作譜

A system of checks and balances

WTF

So let me be upfront about it: I support Barack Obama’s candidacy.

It’s not because of his platform. I’ve ignored the platforms of all the candidates because pragmatism will force them to renege on a lot of promises. It’s not because I find him inspiring. I don’t have an opinion about that because I don’t care to form one. It’s not because I toe the Democrat party line. I’ve voted for Republicans in the past.

I support Obama’s candidacy out of pragmatism (that word again) and history.

It’s all too easy to get swallowed up in the echo chamber that is political coverage in the media. And it’s all too easy to perceive no progress being made when opposing forces continually butt heads. But that’s how a system of checks and balances is supposed to work. The last eight years has been a spectacular display of that system pretty much breaking down.

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Inevitable discovery

Vital Signs

Inevitable discovery is a term I learned from watching too much Law & Order. Although the concept has a specific definition in legal circles, there’s an underlying idea that I guess could be analogous to the notion of fate.

If a set of circumstances would have prevented an outcome from happening, could it still eventually happen through the normal course of events?

Today, I am a web developer at a technology company. I became a web developer because I saw limited opportunities at my former newspaper job. I ended up at the paper because of an internship program to which I was accepted after college. I applied for the internship because I was confident my experience with the college daily paper prepared me. I worked at the paper because I was encouraged to pursue journalism as a course of study. I studied journalism because a number of people saw I had a talent for it.

One of those people was Robin J. Gould. She taught the first journalism course I took in college. She served as adviser for the student newspaper during the two years I was working as desk editor. She was, in short, my rabbi. (Another term I learned from Law & Order.) We lived through a lot of bullshit bureaucratic drama, thus developing a kinship based as much on survival as common interest.

She passed away in the last few weeks.

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I’m a numismatic tourist

Vital Signs

My office held a white elephant party right before Christmas, and I ended up with a 50-state commemorative quarter holder. So now I’ve been obsessing over all the change I get. I have yet to find a Web 2.0 application to keep track of these coins — because really, it would so be easy to build one, I figure someone must have by now — so I’m resorting to an old-fashioned blog entry with an ordered list.

Here’s what I have so far:

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Timing is everything

Technophilia

I joked to myself that once the laptop was completely paid off, something would go wrong with it. I was partially correct.

I sent off the final payment of the laptop on Dec. 31. On Jan. 4, my desktop died. As mentioned before, I thought it was a hard drive problem. It turned out it wasn’t. A support call to Dell led me to believe it was a heatsink problem, which seemed plausible since it was the heatsink that was exhibiting symptoms. So I ordered a new heatsink, choosing the cheapest shipping available. That meant I waited four days to discover … it wasn’t the heatsink either.

If it wasn’t the drive nor the heatsink, that left the power supply or — gracious me — the motherboard. Another call to Dell support confirmed it was the latter. I had suspected as much when I found a thread on the support forums that matched the symptoms my desktop was exhibiting. The technician on the phone had me take out the memory and disconnect everything from the motherboard except the power connectors. The computer didn’t complain about the memory missing. Motherboard, it is.

Before I called support, I looked up what a replacement motherboard would cost, and my jaw dropped. For that price, I may as well buy a new computer. Thankfully, my machine has 35 days left on its warranty, so the motherboard is being replaced gratis.

Thing is, I just paid off the laptop. I’m not really in the financial straits to upgrade the desktop. I would like to get another two years out of it before I consider getting a new one. Maybe when the second half of the company bonus comes, I’ll buy an extension to the warranty. I’d rather spend $158 now than drop $400-$500 when something goes wrong, and if that something happens a day after the warranty extension expires, I should be ready to get a new system by then.

All signs point to yes

WTF

The next Mercury Retrograde is supposed to happen at the end of this month (January 2008.) But this past weekend felt as if the Retrograde started early. Everything just seemed to be breaking down.

  • First, the heat sink in my desktop computer goes berserk. I diagnosed the problem incorrectly as a faulty hard drive and spent $30 more than I originally paid to get a new drive. Then I ended up spending another $27 to get a new heat sink. Since it’s going to take a few days to get here, I spent much of this weekend setting up my laptop as a substitute.
  • The weather went from extremely cold to extremely warm, so I turned on my air conditioning to cool down the apartment a little bit. After half an hour, the a/c started blowing hot air. My attempts to turn it off failed. So I had to cut off the power using the circuit breaker. Since the breaker isn’t labeled, I tried each one till the a/c stopped. As a result, the computer connected to my wireless access point rebooted. I don’t know how that affected the access point, but it did.
  • When I rebooted the access point from its web interface, I lost access to the interface after the reboot. So I had to reset it to the factory default and reconfigure it.
  • My laptop all of sudden dropped its connection to the wireless access point, and even after reconnecting it, I could not establish an Internet connection. Numerous attempts failed, so I renamed the wireless access point. Now it’s working.

I would say, "I’m glad [blank] didn’t break," but I’m not tempting fate.

