The Daily Diversion Archive For August, 2003

Tuesday August 5, 2003

So I spent the balance of last evening recording some of my favorite 45rpm singles to mp3. It was slow but hugely entertaining work. The results don't sound that bad, however I might take another stab at some of the more grotty ones.

One of the things that came to mind last night was that Naked Raygun must be one of the loudest bands ever. They're quite good and a lot of fun live, but they have that huge sound that sounds better the louder it is. Vanilla Blue is the one of the best songs ever to play at painful volume. There's something very agreeable about the sound of a Gibson ES335 (Semi-hollow body electric guitar--think B.B. King) turned up to 11 through a tube amp. I'm nearly certain they had Marshalls when I saw them live, but I wouldn't swear to it. Anyway, the sound is big and raspy at the same time. I think The Kinks used this configuration quite a lot on tunes like You Really Got Me and Paranoia. Anyway, this particular guitar noise plays loudly very well. The song Vanilla Blue is just lousy with this sound and I could play it 'till I'm deaf.

I like loud music. I don't like loud music for the sheer sake of being loud, nor do I like loud music I didn't choose to listen to. I like loud music of my own choosing. Loud can be good. Loud like Led Zeppelin I, Foghat, April Wine, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. Loud, dude.

Loud like Dead Kennedys, Naked Raygun, Black Flag, Big Black and Fear.

Loud like Anthrax, Metallica, Pantera and Slayer.

Hang on a sec, I gotta go rock out.

Where do I get loud? Sad to say it, but the only place that I get loud in these days is the car. My car has a decent stereo in it and it works well for getting loud. My truck is just plain loud and there's not much point in adding music to that noise. From time to time I'll grab the headphones and get loud wherever I am, but my good headphones aren't subtle (think We Are The World video), and headphones can do a lot of damage very quickly.

Usually I won't call out my fellow bikers for doing stupid stuff on the roads out of courtesy. I don't rail on too often about how loud pipes lose rights and I don't push my helmet views on anyone (I wear one, I could give a shit what you do--It's your head). Today I'll have to make an exception.

I'm driving down eastbound I-494 coming up from the Minnesota River crossing. I'd been a little behind and to the left of a guy on an older Honda Interceptor. He was helmetless, had a long ponytail and was wearing his leathers. He was also moving around on his bike and in his lane like he was totally preoccupied with something other than the task at hand. He was looking around, changing lanes and then shaking his head at the cars that got too close to him--kinda like they were at fault for him cutting them off. Anyway, it always startles me when I see someone take their foot off the footpegs. Perhaps it's because I know how this can de-stabilize a bike. Whatever the fact, Mr. Distracted pulls his right leg off the peg and then starts digging in his right pants pocket. He's slowing down as the right side is the throttle side, and even though he's made a big deal about passing the cars behind him, he still goes and does this.

Well he didn't find what he was looking for the first time, so a little while down the road he does it again. This time, the foraging in the pocket lasts twice as long and only ends when a large something pops out of his pocket and hits the pavement behind him. I don't know what it was. It looked like it could have been a cellphone, a leatherman tool or a biggish pocket knife. Whatever it was, it hit the pavement behind him and bounced 4' or so in the air before I lost track of it.

Mr. Distracted looked back right away as if to see if something had fell out of his pocket. I'm certain he saw it, because his face went beet red. He shook his head a couple of times and then made his way to the next exit.

I had a good long laugh at Mr. Distracted's expense. What an idiot. Finally, it seems that what ought to happen to an idiot did happen to an idiot and in my plain sight, too. BONUS!

Tuesday August 12, 2003

I went out shooting with my buddy John last weekend. Man oh man was that a blast. Sorry 'bout the pun. We did our level best to get through a mountain of ammo and did a respectable job.

We were out at his folks' place in a sand pit on their back 40. John has a revolver and a semi-auto. I brought my rifles with and we shot up a bunch of paper targets. There was also a couple of very unlucky kitchen appliances that met their doom. Friends, if you're looking for a small kitchen appliance that is mighty satisfying to shoot, you can do no better than a toaster. There seems to be enough of them around, they're cheap, they're made of soft metal, and they disintegrate slowly under repeated lead invasions. All in all, you could do much worse.

I really had never seriously considered getting a pistol before. I'm toying with the idea now, but it probably won't happen. I don't need yet another hobby, Sarah would kill me, there's the whole kids and pistols thing and I'm just not interested in buying something that is going to be that big a pain in the ass. I will not deny that shooting them is bags of fun, but right now isn't the right time. Make them illegal and I'm there.

Sarah's starting to feel a bit better again and that makes me feel better. Her "morning sickness" is lifting and her cold seems to be ebbing somewhat. All is well.

The same can not be said for our street. It's been a big gravel pile for most of the summer as they've been preparing the under-the-street stuff for the new street on top. We just had our gas lines replaced yesterday. The workers who came to do it were the happiest pair of utility employees I've ever seen. It must have been the air conditioning. Anyway, we're still working on getting our water lines replaced, so we're not done having our house dug up yet.

I am getting sick of living on a gravel road, though. I've washed my car more this summer than I've ever washed any of my cars previously. The cars are perpetually covered in this nasty grit that is only made worse by our sappy, drippy, incredibly dirty walnut tree on the boulevard. My car's outside feels exactly like a sidewalk. Gritty.

