Stranger Things Have Happened

An Update

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 03:10:16 -0700

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays: Collected Essays of Henry David Thoreau

Isn't it odd that someone should keep a "public" journal that is read by few? It is the habit of crackpots, egotists, ravers, religious extremists... and who else? Well, I choose not to lump myself in... lets say instead that this is a "Facebook of One" and hope we find a reason to put content in here more often. For those who check in and get bored, I apologise. We have ample openings for guest bloggers... send me a submission!

Strange Truth

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 01:39:15 -0800

"There is something wrong with a regime that requires a pyramid of corpses every few years."
- George Orwell

Proof Not everthing on the Internet is Stupid

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 09:44:00 -0700

"Republicans are seemingly authoritarian in the natural. They have no desire to govern, but have a compulsive need to rule."
-User "maxdenn" commenting on a CNN article.

Bill Morrissey: 1951-2011

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 19:37:34 -0700

Guitarist, Composer and Author Bill Morrisey was found dead of heart failure in his motel room in Dalton, Ga on Saturday July 23, 2011. He had been on tour, and was on his way home. It saddens my heart to know he is gone, a great and gentle soul fallen away from the world. Bills songs were full of longing, and pain, and his own special wry humor. May angels wings carry you to a better world, Bill. You were truly too good for this one.

Strange Currents

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 09:59:19 -0700

Here in NH we are a lightning rod for what one might call "I/C" - Idiot Current. It's like AC but instead of going back and forth it flows sideways into the twilight zone. We have Republicans, who elected one governor (Meldrim Thompson) that wanted to give tactical nuclear weapons to the states national guard to combat protesters (!) and another (John Sununu) that shoved a nuclear plant down the states throat on the argument of cheap plentiful electricity, thereby giving us some of the highest electrical rates in the nation before leaving the state with his middle finger (figuratively) out the window of his limo on his way to Washington to become the type of beltway insider he had spent his time in office railing against. He made a pretty effective sleazy lobbyist (for the nuclear industry, I believe!) for a time before becoming George Bush Sr's chief of staff. We have a huge influx of libertarians whom I characterize as republicans that want to smoke pot, own guns and not pay their taxes, but of course can't actually be repugnicans because of the pot issue. How they think the pavement beyond the edge of their driveway is to be paid for is a mystery I have never gotten a good explanation for, but maybe that's why they all seem to drive SUV's. Then we have the teabaggers, who just seem extremely gullible proto-fascists. My fondest wish is that they could be transported to a reality where the world has everything they say they want, so that they could try to survive for a year. It would be interesting to see how many made it back from their little visit to theocracy/plutocracy and how many of those would rather stay here than return. I have noticed they seem to be very fond of Michelle Bachman. This is a woman who has in the past campaigned against Masturbation as if it were a serious and relevant platform issue. That she has made it to Congress should tell all of us pretty much everything we need to know about that august body. I won't go into the Palin thing, I don't want to have an aneurysm before breakfast.

I've heard some people say they "agree with the tea party". I'd actually be curious to hear what anyone agrees with regarding the teabaggers, not as any form of examination but rather because I've heard them say they believe so many conflicting things that I'm not sure what their platform really is, other than raw hatred and fear. One tends to see them up here by the side of the road leaning against a rusty pickup truck, holding up misspelled signs averring Barack Obamas kinship with Satan in some form or other. It's pathetic, not only because the misspelled words are usually two syllables or less but because if this were 1970 Barack would have made a pretty believable Republican. I discount his color in that statement, because frankly the guy is whiter than I am. Who's more likely to be found on a Saturday hanging around in the shade playing the blues on an old guitar, and who's wearing a starched suit, wonking out on policy decisions and cutting deals with sleazy rightist radicals instead of confronting them like he should be? The weirdest thing I've noticed about the teabaggers is they seem blissfully unaware that their "party" is a corporatist media blitz financed largely by some of the richest plutocrats in the country, the Koch Brothers. Here's a nice article on what really pays for all the stuff the TB's are loving: http://bit.ly/9PBf9L The TB-rs themselves don't seem like people who read much, to say the least.

Holy Crap, did I just say all that before 7 am?

Strange How The Quotes Keep On Coming

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 10:30:36 -0700

Marko Rakar, Croatian Activist

"May the bridges I burn light the way." - Marko Rakar, Croatian data activist

Bob Marley Said It, And I Believe it

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 08:39:59 -0700

"Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for." -Bob Marley

A Strangely Cold World

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Mon, 02 May 2011 01:19:38 -0700

"There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside."

