CarlSeibert

Mixed and somehow manipulated concrete for what is turning out to be the most over-wrought small speaker stands in history. Concrete is strange stuff.

Good god! That's shit that only happens to other people. I'm really happy you and that creature didn't come to blows. Or to be more specific that he didn't do well in the fight. I assume you squished him. Oh, and perhaps now I should mention that the Miami-Dade government is talking about de-funding the fire department's anti-venom unit. That wouldn't matter to anybody outside of south Florida except that through one of those "you couldn't make up anything this twisted" scenarios, for bites from certain unsavory critters, the only person in the southeastern US who can legally (or physically for that matter, since they possess the juice) give you the anit-venom shot is a Miami-Dade fireman.

It was our anniversary today. Spent the day at the beach. Stayed in our friends' trailer in Briny Breezes. It was lovely.

Groan. I'm sorry I brought it up. No wait, Dreadhead brought it up. It's all his fault ) So now everybody is owed an explanation. OK. I work on a news desk. I edit pictures and video for a newspaper, TV station and website. I see the raw, unedited feeds from all the wires, all the supplemental wires and the output of our correspondents . I see the the same raw news that Fox News does. I see what comes in and what goes out. Believe me when I tell you those guys are not a credit to their profession. To get the same level of spin and manipulation in politically-leaning media, you have to go to the free weeklies, like New Times. Huffington Post doesn't come close. MSNBC doesn't come close. What makes Fox pernicious and New Times, ah "interesting" is that New Times doesn't misrepresent what it is. Nobody is going to come up to me and say they got the "real news" from New Times. Fox News, on the other hand has the brass balls to use slogans like "Fair and Balanced" and "We report. You decide." Their talking heads spend half their time tearing down the rest of the media for doing the very thing that is Fox News has built an empire on - and usually in incendiary terms. Good god. How can they live with themselves? Part of the problem is endemic to broadcasting itself, not that this lets Fox News off the hook. News, analysis and opinion tend to blur together on TV. In some ways, that's a good thing. Newspapers have tended to be too dry. Rarely do we have an opportunity, without straying too far into the land of spin, put news in context for your life. To do the arithmetic to tell you, for example, how much oil is off Florida's coast, expressed in days of consumption. (A little less than six months of US consumption in case you were wondering. We did do that one little bit of math. It took a couple of people half a day to confirm the figures to "publishable" standard. ) TV does a lot better job of talking in terms that are meaningful in "your" life. On the other hand, consumers tend not to know where fact stops and opinion begins. I got a scary memo the other day. The point was to praise Fox News for "owning" their niche. It contained a list of the top ten rated "news shows" on TV. Fox News owned most of the spots, MSNBC had one or two and CNN had one or two. That's not scary. What's scary is that not one of the top ten "news shows" was a news show. Each and every one was an opinion/talk show like O'Reilly, Olbermann, Beck or Maddow. No straight news in sight. The rumble you hear is Ed Murrow turning over in his grave. If the ratings people don't differentiate between opinion and news, how the heck is the "average person" going to do it? I don't know about you, but that scares the crap out of me. Today's market is making it worse. Aggregators deliver much of "the news" that ultimately decides how our society is run. The Huffington Post is a good example, among tens of thousands of others. They don't report a damn thing. It's info-pinion. At least nobody runs up to me and says he gets "real news" from the HuffPost. But if you're looking for information that will lead you to, say, vote for someone, you've gotta know it's the farthest thing there could be from one-stop shopping. Bottom line: If you want a conservative-leaning media outlet that you can trust for something resembling the facts, The Wall Street Journal is a good choice. It's available everywhere and despite some nervousness in the industry about its ownership, it still does quality work. The Economist is a good choice too, especially for US news. It's expensive, but worth it. ... if you want to be bored/entertained by my best rambling Fox News anecdote, read on. If you hurt yourself falling over asleep at your keyboard, it's not my fault. You've been warned. One night I was editing the Iraq page. A picture intrigued me. It showed a crowd of people in Fallujah, of all places, chanting "Death to Terrorists!". Hmmm. Now here's another picture of what looks like same crowd at a different time of day. Now they're chanting "Death to America". Dammit. What could have been a ten-minute job is going to take and hour and at least a couple of consultations with colleagues. And somebody is going to have to suck it up somewhere because I'm about to eat way too much deadline on this. So I'm going through all the pictures and stories out of that part of Iraq, one by one, trying to figure out what I can do, and I glance up at the bank of TVs. Who should glare back down at me but O'Reilly hiz own self. He announces that he has something that the rest of of the biased, lying, sack of shit media won't dare show you...... my Fallujah crowd, in "Death to Terrorist" mode. Now his producers are looking at the same thing I am. (Time zone difference. This material has been in east coast US newsrooms since mid-day.) Not only does this windbag legitimize some dubious data, he ascribes it broad social and political significance. And insults anybody with a professional conscience while doing it. Now mind you, O'Reilly is about opinion, not facts. But that doesn't let him off the hook. With power comes responsibility. Opinions are optional. The truth shouldn't be. What did I end up doing with the Fallujah crowd? To be honest, I don't remember. But I know for sure what I DIDN'T do.

