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Highs and lows.....sorry if TL;DR The highs: I love my neighborhood, and the people within. I maintain a website for the "Bunco Babes" here, a group of women who would get together monthly to socialize, play bunco...and drink. Since Karen passed, much of the organizing has dropped off. But the OG's of the babes invited me to a get-together; little did I know if was partially to thank me for the web site and congratulate my retirement. Pics below. A low with a little bit of high: we have a local "Buy Nothing" FB group, for free things. I have refurbed and donated computers perhaps a dozen times now. Gave two laptops away this weekend, one to a gent who has been out of work for almost 4 years because he was in an accident where a Mack truck blew a red light and slammed into him. He is now in somewhat constant discomfort or pain, and can't do much physically; insurance fights every step of the way. He even gets PTSD driving long trips.... Yet still, he does a lot of nice small things for others, and we shared our stories about that. Oh, yes: we had one FB friend in common, a wonderful woman with whom I used to work. She passed away from cancer and pneumonia complications recently; it turns out this is her distant cousin, and he didn't even know of her passing. The lower low: another laptop I gave to a woman who has an autistic son (two other kids too, one of whom has pretty high functioning autism). I volunteered to bring the laptop and a full docking station with monitor setup I had over. This amazing woman and her husband spend almost 24x7 watching her youngest, as he has non-verbal autism and also has a potentially deadly condition where his digestive tract will get blocked. Constant monitoring and care, advocating for him at hospital and doctor visits, etc. Hugs and tears resulted. They don't even have a place right now to set up the full monitor, so I told her I will come and help when they do find the space. You can see the strain, yet the strength all at once. Humans are such amazing creatures. But the two situations above point out how much the system works against so many, though!

Last night Andrew made me dinner to celebrate my retirement. Also got to see his condo just about fully done with renovations. This kid did amazing design work for it! Even the Designer he worked with - who also did our bathroom remodels in 2024 - said he had an great sense of taste and style, doing some things even she didn't think about..... Dinner was awesome, roast seasoned chicken (amazingly tender), dan dan noodles with a decent kick/spice, and sauteed and seasoned spinach. Watched Buckaroo Banzai (*) and listened to a bunch of music and just chatted. A really wonderful night! (*) I updated my LinkedIn profile to list my "new" job as Laser Engineer, Oscillation Overthruster Division at Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems. That is the fictitious company in the movie. Only one person got it so I had to update my "About" section to tell people to Google it, and that I was retired.

A very exciting Sunday in Hell. No spoilers this time! Apropos of Roubaix, I put some 40mm slicks on to try out. I am very interested to see how they feel.

Yesterday: Installed (functional) matching tie backs. Fixed hissing / pinprick leak in valve that caused rise from set point to edge of overflow by replacing entire valve assembly after replacing and lubricating just the washer valve failed to improve the situation. Now stays silently at set point. Today: Then: For the house. Replaced With one of For the 'fridge. I think I may deserve a Usual after all that.

I decided that it was time for a proper camera to capture the kids. My iPhone appears to have over-processed the shit out of this photo of the photo-taking tool.

You're an amazing person, Todd. Cheers! EDIT: And that was before I saw the other post. I'm at a loss for words. Thank you so much, Todd and everyone.

Thank you, Todd. This last post of yours helped me to recover some faith in the human race, which I’ve been losing for a few years now.

No worries at all! I had found your original comment funny too, but this is even better! BTW, forgot to mention that I even put "John" as my....nickname? And no one asked me about that as well! (For those that haven't seen the movie, the aliens, both good and evil/male and female) are all named John or some variant)

"Fly me to the moon..." https://www.twitch.tv/nasa Direct on Twitch. getting pretty big.

Felt Mountain by Goldfrapp (2000) https://open.qobuz.com/album/u1lencfygsq0e Example: Some frapp for taco Tuesday.

Mushroom medley and leek pizza

Haters will saw it Photomeowshopped.

The bike is looking SWEET! I got out for a nice 27mi windy rip around town this afternoon. Felt good to be back outside again before I have to travel for a few days and be away from the bike.

^^ Because it's a goddamn brilliant camera. I got to shoot with a D4S at work for a bit but have too much Sony stuff at this point to ever practically think about another system. Speaking of Sony, the A7V's 30fps is goddamn bonkers. Sounds like a Gatling gun but allows for capturing some pretty great shots even in mediocre hands. Edit - yes, that's Andrew with the glasses running the 800m today.

My kayak instructor from Chile is playing as “Granny’s Mason Jar” tonight. Good bluegrass.

