One Regret

If I were on my death bed today and someone asked me what my one largest regret was, this might be my answer.

I wish I had spent more time on stilts.

Well, I know that's kinda weird - it came to me this morning as I was half asleep, half awake. So don't read too much into it.

I think that I'll start working on a pair of stilts tomorrow.

Another Silly Wizard Post

Silly Wizard is a mix of crazy Scottish jigs and the more sorrowful songs as well. They're almost too hard to explain¹.

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^{1) Especially with a 23 word limit. But, as Philip tells you, they're really good. I was reading up about them so I'd be more informed. The band started in 1971, they started touring in 1972, and they broke up 17 years later. Many members changed during that time, and the first album they recorded was never released. I think it would be really neat to hear that album. They became fairly popular by the time they stopped, especially compared to the 30 people they played to when they started. Anyways, it might be cheating to write all this stuff in footnotes. Phil just said they didn't count for the number of words so I figured I could write lots then.}

Silly Wizard

I was not going to do a post exclusively about Silly Wizard, but John pointed out an error on my previous page. They are Scottish, not Irish. I may post more about them later, but cannot now because of a situation which I am not at liberty to reveal at this time. I can say, however, that I would just as soon acquire a Scottish accent as an Irish one.

I can talk about Scotland and Ireland. These lands were both heavily raided by the Viking back in the day. This raiding naturally involved a lot of rape. Also, the Norsemen would sometimes move in permanently. I have read of genetic studies of the amount of Scandinavian ancestry among various European peoples. The Scots and the Irish have a lot of Scandinavian blood.

Anyhow, their accents sound very similar to me. And this is all I had to go on for Silly Wizard because until my recent research, all I knew of them was from the music itself. Maybe there are some clues in the lyrics of their origin, but I was not keen to it.

ALL CAPS AND BOLD

John linked the same page because of this guy's poor grammar and obvious scam. I'm not one to criticize the grammar or spelling of others, but I have to point out one thing.

Using all caps is really annoying. Using bold face is really annoying. Just one instance of both at the same time is distracting enough to make the rest of the passage hard to read - because the eyes are drawn to the bold caps and one must concentrate to read anything else.

This guy uses bold caps 23 times in one "paragraph"¹ - by my count². I forced myself to read the first part of the passage, but was still unable to make much sense of it. Trying to read further makes my brain hurt. I'm not sure if it's the concentration required to keep my eyes from darting to the nearest bold cap "universal energy" or the effort wasted in trying to make sense of the nonsense.

Also, someone should tell the people who write this junk that using bold caps is a sure sign that the author is a crank and the product is a sham. I don't know if they ever read any actual scientific publications, but the real ones never use bold caps. Only cranks use bold caps.

Using fake contractions in my posts might be fun, but I cannot bring myself to use boldc'ps myself even for demonstration purposes.

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<sup>1. I must use quotations around the word "paragraph" here because I believe that, by definition, a paragraph must contain at least one sentence.

2. I did not double check my count.</sup>

Third time's a charm

"It used to be that you could tell when someone was talking to the mothership. now they might just be on their cell phone." -John

I don't get "won't"

what's with the word "won't". I understand contractions - they're not all that complicated. You combine two words and drop out a letter or two to be replaced with a '.

I am = I'm
Is not = Isn't
Am not = amn't (actually I just made this one up, if you use it, someone will probably make fun of you - it's really ain't - but that ain't a word according to my elementary school playground. Incidentally, I don't get "ain't" for the same reason that I don't get "won't", but at least "ain't" is refuted on school playgrounds)
will not = won't

WTF? shouldn't that be "willn't" you don't say "I wo not do that" "wo" is not a word and definitely not a synonym of "will".

So I try to avoid using the word "won't" in all my writing. Actually, I tend to use contractions less in writing than in speaking (though obviously not on the craziness blog - probably because I'm trying to write it as I would actually say it which I don't usually do when writing).