I finally got to a 1st Thursday meet this year. I had the Suzuki out and polished it up. It was cleaner than it looked, but the shine on it was nice to see. It performed flawlessly until I took that fateful ride up out of downtown Saint Paul on I-94. It seems that whenever I hit that road, the bike breaks something. Thursday night it was a mis-fire on one of the three cylinders. Why? Who knows. I hadn't set the timing nor changed the spark plugs in a while. Being a two-stroke, it's probably due.

Tuesday August 19, 2003

What do you call it when a woman wants to marry a man who's still sleeping with the mother of his child?

Why, it's a Baby Momma Drama.

I overheard this on my walk to my car in the parking ramp. Two guys were standing on the Nicollet Mall in front of the Walgreen's. They were loudly talking about something that happened to the shorter one of the two. The shorter guy said, "When I heard dat, I hadda call him on the cellamaphone..."

Cellamaphone?

Did I miss something here?

It sorta sounds like this guy watches The Simpsons and was taking Homer's take on what a saxophone sounds like. "Saxamaphone...saxamaphone..."

I've been meaning to write a bunch lately, but I've been too tired to do much. We're gearing up for yet another biggie at work and that means lots of physical labor. The kind that sucks. Lots of moving PCs and hanging out on the loading dock loading carts. The loading dock is just a few degrees cooler than hell itself when the weather is as hot as it's been lately. Combine this with lifting 17" monitors (100 of 'em) and PCs (the same) and you get the idea of how much work it's been.

I sweated through my shirt twice today.

The car trip home was my saving grace. It really rocks to be able to turn up the A/C to 4 and feel your clothes drying out. I kicked off my shoes and drove home barefoot to the tunes Time Out For Fun by DEVO and Don't Stand So Close To Me by The Police. If it wasn't for the traffic jams exiting downtown Minneapolis and entering Spaghetti Junction in St. Paul, it would have been a perfect commute.

Speaking of perfect commutes, I had the shortest one ever yesterday. 28 minutes from desk to door. That's unreal good time. I was home before 5. The fact I spend an hour or so in my car every day really sucks. It's only partly mitigated by the fact my car rocks my world.

Enough about my car.

Monday August 25, 2003

I had a nice weekend. We went to a nice wedding on Saturday and I also got to hang out at my buddy Lou's place. I soaked up a bit of wine and that's always nice. I went for a motorcycle ride and nothing broke on the bike. I also watched 8 episodes of Family Guy.

It was a good weekend to hang out in the A/C. Sunday was hot and we really didn't do much of anything.

I had a bit of drama this weekend. My TV card in my main PC had been acting up. It turns out that it's roached. What caused it was a falling piece of metal put in motion by a different failure due to crappy construction. I'm talking about my Chaintech video card. It was a damn expensive piece of kit about 8 months ago. I bought it after considering all the stuff I could get to make my video pretty. Well it's pretty and still works just fine. The big problem was the fan on the video card's heat sink.

They used a crappy sleeve bearing fan that just sucked. The first card I had was faulty nearly immediately. The fan slipped down the fan shaft and started making contact with the aforementioned heat sink. Bad. I returned that one and thought I was done with it. Nope.

So the audio on my TV card had been making a bunch of noise of late. It happened about a week ago and had been getting steadily worse. I finally took the machine apart this weekend and it was perfectly obvious what had happened.

The video card has the fan and heat sink over the GPU. It also has a couple of pasted-on heat sinks on the video ram chips. Well, the fan had died again--this time it had just plain-old burned out--and this had caused everything to get pretty hot. Hot enough to cause the glue that was holding the heat sinks on to get soft and let the heat sinks fall off the card. This particular machine is a tower so the fan and heat sinks are all facing down. When the card got hot and melted the glue on the heat sinks, they fell off.

I didn't hear it, of course. What I ended up finding was one of the heat sinks on the bottom of the PC. The other heat sink was sitting on the back side of my TV card. I pulled both cards and examined them to see if there was any obviously burnt traces and/or componentry. Nope and nope. However, I'm nearly certain that the TV card's audio section is a goner due to the falling heat sink.

What did we learn today? Well, we learned that sleeve bearing fans are not up to the task of cooling a bleeding-edge GPU and chaintech should be ashamed of themselves for charging a pair of Bens for this card and sticking a shitty little sleeve-bearing fan in it. I would have gladly have paid $10 more for a decent fan. We also learned that when metal touches a piece of electronic circuitry, bad things happen. We learned that heat sinks held on with glue are close to completely useless and are just about as bad an idea as "Faith-based initiatives," two-front wars, dictatorships of the proletariat and governments based on religion. Bad stupid.

I replaced Chaintech's pile of shit heatsink and fan with a ball-bearing fan and heatsink bought for $15. Now I'm shopping for another TV card.

I have more to gripe about tonight. I have now started to get sobig-f infected emails. Being in IT right down there in the trenches, I'm very careful about my incoming emails and to whom I send emails. That it took until today to start getting sobig-f emails is simply the fruits of being careful. Unfortunately, there aren't many people as careful as I am. To date, I've been spoofed at least once and have gotten about 20 sobig-f emails. I've received about 15 bounced email messages (that I didn't send). This doesn't really even register on the pain in the ass scale, but it does suck that people are getting email from me that really isn't and that's infected with a virus.

Remember, folks: I didn't do it. Don't click on attachments that you didn't ask for. Be smart about your email addresses.