Let's see how deep we can go into Chinese lens recreations. After success with several Light Lens Lab models, and reading/watching too many reviews on this, just ordered the even cheaper Mandler (named after Walter Mandler, the Leica and IMAX lens designer) 35mm F2 “7 elements” based on the Leica Summicron 35mm Type IV (KOB). We'll see.

Rush - Permanent Waves

I just really love this song so much. I was actually working on translating it to guitar, back when I played.

Alec's International Relations professor dug this up as the last time they had any good musical protests at SMU (not exactly UC Berkeley being in Texas and all) over a stupid war. Pity we have one.

Clafoutis, Katharine Hepburn's Brownies, Ice Cream, Nice Cup Of Tea, and Scrabble!

hot pot soup with tofu, daikon radish, regular(?) radish, bok choy, bell pepper guts...and a wee bit of chicken

Just got home from our SF/Phoenix trip. ‘Twas fun and great to see my brother and his wife and our son. Gratuitous pictures

Mega necro here. Last sumemr I bought an unlocked Android tablet. Today I taught myself how to use Morphe to patch the YouTube and Reddit apps for android. It involved a lot of jumping through hoops that were unfamiliar to me. It took me four tries, but managed to get both working. This means I now have native (or if you prefer, "native") apps for both platforms that support ad blocking. If I'm not mistaken, the YT app now has integrated SponsorBlock support, which is quite something.

I kind of despise this guy and his opinions. He’s so happy of meeting himself…

Travelin McCourys Young Guns tour https://archive.org/details/travelinmccourys2026-04-09_202604 The Young Guns were a group of kids from 16 to 7 1/2. They were fantastic players who drove from all over the southeast to play last night, they'd never met each other before sound check.

Saw that on a Hannah short this morning.

No reference, just vibes.

🦃 🌶️ 🤖 🥒 🍆

Turkey Chilli with AI extra veggies PDF please? Turkey_Chili_Pierre_Franey_Customized.pdf

No work on the turbo encabulator, or the Rockwell retro encabulator? Dissapoint.

it is a shame that Nikon no longer has that in production. I think I counted about 23 times today that they said D5. ...earth...

This one is complex. Hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa dead at 67. The guy coined the term "hip hop." Calling him a pioneer is an understatement. The problem is that he was a child molester and got away with it for decades. There is at least one alleged murder involved in the coverup of his crimes. I can't say RIP in this case.

Congrats!

And that person was not me. I am so ashamed. I did change my answer though, hope that wasn't too spoiler of me.

This. Thanks for the rec. Yum indeed.

Those look like Renesas parts, which have very faint and hard to see printing.

Here's a pic of what the guy on diyaudio has. This looks like the one on the bottom of your pic. The only way to know for sure would be to pull them and test them, but I'm not sure how to best do that. Here is a link to the fs thread, and this guy is trustworthy. In Europe, but shipping hasn't been too bad not has delivery time.

.

Sorry, one more…

The Carpenters

This!

Peak of mid-80s South African new romanticism. I realize that's quite specific.

Holy shit Dusty. Just saw this on FB. I am so glad you are here in this world!

Lot of hate for these guys back in the day as grunge pretenders, but I enjoyed the throwback.

Congrats and ahhh congrats to both of you. Good vibes all around.

When I've had time recently I've assembled a few more DIY electrostatic headphones: First off, the last of the Superex chassis I had in stock so I designed a new stator design for them: This has been a long running project to to make drivers and test the various aspects in a controlled housing. They are not ideal as they are mostly closed but I got a bunch of them for next to nothing years ago. New stators with some minor tweaks and a protective grill too: These are not really built for sound quality but to test different coatings, distortion tests on drivers and all that jive but still fun to have a pile of these here. Since the Superex is just a Beyerdynamic clone, I found some DT880's with blown drivers that could also work: The need to be modified internally a bit to open up the back but nothing major. Different stators on this one and the drivers have to be at a 45° angle to get it all to fit (not that it matters at all) but same basic idea as above Round them off with some nice leather pads, silicone 6 core cable and my new Stax plugs that I've been refining recently. These do sound better than the Superex shell as the backwave is more open. Finally, the second of those Kiwi Ears headphones was fitted with drivers: No major changes here except I didn't use the bayonet plate to fix the earpads, I rather slipped the stock pads over the lip of the housing which helped a lot Also some simple tweaks to ensure better baffle seal: Thick cloth tape here and it works nicely. These are okey sounding headphones for next to no money at all.