- "The Jungle", Upton Sinclair (via Gutenberg Project)

Wikipedia Page for The_Jungle

"It is a fact, the significance of which cannot be exaggerated, that the measure of the civilization which any nation has attained is the extent to which it has curtailed the power of institutionalized religion."

- "The Profits Of Religion", Upton Sinclair (via Gutenberg Project)

I wish I had read this mans work 40 years ago. It was right there, waiting for me, not that anyone would have pointed me towards it in the school systems I encountered. Kids should be reading this in school instead of their schoolbooks. Congressman should be required to carry it at all times. You should read some of his work, not because it is Great Literature (much of it is not) but because he speaks clearly and directly to the real causes of social injustice and its remedy. If nothing else, Upton is remembered as the single man responsible for the existence of the FDA - without him, no one would have bothered. This certainly wasn't his real reason for writing The Jungle: he later said "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." Much is available on the Gutenberg Project site.

His Wikiquote page is also valuable.

Excerpt:

"Will it be the task of your masters, do you think--will they write the
charter of your liberties? Will they forge you the sword of your deliverance,
will they marshal you the army and lead it to the fray? Will their wealth
be spent for the purpose--will they build colleges and churches to teach
you, will they print papers to herald your progress, and organize political
parties to guide and carry on the struggle? Can you not see that the
task is your task--yours to dream, yours to resolve, yours to execute?
That if ever it is carried out, it will be in the face of every obstacle
that wealth and mastership can oppose--in the face of ridicule and
slander, of hatred and persecution, of the bludgeon and the jail?

Continue reading "A Strangely Cold World"

Strange Equity

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 06:46:28 -0700

"Look, I guess it's a disagreement over the idea about where it is that we should try to get us back on the road and off of debt. It's not just non-defense discretionary spending. I don't think our problem is we have too much money going for job training. I don't think our problem is (that) there's too much money going for education, yet those were the things that were cut in the deal.

I think, fundamentally, our problem in this country is the growing sense of inequity that we have. When the top two percent are making more than the bottom 40 percent, then I don't think that it's fair that the only place that these cuts were coming from were some of the most vulnerable people in America."
- NY Congressman Anthony Weiner, April 11, 2011

Note that he was referring to the bottom 40% of wage earners, who presumably still have a job. For now, anyway. It was a short while later that Congressman Weiner got busted sending pictures of his Eponymous Member around the internet, and we all know how that turned out. I'm glad that before that happened, he took this opportunity to show that the "angels of his better nature" were alive within him, and his coming scandal was not all there was to the man.

Strange Tone

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:13:12 -0700

I see on http://thegearpage.net that these sites are good resources for beginning amp builders. Since I'm starting a number of projects very shortly including a Mission 5E3 build I'm sure these will be worth looking at.

http://www.freewebs.com/valvewizard/index.html

http://www.aikenamps.com/TechInfo.htm

http://www.el34world.com/schematics.htm

http://paulrubyamps.com/info.html

http://www.geofex.com/ampdbug/ampdebug.htm

When Strangers want their computers fixed

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:48:26 -0800

Support Issue Tracking is a topic at my day job the last few days. Weeks. Years?

I had decided to revisit the options we discussed way back a few years ago and see what direction all these softwares have gone in since the last time we decided to put up with what we had. Back then, I researched the various support tracking suites. At the time most of them were closed source and very expensive. Today, that situation has changed; there are many open source systems and one that is well liked and easily available is called Request Tracker. A look at their web page that lists some of the organizations running RT at http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/who.html makes interesting reading. It's written in Perl and supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQLite for a back end. The company has a knowledge base/article tracker that links to it called RTFaqM, which I didn't look into.

I also found this comparative matrix of support tracking systems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_tracking_systems

The screenshots at http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/screenshots.htm look nice.

http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/ has a wiki at http://requesttracker.wikia.com/wiki/HomePage

I'd appreciate hearing back if anyone reads this and is interested at all, or has -anything- to say about Request Tracker, good or bad.

Testing linkage to LiveJournal

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 23:55:35 -0800

With a little luck, this entry will also appear on Livejournal.com thanks to a (new?) Serendipity plugin.