Just got an email. I won one of those oscillating tools that does everything in the Woodcraft Pirate Chest Giveaway, which is one of those silly affairs that draw a crowd of geeks (yes, me and a hudred others) to a store in a strip mall to try a sheet metal key in a padlock. And of course buy something they didn't really need while there, which in my case was a $55 dust collector hood. So nobody's key worked for the oscillating gizmo, apparently. Makes my day. A little certified good luck does wonders. Yippie!

When I was a little kid, the journalism market was full of diverse voices, although few of them were of any quality. From there, we somehow evolved into an infection of orthodoxy served up by monopolists. So I should think Fox News is great, right? A step back toward our roots as a vital force in society or something? No. They're too big and too powerful to have shabby quality as an excuse. They go beyond spin. They plain, flat make stuff up and pawn it off as journalism. They apparently think their customers are outright idiots. Which is somehow unsettling for those of us who are struggling to maintain some relevance in an industry that has become synonymous with "existential crisis". So there. rant and an existential crisis all in one. Oh, and I'll vote for the notion that "average people" who try to behave a little better to feel better about themselves aren't even close to "average" (at least by the standard of "average" that thirty years in this business has provided me) and just might be taking the first little step to being ready if historical dumb luck requires a "great person" in their neighborhood.

More of a cat person myself.... Naw. Not even gonna think it..........

I have single-drivers (modified FE127e's in Metronomes) in my den and like them. It's an itty bitty room, though - about 10 by 12 by however tall a typical South Florida room is.

Hi Miguel, I've never heard Fritz' speakers, but I talked to him at length when I was contemplating buying/building my first set of full rangers. He seemed to be an extraordinarily straightforward and kind fellow.

Happy sniping. Bear in mind that while on FleaBay any bid earlier than two minutes out is just an invitation for some ding-a-ling to run up the price, Audiogon is a no-snipe zone. A bid there in the last five minutes automatically extends the auction. Man was I embarrassed.

Congratulations. I hope the cake got shot before it got eaten. Back in the day, when I shot food a lot, the staff always considered it good form if the stylist made deserts practically (so they could be eaten). If there was cake involved, the hungry sharks would already be schooling up as the film was coming out of the processor.