It’s hot in there

Technophilia

People sometimes perceive as me some sort of technical whiz, and perhaps that’s true if you compare me to, say, my mom, who had trouble with the concept of double-clicking when forced to use a computer at her job. (She’s been retired for a number of years now.) And my co-workers certainly think I’m a miracle worker when it comes to writing scripts that cut a three-day manual job down to 30 seconds.

But when hardware breaks down, I’m dumb. I own my dumbness. I am not an electrical engineer, and after years of working with computers, I couldn’t begin to tell you what the hell happens inside the damn thing.

So this morning, I turn my computer on only to hear the fan whir like it’s about to take off the runway. I cut the power and plug it back in. Same thing. I conclude it’s a bum hard drive, although I have this nagging suspicion it might be something on the motherboard itself.

The drive was purchased nearly a month ago, so I took the old one and put it back in the computer. Luckily, I hadn’t wiped anything off of it. The computer started up with no problem — no fan sounding like it’s about to fly out of the room. Conclusion: hard drive.

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Waterloo Records acquires huge classical collection in estate sale

Capital of Texas

Russell McCullogh, the classical expert at Waterloo Records, mentioned the store had recently acquired an extensive classical and jazz collection from an estate sale. I stopped by Waterloo last night and browsed through some of the classical offerings. (They’re laid out on a pair of tables in the back corner of the store’s north section.)

Russell mentioned most of the collection includes 20th Century tonal composers, and while I did see a smattering of Krzysztof Penderecki and Arnold Schoenberg — with a Mahler and a Beethoven here and there — the collection had an impressive diversity. I managed to find a number of albums I owned on cassette but never upgraded to CD: orchestral works by Joan Tower and Tobias Picker, as well as Kronos Quartet’s recording of Witold Lutoslawski’s string quartet.

But if you’ve been reading The Rest Is Noise by New Yorker writer Alex Ross, a lot of the composers in that collection will sound familiar: Max Reger, Bohuslav Martinu, Paul Hindemith, Alan Hovhaness, Samuel Barber, Ned Rorem, George Perle, Morton Gould. I went to Waterloo thinking I’d just pick up the new Ex-Boyfriends album and be done, but no … I spent half an hour sifting through that collection, and I didn’t even scratch the surface.

I don’t know if any of the jazz offerings are out on the floor, but the classical selection includes a lot of tempting titles. I should be greedy and not mention it, but really — fans of this kind of music ought to check it out.

Missed it by that much

WTF

I knew it was around the time of the year for my credit card to get charged for my hosting. I’ve been a Dreamhost customer since 1998, and my plan was grandfathered in with a number of rate changes from many, many years back.

So I logged into my account to see when the charge would happen, and I discovered the hosting plans have changed — or rather, hosting plan. Dreamhost did away with all the various programs to offer one hosting solution for a price significantly less than what I’m paying for right now — $10.95/month, with discounts for paying in advance.

Good news, right? It would have been had I heard about it earlier.

My current plan had already been auto-renewed, and my credit card was days away from being charged my six-month grandfathered rate, rather than for the single cheaper plan. So I changed to the One Plan to Rule Them All but still got charged for the two weeks I was under the old plan. It came to about $13, which isn’t too bad, but it’s $13 more than $0, which I could have saved if I knew about the damn change. And that’s roughly $3 more than the monthly price I get for paying a year in advance ($9.95/month.) Two weeks of service under the old plan > one month of service under the new plan. Suck, no?

At least now the charge on my credit card will be for an entire year of service, which means a total savings of $156. The plans changed back in September 2007, so I didn’t really miss out. Had the plan changed after May 2007, when I was last charged at the six-month rate, I would have cried foul.

Upgrading the Closet

Technophilia Aural

The recent release of Cakewalk SONAR 7 has me covetous of new and upgraded studio software. Just about every piece of software in the Closet — that’s what I call my studio — has an upgrade available. This entry is more of a note to myself, to weigh the pros and cons of dropping all that cash to keep everything current.

So I’m making myself a handy table:

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Evaluation period: Native Instruments Kontakt 3, Cakewalk Project5 v.2, Cakewalk Rapture

Technophilia Aural

As deep as I am into home studio recording, I’m not much of a synthesizer guy. For the longest time, I used preset sounds because I had no idea what all those knobs and settings did. Even after taking classes on synthesis, I’m probably more inclined to use sampled sounds than to create my own. I pretty much write music for live bands, but I don’t have a band. So I use synthesizers and samplers.

Cakewalk recently released SONAR 7, the 2007 update of their flagship digital audio workstation software. The company has also bundled SONAR 7 with its other large products — Project5, Rapture and Dimension Pro — into a package called Cakewalk Pro Suite. The bundle sells for about $799 retail, but since I own SONAR 5 Producer Edition, I qualify for an upgrade price of $479. The upgrade price to SONAR 7 Producer Edition is $229. For $250 more, I can get software that would cost $707 to get separately with entirely new licenses.

So that begs the question — do I need them?

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