CarlSeibert

Happy Birthday Tyll! It sounds like you had a great day.

RIP Matt

Thanks Todd! I missed you guys.

Major feline win.

In my case, the mains in that room are horn-ish (quarter-wave pipes), which made me think these might do well with them. Well, one of them. Space constraints put stereo out of the question.

Had lunch at the Peter Pan Lounge with Miguel, Richard (a new guy from the other site) and a whole lot of portable gear. We had a great time.

Ditto. A new sub for the home theater of the absurd is a long overdue project. These sound interesting.

Super congratulations to all the newlyweds!

I'm just stuck on this part. What's the line from Apocolypse Now? "Do this and you never have to prove your bravery in any other way".

Sounds like you're on the right track. Short speaker cables are good if for no other reaason than because speaker cables tend to be expensive. In theory, the best interconnects should be the ones between the preamp and amp because the signal always goes through them, whichever source may be selected, and they're usually the longest. (That said, the best sounding system I know has a forty foot run of microphone cable as its main interconnect.) Balanced is way better if you can do it, in my experience, especially for that long preamp-to-amp run. Cheaper balanced cables> more expensive single-ended ones. I've heard slighter differences between cheap and expensive in balanced mode than single-ended, too. I don't really agree that cables are all more or less the same, but I do concur with the notion that you're more likely to hear more sound quailtiy per buck invetsing in better equipment than better cables. Not to mention that some commercial cables are absolutely terrible value for money. (Assuming, as Steve said, that you avoid corroded zipcord.) If you use interconnects made from microphone cables, shielding and balanced or not become moot points, since most of those wires have four conductors and kick-ass shielding.

I got to DAC-sit my friend Alan's PS Audio Perfect Wave this weekend. What a nice DAC!

This should work for Shelly:

I've bought cables from BlueJeans and they've been good value for money. A friend of mine has SignalCables and likes them. We've all made interconnects out of star-quad mic cable. (Which isn't to say they're the greatest, but you can't beat the price.) I've built interconnects out of jewelers small-gauge silver wire and "stuff" (the recipe is here in the cable gallery thread) that I've been very happy with (and they cost less than lint - just some labor) Speaker cables are harder to do, but I've made some out of some in a shotgun configuration out of some crazy Mogami coax that sound good and didn't cost much. They look snazzy, too, if that matters. I can find the model number of that wire if you want. If you can find some teflon-insulated CAT5 or 6 network cable, speaker cables can be fashioned from that. (many recipes on the web) I've also bought nice manufactured cables that cost a fair bit, and - gee wiz - they work really well.

Went to Skyline Chili. (guilty little treat) When it came time to pay, I had no wallet. It was embarrassing, but no biggie. I knew the wallet had to be at home, right on my nightstand. I just had to go home, grab the wallet and come back, so I wasn't stressing. When I got home, I couldn't find the silly wallet. It turned up, after some panic-y searching, in the pocket of the suit I wore yesterday. Which is a lucky break, since suits don't go in the washing machine. Went back to Skyline Chili and paid my bill. Now the planets (except Pluto) are aligned again.

Happy Birthday Antonio!

Another update: I'm ditching my ancient tape drive. For the small server share that holds really important stuff and needs daily backup, I'm trying this outfit: https://www.jungledi...group/features/ So far so good. The client runs fine on Fedora. It emails me spiffy run reports,and takes pretty close to zero effort. I'll pair the cloud backup with some sort of disk-based scheme for weeklies of the bigger datasets. At the moment, I think I'll try this: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

Wow. Just wow., as they say.

That's exactly what ran through my mind, too. We may not be seeing the broken trees for the forest or something. John - Glad it's just a few branches and none of your trees are seriously damaged.

Got back from Phoenix. I had forgotten how comfy my Fisher hearing / SE 420s are. I wish I could convince them to seal a little more consistently though.

