Category: Uncategorized

There’s a sort of morbidly fascinating collection of sounds at this site. The site is a web presence for a data-recovery service named DataCent. They recover data from dead hard drives and other storage devices. Apparently as an attempt to help prospective clients identify potential problems, they’ve put up an impressive catalog of audio recordings of noises emanating from failing hard drives. The recordings of drives with bad bearings are particularly disconcerting.

(Rule of thumb, for those of you who haven’t lived around hard drives for as long as I have: if it makes much noise at all, be worried. Today’s hard drives are usually nearly silent.) read more

It snowed last night, for the first time this season. It didn’t amount to much and may not have even qualified as “measurable precipitation”, but at least it made it feel somewhat more normal around here.

You have until December 3 to vote for the name of the baby panda at the Atlanta zoo. Go here to see the list of choices and to place your vote. Okay, yeah, it’s kind of silly. The ramifications of this vote are far less serious than those of the presidential election, but hey, he is the only panda born in this country this year.

Some folks in Edinburgh have put a MIDI retrofit on a 19th-century pipe organ. There is info and video clips here. Mostly I think it’s neat that the interest in this project led to the restoration of the organi itself.

Well, now that the election is over I have to go back to actually thinking about things to blog. Let’s see…

Um…

Well, okay, here’s a few random things:

It still hasn’t snowed yet. It’s been cold enough to snow, now and then, but it has neither rained nor snowed since my last weather-related posting.

I just started reading Barry Blesser’s book about aural achitecture. I’m only a chapter into it but it seems pretty good so far. It crossed my mind that I haven’t read much of anything for awhile, so I’m trying to get myself to sit down and read every day in an attempt to not look like an inept vice-presidential candidate. read more

And we did. Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States. The eight-year nightmare is coming to an end. Voters came out in record-breaking numbers to cast their vote for change and renewal.

Now the hard work begins. It’s not about blue vs. red any longer. It’s about reuniting and rebuilding this country.

Yes, we can.

One of the interesting things about today’s election is that Colorado may go Democrat for the first time in a number of elections. If so, I hope that means we’ll be included in the seccession from the country (see below). I’m afraid that they might not take us because of Colorado Springs, though.

Dear Red States:

We’ve decided we’re leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we’re taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren’t aware, that includes California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California. read more

Just in case you’re still wondering why you should vote for Obama, how about this: McCain is either an out-and-out liar or he’s demented.

This site documents someone’s clever approach to keeping cats off his kitchen counter. Basically he used off-the-shelf home-automation hardware to build a motion detector that turns on a noisy blender and flashes a bright light when the cat pokes around on the counter. The site also has several videos of the response of the cat. It appears that the system is quite effective.