Well, I can't say they're Pink Pythons of Perfection, but they're pink pythons of pretty good at least. Inspired by the guy whose link Pars posted, they're 2 meters long and no Teflon tube was harmed in their building, apart from a couple of half-inch lengths for the center wire at the plugs, which are my favorite ersatz WBTs from Parts Express. My contribution is to use cotton thread to bind the silver conductor to the rope, which seems a decent idea and allows you to build in the cotton spirit, without any PTFE touching the conductors. I actually used PTFE tape first and then the thread, mostly because I wasn't comfortable with the thread yet and I didn't want the things unraveling on me. The cotton jacket is jersey t-shirt material, which turns out to be a pain in the butt to work with. The edges curl up and you have the devil's own time getting it to lay flat. I'll use woven cotton next time. The curly edges made for a spiral bump down the cable, but two layers of Teflon wound over the cotton pulled it all down to a more or less uniform shape. So how does it sound? It trounced the rather decent commercial cable it replaced. A significant hardness was replaced by better resolution and a more relaxed musicality. Transients were better. Dynamics were better. Generally speaking, it was mo' better. Break in behavior is not the same as I've had on other silver cables I've made. Normally, they're pretty disappointing for the first few minutes (all midrange, no extension and no subtlety) then they pop into focus in less than an hour and don't really change any more. These don't seem to be changing much. Either they aren't going to change at all or they'll do it slowly, more like what you're supposed to expect from silver cables. We'll see. For it's intended purpose, it's a success. But that doesn't answer the real question, which is "is the cotton better, worse, or the same as the tubes?". Given that this is the longest cable in the den system, it's not as easy as I would like to work out a way to compare. If I take it out of its place, then I have to put the inferior old cable back in. It's a sticky wicket. I'll contrive something and report back. (I'll upload the file of the picture of the thread binding so it will stay permanently with the post.)

Happy Birthday!

The braid arrived today. Many thanks, morphsci! You were most generous. There's more here than I need. I feel a power cord coming on. If the size works out, it too will sport a fancy braid sheath. I made the cores for the shielded cables this weekend. When the rest of the parts arrive and I get them together, I'll post.

Interesting. Of course ten grand is lot of money for a turntable, or more specifically, more than I have for one. But not wearing out your records and not having to buy new carts every whenever make it seem more reasonable.

It's some sort inverse-Darwinian worker selection scheme to mess with people who just want to goods and services they paid for without any drama. Got a call from the bank today. It seems some piece of shit script kiddie breached one of my credit cards. That would be the same credit card that I had to cancel and replace not more than two months ago because the bank itself managed to let about a gillion accounts get compromised. OK. That's annoying. But the lady in the fraud department was one of those people who confuse numbers - who think one number and say another. What pointy-haired genius decided that the person who can't associate numbers and the words for them should work in a credit card department, on the freaking phone! I was on the phone for an hour. I tried my best to confirm and re-confirm everything I said, but if your credit card is a couple of digits off mine and stops working today..........

Have you - or anybody we know - actually heard one of these? I remember thinking when it came out that it was a fascinating idea. Then I never heard another word about it.

Floods suck. I made the all important and politically more attractive left channel run of that set of interconnects today.

Been on vacation for a couple of days now. Check that. It's been three. Installed T-track in my router fence. Fell asleep with my headphones on (twice) Made half a set of interconnects (the right channel) Listened to some records. Dined on golden (abyssal) crabs. Lost track of time. -- Doug - is that zebrawood?

So sad.

Hmmm. I see a link that says "View all subscribed threads". It looks like the one in the full size version. When I follow it, I get the same list of subscribed threads - which is all of them as best I can tell - and the same option "View all subscribed threads". Click the link again and the same list is returned. This with Opera on a Windows Mobile 6.1 device. Stand by. I'll try Internet Exploder and see how it behaves. .......... same behavior in IE.

It would be cool if you could filter subscribed threads for those with new messages in them, too. But no biggie.

Ah. Er. Mia culpa.

About four feet of 1/2". It's for half meter/two foot-ish ICs, so it doesn't have to be one continuous piece.

Some person of questionable socialization kicked one of our video reporters today. Of course, we don't mention the vile threats this guy made against the reporter's mother or his behavior in general, so when the video is on YouTube people will think that he's a normal person and that our guy must have been terribly rude and deserved the boot. We are our own worst enemies. The Miami police are "investigating". Funny, scary and sad all at once.