I have this pet peeve: it really bends me out of shape when musicians known for their instrumental releases start putting out material with vocals. I’m listening to the latest Michael Brook CD, RockPaperScissors. It’s a nice disc–or at least the first three tracks are, which is as far as I’ve gotten–with all of the musical sensitivity and production quality that I expect from Mr. Brook. However, I’ve now twice been jarred by someone’s voice. It’s not that I have anything against vocalists per se, but I tend to prefer instrumental recordings and I’m really bummed that someone chose to put some guy reciting some obscure text over the top of what otherwise is a nice track. It’s like finding a dead fly in your mug at a microbrewery as far as I’m concerned–not at all what one had in mind when one sat down. read more

I purchased a new laptop computer recently–a snazzy new Lenovo X60 convertible Tablet PC. Eventually I’ll say more here about the computer itself, which is my first tablet and quite a fun device. First, though, I’d like to mention the nice case I found for it.

The computer is a somewhat unusual shape for a laptop; it’s smaller than average and is nearly square. This means that finding a case for it is something of a challenge. Lenovo sent me a case as part of a promotional offer (“Free Shipping! Free Messenger Bag Carrying Case!”) which is a nice enough bag for what it is, but it’s completely the wrong size for the computer–it’s far too big. No, I don’t know what they were thinking. read more

Okay, I’m still getting over my disappointment that it’s the 21st century and yet we stil don’t have flying cars or moon bases, nor are we wearing jumpsuits with metallic trim or eating food pellets and Tang for breakfast. However, we are making progress in the field of robotics: we now have a robot guinea pig.

I couldn’t have put it better myself. Quoting from today’s Macintouch.com coverage of MacWorld: “In a startling acknowledgement of what has become obvious, Jobs announced the change of his company’s name from ‘Apple Computer Inc.’ to ‘Apple Inc.'”

Quite frankly, I’d be far more excited if Steve had announced that they’d finally fixed the cross-platform networking bugs in OS X than I am about Apple making cell phones.

Who’s Bill Mitchell, you say? According to this article on Retro Thing, Bill Mitchell was a food chemist who invented Tang, Kool Whip, Jell-o Instant Pudding, and Pop Rocks, and presumably a number of less memorable General Foods products. This genius deserves national recognition. Mr. Mitchell passed away in 1994, but that doesn’t mean we can’t honor his memory. Maybe a statue in his home town, at least.

As reported at CNN.com, Bush is making it legal for the government to read your mail without a search warrant. I suppose this is the sort of thing people are talkin about when they put those bumper stickers that say IF YOU’RE NOT OUTRAGED YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION on their cars.

Another snow storm arrived here last night. This one isn’t predicted to be another blizzard, but there’s already a good 15cm or so of snow on the ground and it’s still coming down. The interesting thing about this storm is its proximity to the previous one. It’s quite unusual to have two substantial snowfalls this close together. I can’t recall it happening as long as I’ve lived here (since ’83, that is) and someone at the grocery store remarked that she hadn’t seen it happen and she’s lived here since ’76. Two anecdotal accounts aren’t worth much of anything, but it’s certainly unusual to get this much snow in such a short period of time. read more

I’ve started making my own PC boards. I spent a lot of time perusing the archives of the Homebrew PCB Yahoo group and am using the toner-transfer method with a cheap Samsung laser printer. I tried using the Pulsar paper but unfortunately it doesn’t work with my printer. I have obtained very good results with Epson Glossy Photo Paper (yes, the stuff made for inkjet printers) and a GBC Personal Laminator. Here’s a photo of my most recent board (click the little image to see a full-sized one):
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We just put up a batch of photos of Blizzard Deux in the photo gallery here.