save American Lives
If you’re still entertaining foolish thoughts of voting for Republican Party candidates next week, you might want to read this op-ed piece by economist Paul Krugman in the NY Times. Since it requires a registration to read, I’ll take the liberty of quoting parts of it here:
Bechtel, the giant engineering company, is leaving Iraq. Its mission — to rebuild power, water and sewage plants — wasn’t accomplished: Baghdad received less than six hours a day of electricity last month, and much of Iraq’s population lives with untreated sewage and without clean water. But Bechtel, having received $2.3 billion of taxpayers’ money and having lost the lives of 52 employees, has come to the end of its last government contract.
Another Brand of Epoxy for Metal
If you haven’t been able to find the Plastic Steel epoxy I’ve mentioned for attaching standoffs to panels, there is another brand of apparently similar stuff called JB Weld. A reader of this site sent this link to me. It’s a discussion thread on making inexpensive illuminated pushbuttons, but if you scroll down a bit you’ll see photos of some interesting techniques. He uses flat-head screws instead of standoffs, which is a clever idea. (Personally I’ll stick with threaded standoffs because with screws you’d have to carefully set the height of all of the backing nuts.) I happened to be in a hardware store a couple of days ago that stocks JB Weld products; they appear to be pretty straightforward epoxies with different formulations for speed, materials, etc.
Vexed by FedEx
I used to really like FedEx. They were fast, they were efficient, they had excellent customer support. It seems that they are no longer that way. For the second time in recent years they lost a package sent to me from California. There was nothing unusual about either of the packages; they were packed in FedEx’s own boxes and weighed only a pound or two. They both vanished somewhere within FedEx’s sorting facilities.
I gleaned something somewhat interesting about FedEx’s operations while trying to locate the most recently lost package. Their tracking information, as presented on the web, is false. Here is the tracking information for my lost package, copied from their website:
