| Moving |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|06:26 pm] |
There isn't much in the media that ever touches me. Wars, famine, genocide, murder in my own town - it's all pretty much water off a ducks back, shrugged-off and a matter of whatever. Those who know me well also understand my dislike of children (or perhaps more accurately, the way we seem to idolise them nowadays, but whatever, I resent their noisy presence).
Finding myself working before now for a very tacky UK-centric memorial website for months on end, which seems to be a magnet for dead babies and frankly hopeless nutty grief-addicted mothers has probably helped harden my resolve too.
But every now and again I read of a story that's inexplicably moving. Lately, it's the case of the father fighting for his baby's right to live - vs the hospital and the mother, who want to pull life support.
Long story short, one year old with an incurable, perpetually painful, crippling genetic disorder who cannot breath unaided yet mentally sound. Unusually perhaps the father, not the mother, has until today been fighting in the courts to keep his child on life support. Today he has relented and agreed to, I guess, pull the plug and let nature take its course.
I don't know why this resonates any sympthy within me more than any other story of child disease or dead babies (or indeed why it resonantes any sympathy), but somehow it does :/ Perhaps because it's the father listening to his heart and not his head? I'm not sure, but I really feel for the guy. |
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| Retrogeekery! |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|11:34 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  happy | ] |
Finally! After some ten years of searching online, I found the amplifier I've been after since my early-mid teens. A Hitachi HA-7700, circa 1979-1981, making it as old as me.
What's special about it? Nowadays, probably nothing much, but during my (rather lonely) 'electronics geek' years I was gifted one of these. That is, until it broke and I mucked it up. The specs are still impressive - 65W RMS per side, 0.02% THD into 8 ohms, or 0.005 at half load. 5Hz - 100KHz. Subjectively it was brilliant, and have to admit these lumps have a strange sentimental attraction. Plus I just love older audio kit. There's something more "real" about a bunch of discrete components (yeah, I'm one of those mental people who if I had the space, would opt to use vinyl too...)
It's somewhat smaller than I remember it (then again, I'm somewhat bigger) but it's still a heck of a lump, much of the weight being the dual transformers. Unfortunately this model is faulty, but I'm hoping I can repair that. It helps enormously that some kind soul has already uploaded the service manual! I've already ascertained that the pre-amp stages seem to be working fine, the problem is within the power output stage. The protection circuit doesn't switch the speakers in. Already I've found several 'fuse resistors' have gone bad - from a few tens of ohms above rating to fully open circuit.
I'll admit, I've never heard of fuse resistors before, therefore I'm not sure if after 30 years they're expected to fail, or this indicates something else has gone badly wrong. So far as I can tell, the power supply works properly, which is something.
Annoyingly the case is rather tatty. I still have all the knobs from my pup-hood amp (and they mock my klepto-ways!) but the nice brushed aluminium frontage is chipped and scratched in places. The cover is panting black and feels a little bit flimsy - the one I had was grey and looked altogether more stylish, so perhaps this is an earlier model. It's quite tarnished so I'll probably spray it. There's a fold-down aluminium flap over the lower controls which is also scratched, and the plastic hinges have broken :( Not sure if glue will hold that, damn it. I can tell this thing's been dropped at some point in its history.
( Some more retro-amp goodness ) |
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| Being "a good person" |
[Nov. 6th, 2009|07:12 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  thoughtful | ] |
A recent post made me think about something a friend once asked: whether I thought they were "a good person".
To be honest, I didn't know them well enough to have a good answer; even now, I'm not sure it's my place to render an opinion. Hopefully they can judge for themselves how this would apply:
( What it means to be "a good person" ) |
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| Par for the course |
[Nov. 2nd, 2009|06:42 pm] |
It's surely been one of the driest summers ever. The weather the last few weeks has been quite spectacular, given the time of year.
So it's no wonder then that now there's £170 of fireworks stashed downstairs, the forecast for this Wednesday / Thursday (our Nov 5th "bonfire night" for non-locals, when we let off fireworks but don't give a damn why) is presently heavy rain.
Fuck it all. |
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| Mixed day |
[Nov. 1st, 2009|01:13 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  blah | ] |
Good: Went to CCL and bought a cheap celeron CPU and motherboard to upgrade the house server, and 4GB DDR2-1066 for my desktop. Old 2GB will go into the server.
Bad: Just realised after opening the box that I somehow got the wrong CPU. This one has 512K cache not 1MB, and doesn't have the hardware VT stuff - and that was half the point of buying it *grumble*. I don't know how I did that. Will have to exchange, and that stops most of the stuff I was going to do tomorrow.
Good: Tidied rubbish up in the garden, put more into compost box, put some wood up for a bonfire.
Bad: Had another moment of weakness and indulged in a big fat greasy Burger King for temporary good-feelings.
Good: I finally bagged one of those big Hitachi Mosfet HA-7700 amplifiers off ebay after some 15 years looking. It doesn't work, but hopefully I can fix it this time. I just hope it's not badly scratched.
Bad: Apathy kicked in this evening and I haven't felt motivated to do anything.
Good: Munched a lot of beetroot from the garden for lunch. Some 10 hours later, I had a surprise big, purple-red beetroot-poo. |
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| Enlightenment |
[Oct. 31st, 2009|07:55 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  lonely | ] |
In future, I'm never going to bother introducing new-friends to old-friends. I've often done this in the past because it felt like the right thing to do, but I've realised it's never been reciprocated.
So screw it, I'll live by others examples. If it means making anyone feel put out, tough. |
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| Ride share to MFF? |
[Oct. 30th, 2009|02:30 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | hopeful | ] |
Anyone heading up to Midwest FurFest on Thursday evening, and - ideally - back on Monday (Sunday might work too)? Got free space and can swing by the Northville/Plymouth, Michigan area? I don't take up too much room, and I can pay for gas. :-) |
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| Windows 7 musings |
[Oct. 29th, 2009|08:08 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | bored | ] |
So, it's been a couple of days now living with the new OS. One that I've paid for, I should add!
There are plus points. I'd been warned against the 64bit version, but opted to try anyway because I'd like to expand to 6, and maybe later 8GB. My only 'power app' is Adobe Lightroom for processing sometimes hundreds of 10 mega-pixel RAW image files at a time. The 64bit version seems a little smoother, but I won't know how much of a win that's afforded until I increase the RAM.
Otherwise, I'm stunned that so far, 32bit apps work so well. Contrary to some of the stories, Firefox has never, ever run so well! I've had umpteen tabs open running flash and js-intensive pages, and still every new tab renders almost instantly with not a hint of grinding. This impresses me!
Nothing really unexpected has happened yet. I'm willing to chalk up the power-settings issue (switching off when I believed I'd set it not to) to PEBKAC.
While performance is (subjectively) a clear winner, I don't have resounding praise for it. There are some glaring problems, most of which I fear will not go away. Some of the design decisions taken seem breathtakingly stupid.
The task bar is awful. Truly awful. The Vista-style Program menu is a royal pain in the ass to navigate. One click has become x number of clicks and navigating back and forth as well as up and down. There is no benefit whatsoever to the Vista style Program menu over the traditional style, it's more effort to use. Yet the decision was also taken to force users to live with it - no reverting to the "old" style.
Similarly, the rest of the task bar is quite fucked up. By default window buttons are huge squares without titles, the idea being you can 'pin' a shortcut to the task bar, its icon becoming an ugly square button when it's running. Multiple windows of the same program are combined in a subtle stack to hint at their existance. Rather than click a traditional button to flick to that window, you either have to click the stack to get a preview of all the open windows and then click the desired window, or hover the mouse over the stack and wait a short period before clicking a preview window. Whichever way, 'stacked' programs require more work to open their windows. Think MSN messenger with multiple chat windows open. No more single clicking the title bar name to open that chat...