Dusty - This thing: http://www.amazon.co...ds=cat fountain is great. Water is always available and our cats love it. The water is nice and charcoal filtered. The downside is that it makes it really hard to track consumption. If you only have one cat and can experimentally determine evaporation loss, you could easily make an index on the water tank and you would actually have a nice gauge. Two cats and consumption is totally mystery.

Great news. Personally, I have never had much luck with the false pleasantry thing. For me, it's always come out as subterfuge. Maybe that's just because I have no social skills. Your mileage may vary. However, I think the boss being the offender is an advantage. If we assume the boss is either a human being or not a complete moron I think you're in a good place. If we assume human being, she can go to the boss and say "I'm 90% sure I isolated the problem and it's actually your perfume." (In a newspaper, she could add how sorry she is that giving up the perfume might mean the boss never gets laid again, but I fear that might not exactly fly in your standard corporate environment. ) Boss- if actually human - would immediately offer to change it or not wear it or whatever and GF could offer to go get a sample to confirm that it really is the culprit or see if there's anything she can do on her end or whatever. Nice gesture of concern for human boss blah blah blah. Personally, having more faith in humanity than most people would expect, I would think/hope it should go down quick and easy. I mean, really, if somebody who was not completely obnoxious came to you and and said they were pretty sure your perfume or cologne was making them sick, wouldn't you just immediately offer to do the decent thing? If the boss is really a lizard but not a moronic lizard (and no offense meant to any actually reptiles here) boss should think "Hmm. I may like to kill this person, but it wouldn't be a very upwardly mobile bosslike thing for me to be caught violating the no-strong perfume policy to such an extent that I've actually sickened an employee. I'd better back off and be cooperative." Lacking all that, as long as GF can establish that she has been careful to do everything possible to cure the problem on her side and she's respectful of everybody's first or second amendment right to odor and whatnot, she should fare pretty well with the chain of command, in her own department or through HR, as appropriate. Somebody who knows HR law can correct me here, but I think at the corporate snake level, the underlying motivation here is that the company could be exposed to some liability if they choose to deal with the problem by firing GF for having allergies.

The new small interchangeable lens cameras are selling wildly to women. Supposedly in large part because they're in colors. Purple would be good in the office. Nobody would steal them.

Shelly- that so totally blows. In Florida we live in fear of roofs and sea walls. A sympathetic chill goes down my spine just thinking about it. It's always just when things are starting to go smoothly, too. Way to go Doug. We managed kidney disease with Toots for a couple years. It's amazing what some sub q fluids can do Dusty hang in there.

Didn't Tyll really like those, purpleness not withstanding?

As best I can tell after covering countless workplace gone wrong stories, going to HR or dealing directly with inconsiderate employees (or their direct supervisors) is a political choice dictated by the culture in the industry/company. Whichever choice is the wrong one is usually very wrong indeed. Which choice is the wrong choice politically has nothing to do with which choice might actually work or which choice puts you in an even worse spot legally, if it should go that way. Not that employees in Florida are exactly swimming in legal protections anyway. As for the problem itself, I can only offer that we once had a room in our Imaging department that was suspected of being "sick". We did all sorts of things to test or mitigate whatever it was that the test weren't finding, with no joy at all. Eventually, we moved the people out of that room. Subsequently, we laid off all those people, closed the department, and moved out of the building altogether. I guess that took care it. Which goes to show, I suppose that whatever badness happens at work, it can always get worse. I suppose it's worth asking if your GF is the only person affected. If it's just her and she was fine in another part of the building (perhaps near different perfume-wearers) that would suggest something different than if her whole workgroup has come down with the sniffles since the move. (In our case, it was half or two thirds of the employees in that space. We never figured out if they were just passing the same cold back and forth in the confined space or if it had something to do with the space itself. They were fine after we moved them elsewhere. Until they got laid off, of course.) The "sick" room was vacant for a couple of years. Then we jammed so many edit bays in it that it looked a can of TV sardines. We used the room for edit bays for about a year and a half and there was no trend of sickness in it for that period. Go figure.