So now I'm going to talk more about my headphones from the previous post - I can do that because this is my blog.
These are some nice $150 DJ headphones - This is not a feckin advertisement, so I willn't reveal the brand, but they have a pretty high reputation for consumer electronics. The headphones are awesome. I've never heard sound as clear from anything else. I've listened to songs on these puppies and had epiphanic moments because I could actually hear the words of the song clearly and finally knew what they were really saying. It's awesome. Also, the bass out of these things is incredible - it's more than enough for my taste, though they certainly don't have enough power to make your whole body vibrate - if you're into that sort of bass, which I amn't

Oh - about Silly Wizard: These guys make me want to acquire an Irish accent (Irishacc'nt)

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Be sure to tune into craziness next week for modular origami pictures - only on cue pee crazy dot blog spot dot com.

You learn something new every day

I just learned something new about my motherboard (an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe - a very nice Athlon64 socket 939 board, though I have not taken advantage of the SLI capability and probably never will).

This motherboard features an integrated surround sound audio card (ATI IXP150 AC'97). It's not spectacular, but it is surround sound. I've played around with the thing a bit, but I've never connected more than 2 speakers to it. But my case does have front panel audio jacks which connect to an internal connector on the motherboard - these front panel jacks only support stereo output. I have my speakers plugged into the rear jacks.

I rarely use the front jack, but I wanted to test out my $150 headphones because I left them too close to the heater and melted the hard plastic earpiece cover and I wanted to make sure that nothing inside was damaged (it's not, they still sound awesome and I don't care about the purely cosmetic damage).

I was playing some Silly Wizard (If I was a Blackbird - one of my all time most favorite songs) and on a whim picked up the headphones and plugged them into the front jack. I could hear the sound coming out of the headphones before putting them on, but I was surprised that the speakers went silent. I did not know that the audio output was designed this way - I just thought that the stereo output was duplicated to the internal connectors for the front panel, it's not, it's switched so that using it mutes the rear stereo jack. cool.

useless keyboard

Of course the only thing that I use that MS "Natural" keyboard for is hitting the enter key at boot¹. You'll notice that I haven't switched it to colemak². It does have the colemak layout installed.

I'm going to go fix the boot loader now.

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<sup>1. I have to hit the enter key because there's something wrong with my boot loader. I could fix the problem in about 5 seconds, but I'm too lazy (I keep forgetting to until I have to boot again). Also, I wouldn't ever have to shutdown except that the fans are a bit distracting when I'm trying to sleep.
2. I thought about switching the keys to the colemak layout, but it would be kinda hard because they have some funny sized keys because of the "Natural" shape. So I'd have to scrape off the letters and repaint them - at least a few of them. I'm just not up for that.</sup>

Speakerectomy

My first speakerectomy on a non-computer. Now it does not beep. Ever. It retains full function other than beeping - the patient survived the operation.

It was not a full speakerectomy as I actually just disconnected one lead from the speaker leaving the speaker intact. So speaker function could be restored with a speakerectomy reversal, though I do not know why anyone would ever want to do that - especially with the patient in question.

Disha Washa

Yup, keyboards are dishwasher safe. It's all clean now and the keys aren't so stiff - but this keyboard pretty much sucked when it was brand new. People need to learn to not buy into this sort of gimmick.

By the way, I did not put the entire keyboard in the dishwasher, just the top 1/2 of the shell with all the keys in there. I removed all the electronics and the rubber membrane with all the rubber nipples on it¹. But I did run the dishwasher at the high temp on the "pots and pans" setting with heated dry. And it didn't melt any of the plastic components. And all the keys stayed in place. I was half expecting to be digging melted keys from under the rack.

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1. Never seen this membrane? Well, what are you waiting for? Take your keyboard apart right now. No, seriously¹. All you need is a screwdriver with a Philip's Head #1² for the tiny screws inside. You'll also probably have to remove a metal plate inside to get to the membrane. If you're really unlucky then it will not be a membrane, but a bunch of little rubber nipples that are a real pain to get back in because there are like 105 of them and they don't like to stay in place when you re-assemble the keyboard.