Fortunately you can somewhat revert this to the "old" (ie: sensible) behaviour, and have rectangular buttons with window titles. You can also choose 'small icons' which in fact restores the task bar to almost the size of a traditional XP bar, rather than default fucking enormous.
Alas you can't revert all the stupid design decisions. There's no bringing the quicklaunch bar back, which upsets me. Instead we have this concept of 'pinning' an icon to the task bar. It sounds like almost the same thing, but opening a pinned application nudges the other pinned applications along the bar as it transorms into an ugly square or traditional rectangle. And pinned application icons are spaced way, way too far apart anyway! The padding either side of a pinned "quicklaunch" icon is at least twice what it always has been, and I can't find a way of fixing this. More than four pinned applications really begins to eat into the available space - even at nearly 2000 pixels wide.
Similarly at the other side, there's far too much wasted space either side of the clock.
Desktop icons are another problem. I can't objectively say why they're wrong yet, but they are. By default they're too large, but even reduced in size they seem to occupy too much space. It reminds me of an old KDE desktop, which always felt cluttered and irregular with only a few icons. Even back when I was a committed Linux user, I preferred the way Windows dealt with desktop icons - more space-efficient and "tidy". Now everything feels clunky and cluttered. Changing the font back to Tahoma size 8 without the blurry shadow helps, but the icons are still not scaled and/or spaced right. Nor does the font change contrast according to the background. White font is invisible against bright wallpaper :(
There's not quite as much control as I'd like over the fancy window decorations. I've shrunk the border padding down to 0 which saves some space (windows don't feel 'constricted' by a chunky thick border) and turning off the wretched shadow improves the 'feel' even more, yet there's further tweaks I'd like to do but can't.
Other decisions baffle me, and scream of a rushed product. For instance, in Apperance and Personalization under Control Panel (itself a design I'm at odds with) there are two! distinct options to change the resolution. "Change Display Settings" and "Adjust Resolution". Both take you to the same page. Why two? How did this happen? Is one supposed to go elsewhere? The whole Vista-ish Control Panel / Settings dialogue boxes are awkward and far from logical, with familiar options burried multiple clicks away. At least the network adapter properties are easier to find - but frankly I lost count of the number of clicks it too to get there.
Not all problems are due to Windows. The new MSN Messenger client has taken to further reducing choice. By default, if it detects it's running under Windows 7, Microsoft have taken the unfathomable decision decision to not present an icon in the system tray! 'Closing' the task bar button closes the whole application. I don't know why they've done this - the new customizable notification-system is rather good, so all they needed to do was set the system tray icon to only show notifications, or never show at all - leaving the option to turn it back. The workaround is to set the programs shortcut to launch in Vista compatability mode. Hey presto, the useful systray icon returns.
Also, without turning shadow effects and chunky borders off, the flashing-chat-windows are horrendously annoying as they're impossible to ignore when not focused, which makes holding a conversation and daring to attempt to do something else at the same time next to impossible. Again, there's no way to control window notifications in MSN (I doubt there ever was) but a window with a waiting message is far too intrusive under Windows 7 without some reverting of the new styles.
None of these problems are insurmountable, but I worry in the future they could be. While Microsoft has a dodgy history so far as reliable secure code is concerned, they were always stellar when it came to designing UIs. MS software has always been easy to pick up, intuitive and relatively comfortable to use.
It's ironic how they're finally producing more robust software, apparently at the expense of throwing away years of efficient and comfortable UI design - presumably for Apple-eating eye-candy :(
EDIT: Actually, there is something quite broken. The Storage Media whats-it hasn't let me copy a file off either my Nokia phone or my Sony walkman yet without crashing. It consistantly fails to let me do anything. I can't copy off the new Ubuntu ISO from my walkman now. Grrr... |
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