Category: Uncategorized

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.

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. read more

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:
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Halloween’s almost over so this post is a little late, but I still wanted to put up this photo of the front of our house:

The spider’s name is Hank. Hank first appeared on our roof last Halloween and was something of a hit with the local trick-or-treater crowd. This year, though, Hank hasn’t had much to do. Aside from Brooke, our next-door neighbor, we’ve had only one costumed youngster dare to make his way past Hank in search of handouts. Brooke has declared that this is her last year of trick-or-treating, so poor Hank might be quite bored next year. I, of course, am forced to eat all of the leftover candy. read more

I have no idea what this person is singing, or what she’s holding under her arm, or what it has to do with a leek. (Thanks go to Chris for this one.)

Gee, it would be kind of embarassing to have to post this article.

It seems that Apple isn’t above monkeying with its stock options to polish its financial image a little. There’s an article in the NY Times here that says while current employees have been cleared of any wrongdoing, the investigation is still in progress and Apple will have to restate its earnings. Nope, it just never looks good when the CFO has to resign from the board.

Here’s a great video of a recent Weird Al song. It’s nice to see that he’s still as brilliant and funny as he was 20 years ago.

Somewhat fittingly, Tracie found this video just as I was on my way out to the garage to work on my retro-arcade game controller, and I’m typing this on my ergonomic keyboard…

I really shouldn’t gloat over the misfortune of other companies in the music-tech biz, but somehow I can’t help but smirk a little. Seems that Digidesign’s parent company Avid got the attention of the financial world by announcing that sales of ProTools have fallen off badly recently. Their stock then fell 14% in response. Bummer. Maybe Digi’s monopolistic stranglehold on the DAW market is weakening more than I thought. Maybe people are starting to figure out that just because ProTools is ubiquitous doesn’t mean that you should use it, or that there aren’t better products for less money, etc. read more

I just cancelled my Earthlink accounts (one for general internet access, one for DSL). I’ve had the DSL account for five years and the general account for… uh… ten years, maybe? I opened it long enough ago that my email address was a single dictionary word. It’s a little odd to no longer have that as my default email address, but I’ll get used to it.

There were several reasons. One was that the quality of their customer support declined rather sharply when they outsourced the operation to India. Another was that I discovered that Comcast’s cable-modem service costs the same as Earthlink’s DSL service and is dramatically faster. (Suddenly YouTube makes sense. At DSL speeds all of the videos are blurry and not terribly fun to watch; at cable speeds they look like local video files.) read more