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1. I do not recommend that you attempt to disassemble a laptop keyboard. Please stick to external keyboards only - also avoid external laptop-like keyboards like they small gyration wireless keyboard. The only way to access the membranes on the laptop keyboard is to take all the keys off one-by-one. It's a real pain to put back together. I've done it several times as you can see on my colemak post in which I rearrange the keys. But you are more likely to break something if you attempt to remove the keys improperly. A laptop keyboard is just a stamped metal plate with 4 tabs sticking up for each key. 3 stacked sheets of plastic contain the circuitry and "switches" and the rubber membrane provides the interface between the keys and the switches. The keys are held on with two little plastic 'U's which interlock with each other, the key, and the 4 tabs on the sheet which protrude through holes in the plastic and rubber. The rubber also serves to keep the keys up. You can type on just the membrane having removed all the hard plastic keys, but the nipples tend to move sideways as easily as down, so you "miss" a lot. Every laptop keyboard I've ever seen is made this way. Most other keyboards aren't much better, they just have a plastic shell that keeps all the keys in place somehow - I've seen a few different ways - instead of having the keys attached to the metal plate.

2. Every keyboard I've ever seen (except laptop keyboards of course) is held together with philips head screws, never those annoying triangular head screws you find on chinese made toys from fast food restaurants¹, or the slightly less annoying tiny star head screws you find on hard drives that are too small for the smallest bit in a normal set of star head bits.

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1. Why do they bother using those triangle head screws? Are they afraid that someone's going to take one apart to discover the top-secret internals of the cheap chinese toy? Are they afraid that a toddler is going to get hold of a screw driver, take the toy apart, and choke on the components? Are they afraid that someone might fix the thing if it breaks?

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Disclaimer: I do not endorse disassembling your keyboard or putting it in the dishwasher. I am not responsible if you injure yourself or damage your keyboard.

I don't think those are supposed to go in there

Are Keyboards dishwasher safe?

Touchpad

i been usin a laptop and its touchpad for so long that i tend to reach for the touchpad rather than the mouse even when i have a mouse plugged in. in fact, the only difference that makes any difference to me anymore is the scroll wheel. if my touchpad had scroll wheel and middle button functionality then i wouldn't need a mouse at all ever - except when using my desktop of course. though i did have an old touchpad from a piece of crap laptop that i was thinking of connecting to a ps/2 connector so that it could be used from a desktop. i still think it would be a pretty cool thing to do.

Identify

Sorry my recent posts haven't been that crazy - guess I just don't have much drama in my life right now to stir things up in my brain.

I'll try to make up for that in this post.

Ever look at yourself in the mirror or in a picture and wonder "who is this person?" I don't mean "Who am I?" a self-identity thing, but more like "I do not recognize this person."

I just did that with the picture I took of myself for my picasa page. I don't look at myself in the mirror a whole lot or take a million pictures of myself all the time like some guys I know. I may go for several days without really looking at myself. So I was looking at the picture, post-processing it for upload to picasa (I did no touch up except to desaturate and adjust a slight overexposure). Then I was looking at it and trying to imagine that I was looking at a complete stranger. It wasn't very hard. I could easily disassociate from the person in the photograph. I was like "Who is that guy? I don't know and I don't care what happens to him. And I'm sure he doesn't care what happens to me."