Rixter makes a Vacation

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 22:25:27 -0700

I had a vacation. A lot of it wasn't much fun, consisting of lots of moving stuff from place to place and generally trying to re-arrange things for the next stage of my life. Vacations are handy for that. But a few days of my time were spent in Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts, with much grilling of seafood, drinking of good beer, kayaking of open salt water, and marveling at sights such as you see pictured below. I am so jealous of the folks that live here. Click on either picture for a full view.

Todays Letter is W for WhackJob

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:40:15 -0700

Yes, it is. You probably won't recognize Shirley Ardell Mason, the woman on whom the book and movie "Sybil" was extremely loosely based. Later analysis of her case has been hampered by sealed records even though both her and her doctor are long dead, but many researchers think much of the case was faked by Doctor Cornelia Wilbur for gain and notoriety. This hasn't stopped thousands of people since the book came out in 1973 from using this extremely rare disorder as a rationalization for all sorts of ugly behavioral habits from minor deceptions to violence and sexual promiscuity. Those who imagine themselves "afflicted" by this disorder sometimes seem to think it makes them somehow exotic and unique and wonderful, and seek out others who will either feign the disorder with them or at the least buttress their imagined personalities by pretending to interact with them.. sometimes even on a psychic level! Think what you can get away with and still look at yourself in the mirror, when you can tell yourself "sure that was my body, but it wasn't really me doing/saying that." Combine that with the ego boost a person with self-image issues such as a narcissist gets from having such an unusual disorder... we have a Win/Win situation! That's my rant for today... and please, if someone reads this who actually -does- suffer from the very rare disorder know as MPD... know that this rant is not aimed at you, but rather reflects my impressions of some very specific people.

Dell Shows its Fading Stripes

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 00:58:02 -0700

I've long said that Dell Computers are not a wise choice in any environment, home or enterprise. There have been arguments, and denials, and scoffing. I've never agreed with the operations model and the "do more with less" hardware decisions you see when you open the case. I've felt that those few I've met who strove to emulate its "just in time" inventory and parts management schemes were asking for trouble down the road. Well, our friends at Dell have apparently not only proved me right by getting caught trying to conceal their problems, they are finding themselves roundly sued and even foolishly pissing off their own lawyers by refusing to acknowledge hardware failures in 12 million Optiplex systems sold over a two-year period.

Ars Nova provides an overview while the New York Times provides more details. It's nice to see this long string of poor dealing nearing a close. The suit itself looks to be about three years old already but the documents have been unsealed and hopefully Dells stock will react like a housefly hitting a bug zapper.

"After the math department at the University of Texas noticed some of its Dell computers failing, Dell examined the machines. The company came up with an unusual reason for the computers’ demise: the school had overtaxed the machines by making them perform difficult math calculations..."

"'The funny thing was that every one of them went bad at the same time', said Greg Barry, the president of PointSolve, a technology services company near Philadelphia..."

"In other documents about how to handle questions around the faulty OptiPlex systems, Dell salespeople were told, “Don’t bring this to customer’s attention proactively” and “Emphasize uncertainty.”"

So. What exactly -do- you do when 2 million Optiplex computers shipped to tens of thousands of private, institutional and enterprise users (including your -own lawyers- ) experiences a 97% failure rate over three years? Well, if you're Dell, apparently you deny there's a problem, train your support staff to try to up-sell the victims to more expensive systems to "fix" the problem, ship equally faulty replacements, cover up the problem, cook the books, lie to investors and the SEC (that one is going to cost them approx $100 mil), get caught and wind up getting sued by some of your biggest customers, and etc.

The Ars Technica article is overview, the NYT report has details but is still only two pages. Interesting reading that exposes where Dells "Just In Time" inventory system and cost-cutting strategies eventually led the company: another "winner" in the Race to The Bottom.

Avatar Speaker Cabinets

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Mon, 10 May 2010 23:49:20 -0700

The good folks at AvatarSpeakers.com have put together a beautiful 1x12 speaker cabinet in Black Tolex with black and gold grill and a Hellatone 30 speaker. For my part, I'll be redoubling my efforts to improve my playing, in order to deserve all this fun. The tone from the Hellatone 30 is warm, smooth, nicely responsive even at super-low volumes. The "Contemporary" 1x12 is built super solid, I'd recommend these to anyone.

