Yesterday morning before work I walked the dog as usual. This was the first time I didn’t finish our walk in the dark. By the time we had returned to the house, the sky was bright enough that we could see without streetlights.
It’s definitely a welcome sign of spring!
It’s been a fun 72 hours. I began it Friday afternoon with my GPS talk at Conn. Then I did some volunteer work at the Rhine.
Saturday morning the family and I puttered around the house. Around lunchtime, I brought the last of the donations I’d collected over to my neighbor, recruiting my neighbor for assistance. She seemed happy and settled in her new place.
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My recent list of commitments this week left out an important one: another GPS talk at Conn today! I met the class at 2:45, which was the time I was given. I got to the media center hearing “oh, there he is,” which made me suspect I was expected earlier.
I don’t know if there was a mix-up in time, the kids just had spring fever and I was keeping them from an extra recess, or I wasn’t as engaging speaker as before but I don’t think this talk went as well as the last. Not to say that it was bad, it just wasn’t as good as before.
I’m still very happy to have been invited and I will cherish my Conn guest speaker water bottle. It feels great to be in the classroom, if only for 45 minutes.
Today’s the vernal equinox, making this the first day of spring. Happy spring, everyone!
I was poking around the Mailboat Records site this morning and enjoying the version of Margaritaville that Nadirah Shakoor sang in the [auto-playing!] Flash music of the site. It was recorded live and it sounds like it. The acoustics are very warm. You can hear the music bouncing off the walls.
It made me recognize that these acoustics are part of what I admire in the old Squirrel Nut Zippers’ Hot record. It was recorded in a house in New Orleans – and again, you can hear the musicians in the room. Same goes for this Jolly Boys songs I have. The stand-up bass sounds like it’s right inside your head. And the O Brother, Where Art Thou record wall full of this – it’s a great record.
Recording studios think they’re improving the sound when they dampen the acoustics so that all you hear is the source. But that’s not the way music is really played, or enjoyed. The lack of these acoustic details puts a barrier between the artist and the audience, saying “what you hear isn’t real – it’s plastic.” It’s the audio equivalent of the airbrushed pin-up: sure she’s cute but she’s not real.
I think artists and producers should make an effort to put more acoustics in their recordings. It’s only natural.
Add two skippers to the ranks of the unemployed.
I noticed today that two weeks ago a new release of QEMU came out: version 0.10.0. This the first new QEMU release in a year. Good to see that this free virtualization software is still alive, well, and better than ever.
Here’s the changelog for version 0.10.0:
version 0.10.0:
– TCG support (No longer requires GCC 3.x)
– Kernel Virtual Machine acceleration support
– BSD userspace emulation
– Bluetooth emulation and host passthrough support
– GDB XML register description support
– Intel e1000 emulation
– HPET emulation
– VirtIO paravirtual device support
– Marvell 88w8618 / MusicPal emulation
– Nokia N-series tablet emulation / OMAP2 processor emulation
– PCI hotplug support
– Live migration and new save/restore formats
– Curses display support
– qemu-nbd utility to mount supported block formats
– Altivec support in PPC emulation and new firmware (OpenBIOS)
– Multiple VNC clients are now supported
– TLS encryption is now supported in VNC
– MIPS Magnum R4000 machine (Hervé Poussineau)
– Braille support (Samuel Thibault)
– Freecom MusicPal system emulation (Jan Kiszka)
– OMAP242x and Nokia N800, N810 machines (Andrzej Zaborowski)
– EsounD audio driver (Frederick Reeve)
– Gravis Ultrasound GF1 sound card (Tibor “TS” Schütz)
– Many, many, bug fixes and new features
It’s Crunch Week for me. The third week of the month is like that. Here’s my agenda for the week:
What a crazy life, but a satisfying one.
Ah, Lulu. What can I say? I love the business it’s in, I love the new office. I’m a fan of Bob Young. I even know some Lulus. It would seem like the perfect place to work … if only they hadn’t kicked me to the curb for no good reason back when I had an eight-month-old to feed.
That’s why I’m so conflicted. On the surface Lulu seems like a great place to work but in my experience it wasn’t. I hope things have changed since my all-too-brief days there.
If you want to try your luck, Lulu is hiring. I hope your mileage varies.
Last night I took another hack at getting MythTV working with my DVB card. This time I was much more successful! The key was configuring Myth to use the LNB, which was hidden in the mythtv-setup under “capture cards-DiSEqC options. An LNB is not a DiSEqC, so I would’ve never thought to look there, but there it was.
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