Music Player Daemon

so i got two computers setup in my room - my laptop and my desktop. why? because i can. i use synergy¹ to control both computers with one keyboard and one mouse. this is pretty convenient. i have like 3 each of keyboards and mice in the room, but not having to set one down and pick the other up is nice. i use nfs to access the desktop's much larger hard drive from the laptop. i like to do most interactive work on the laptop because the screen is a lot better². but the speakers³ on the desktop are better. so, i found the mpd program⁴.

i was just looking for a sound player to replace the crappy xmms which has been a mainstay the linux community for years, but was recently black listed by the gentoo maintainers because of > 30 bugs or something. i found some really good players, but what go my attention was mpd, the music player daemon⁵. the player itself runs in the background with no gui or any such thing. gui clients can connect to it. the upshot of this is that i can now control the player from my laptop, but the desktop does all the actual work of playing the music. the files are stored on the desktop, decoded on the desktop, and play from the desktop speakers.

this software allows for some pretty cool setups. you could build a dedicated music server connected to some really nice speakers that would be accessible to anyone on the network. you could probably hack a slu2 (can you add audio output to these - i suppose you could) or other network storage device or any of a number of embedded devices. this thing's job would be to play music and nothing else. it could contain its own storage on which to hold all the music or access it from another server through nfs or smb⁶

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<sup>1. synergy - you can google it if you haven't been paying attention to me in the last 2 years. I have blogged it a couple of times.

2. the desktop has a really crappy 14" monitor that I got from Good Will for 6.99. I know exactly how much it was because the price is still written on top in black crayon. I think I got it in Orlando or Atlanta.

3. they're just some crappy computer speakers, but they're way better than the crappy built-in laptop speakers. I can't easily connect external speakers to the laptop because the first thing I did when I bought it was to break the headphone jack. I have a usb soundcard that works with my laptop, but it's a pain in the butt to use it and switch back and forth. plus I don't like having all kinds of wires and things coming out of my laptop - that's how the headphone jack got broken in the first place.

4. mpd - google it

5. a daemon is a program that runs in the background (server) and usually allows other programs (clients) to connect to it. It's a pretty common design and the unix/linux/open-source community employs it frequently. clients can generally connect from a local machine or a networked machine.

6. wtf is smb you ask? it's the windows file sharing protocol. the open source software to access it is called samba. yes, you can access it from linux or pretty much any other os because samba is open source and can be made to run on pretty much any os. i don't bother with it myself because i don't use any windows systems and windows file sharing has always been a real pain in the ass. i've tried to get file sharing working between two win xp computers with no success - then seen an mcse attempt the same on the same systems with no success. windows just sucks like that. i got nfs working, no problem, and i got an ftp server running, no problem. i can't say that these setups are exactly easy, but they're at least possible which is more than i can say for smb. i think the two computers were running two different versions of xp and i firmly believe that in that particular situation it was simply not possible to get file sharing to work.</sup>

A Rollercoaster for Astronauts

They're puttin a rollercoaster on the space shuttle launch pad. lol.

The most annoying thing in the world

My dad has this wireless thermometer designed to display the outside temperature from up to 3 sensors as well as the inside temperature as read by the receiver.

That's all great - you can see how cold it is, Yeah!

It also keeps track of the day's coldest point and such. Again, that's great.

However, the designers must have thought that the fact that the current temp is the lowest so far is the most important information in the world and that the family will be running to the thermometer all day to see just how cold it is. The stupid thing beeps every time it reads a temperature lower than any of the day's previous readings. This beep is one of those beeps designed to really get your attention - it's extremely annoying. And when the temperature is dropping - like at night, when you're trying to get to sleep or watch a movie or something - or like the entire season of autumn, the thing is continuously beeping at random intervals.

There is no way to disable the beep - except to change to a channel with no thermometer attached. I don't know how my dad's got the thing set up, but there are 3 channels and only 2 of them display a temp. So when it's on the 3rd channel it doesn't beep, but it doesn't show a temp either. This is fine as far as I'm concerned - If I cared how cold it was, I'd just step outside, say "Yeah, it's cold", and then go back inside. I don't really give a crap about "highs" and "lows" or any of that weatherman junk. But my dad is always checking on the temp. So when I got the display set to channel 3 so that it doesn't beep, he has to switch it to one of the other channels to see how cold it is. And he always leaves it on one of the other channels.