Where the hell are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Wed, 05 May 2010 23:03:21 -0700

The world and most of the people in it are showing every sign of being ready to go off the deep end lately, and sometimes I hope we can all get worked up enough to all just do it at once and get it over with. But for the moment, I'm picking up one of these instead:

Frenzel FM-5E1SS Champ Super Sportster Tube Amp

You can seldom hope to hear a human say what you really want them to say, but there's always hope with a guitar. Look deep enough and you'll find that blue note.

Now to find a good cab and speaker.

Strange Sounds

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:18:56 -0800

I love my guitars, and since I went electric a few years ago, getting to actually hear what they can sound like at their best is a problem. I live in a building with other tenants, and have done so most of my life. It's no fun sitting here with hundreds of watts of power that I dare not use and looking for quiet ways to hear screaming overdrive, roaring power chords and sweet, singing blues sustain.

Simplest but least-effective solution: My Vox DA-5 is actually not a bad little amp, on the clean channel. Lately I use it more as a computer speaker than anything else. The .5 watt setting can really be your friend. The effects that it tries to pack onboard are a little dull, to my ears... but the clean channel is really quite nice for such a tiny thing, and I can imagine busking with it. But I often feel a bit cheated when using it.... there are better amps in the room!

I LOVE-LOVE-LOVE my Digitech RP-1000. It might not be quite the thing for a tube or stompbox purist, but I feel I could pipe it into almost anything and find some good tone: a small monitor speaker, PA, headphones, whatever. Usually I send it into my Tech-21 Trademark 60 or Power Engine 60 and keep it turned way down. This device is expensive ($400 lately) but has LOADS of depth and versatility. Running through its hundreds of pedal, amp and cabinet combinations is like going to your filthy rich rockstar friends house. When he's not there to make sure you stay out of his collection!

And now to the reason I'm writing this. I don't have either of these, but damn I wish I did. Put one of these together with a 1x12 or 2x12 cabinet and you could have sonic heaven in an apartment or condo.
http://zvexamps.com/amp_view.html 1/2 watt. Listen to the sound samples.

You can buy them for $499 at a bunch of places, click their dealer links or
http://www.musictoyz.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=M&Product_Code=ZVEXAMP&Category_Code=Zvex+Amps

Unfortunately it doesn't come as a kit, and of course seems more than a bit overpriced. (Editors note: Now that I've researched the issue more throughly it's a completely indefensible price. Stay the hell away from it, but I leave the mention of it here as reference.)

Then there's this thing, the "BAR/OLC Tube Cricket". The kit is only $135 !!! I don't know what the hell it sounds like but it sure is affordable, 1/2 watt. I might just give this thing a try as a first project.

http://www.olcircuits.com/olc_tubecricket.html

Let me know if you buy either of these: I'd be curious to hear about it.

Strange Rides

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:37:59 -0800

I am sometimes tempted to not only put my Harley back on the road, but to turn it into a chopper or bobber at the same time and therefore probably make myself a few inches sorter by riding a newly rigid-framed motorcycle down New Englands horrific back roads. So tonight I was in that frame of mind again, and wandered into http://www.clubchopper.com/modules/Jig/index.php where I encountered this nice little list of suppliers for frames and rolling kits and so forth, for Sportsters and Buells.

www.mcworx.com

www.bitterendchoppers.com

www.redneckengineering.com/

www.twobitchoppers.com/

www.wickedwillychoppers.com/

www.flyritechoppers.com/Pg/FRCMerch.html

www.atlasprecision.com

www.dirtysouthchoppers.com/

www.cycleonemanufacturing.com/

www.franticcustomcycles.com/

www.carolinacustomproducts.com/

www.bareknucklechoppers.com/frames.html

rowemachine.com/brochure.htm

www.paughco.com/

www.twistedchoppers.com

www.satmotorsports.com

www.brosmfg.com/page7.html

www.kansaskustom.com/Hardtail_Sections_Sportster.php

www.allenbros.com

www.customcycledevelopments.com

www.ledsledcustoms.com

http://www.tanksbytigman.com/frames-sportster.shtml

http://www.scootersperformance.com/frames.htm

http://nastybikes.com/

http://www.suckerpunchsallys.com/rollers_and_kits08.htm

http://www.l-l-choppers.com/borderli...Sportster2.htm

Cool Site of the Day: Instructables.com

nospam@example.com (Rixter) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 13:37:00 -0800

Cool Site of the Day: Instructables.com

http://www.instructables.com/

How to make Stuff. Recipes, hardware, projects of all sorts. Almost as much fun as Wikipedia, if you like to make things