There are a number of neighborhood cats who frequent our house (mainly because Karen leaves a bowl of food out for them in the mornings). There's a dark-brown medium-hair, very affectionate, whom Karen has dubbed "Blossom". Blossom was joined by a beautiful snow tiger (lynx point) Siamese whom we call "Boo-Boo" (after Jay's pet name for the object of his affection in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back), a skittish orange tabby tom without a tail, whom we call "Milhouse", and a tiny black kitten, also skittish, whom we named "Loud Harold" because of his constant meowing. Actually, it's more like the alarm buzzer from Dark Star than a meow.

Softies that we are, we wanted to take them all in, but so far we've only adopted Boo-Boo (because she's declawed, thus less able to defend herself, and she also had the nerve-wracking habit of pelting madly across the street to greet us when we came home). I took her to the vet one morning, and had them give her the full battery of tests and shots. Surprisingly, she was in excellent health; no feline leukemia or HIV, no worms or other diseases. So I gave Slim and our indoor cats a preventative flea treatment and brought her in.

She wasn't afraid of Slim; simply irritated at his constant habit of coming up and sniffing her until she batted at him. Anastasia, my Russian Blue, hissed at her a couple of times but quickly came to terms with the idea of another cat living in the house. Romana, Karen's lynx point, is a different story.

She hisses. She growls. She glowers and lashes her tail madly whenever Boo-Boo comes into the room. We were hoping she'd accept another cat of her own breed, but she's insanely jealous. Actually, it reminds me of SCA group dynamics, in a number of ways.

Last night, we went out with Sev & Lisa to see Austin Powers in Goldmember. Although we all enjoyed it, I can't say it was my favorite of the three. Though there were some great gags (the opening comes especially to mind), there was a lot of reused material (for which, to their credit, they did poke fun at themselves), and the Goldmember character was weak and not terribly funny.

Apart from the Goldmember role, Myers did an excellent job in the already-established characters (as usual, his facility with accents is excellent), and I was pleasantly surprised by Beyoncé Knowles' performance.

I was fascinated by Verne Troyer's "stunts". On more than one occasion, he was slammed brutally against a wall, so hard that they had to be using a dummy — but then he would get up without the camera cutting away. However they did it, it was very well done.

The outtakes during the credits, as well as some of the credits themselves, hinted at some interesting deleted scenes. Can't wait for the DVD to come out, so I can actually see what they were.

I know I'm not supposed to have caffeinated beverages, but I couldn't resist trying Pepsi Blue this morning. I am attracted to strange beverages, so naturally the blue cola drew me like a moth to flame.

It promotes itself as a Berry Cola Fusion, but upon opening it, I discovered that has a bouquet almost (but not quite) entirely unlike berries. The label proclaims that it's Naturally & Artificially Flavored, and I suspect that the berry flavoring is what's artificial. It smells like a blue "raspberry" Slurpee, with faintly bitter undertones. There's very little carbonation, at least in the bottle I bought.

It's cloyingly sweet, but it has very little actual taste; most of the flavor is in the aftertaste, which has an overwhelmingly chemical character to it. The "berry cola fusion" contains almost no discernable cola taste; it's very much like drinking a melted blue Slurpee, with the bitterness of caffeine added into the mix.

Fortunately, I don't have to worry about whether or not to ignore my doctor's orders on this one; Pepsi Blue isn't going to tempt me into drinking caffeine on a regular basis. (Now, if Afri-Cola were readily available, I'd be in trouble; fortunately, there's only one place in Tampa where I can find it, and it's all the way across town, so it's a special treat that I have only once every few months.)

One of the reasons I like Opera is its built-in pop-up (and pop-under) killer. The only windows it opens are the ones I tell it to open. No annoying X10 ads, no aggravating "You are viewing a Tripod member page" windows.

Unfortunately, since it works by preventing the JavaScript window.open() call, this means that regular Web pages which use JavaScript's OnClick method to open a link in a new window (rather than using target="_blank" in the <a href> tag) don't work. In order to follow the links, one has to call up the Quick Preferences menu, select "Accept pop-up windows", click the link, call up Quick Preferences again, and select "Reject pop-up windows" to once again secure oneself from the ravaging hordes of intrusive windows.

You'd think they could define a way to temporarily override the default behavior (like Alt-click) so that the user could indicate to Opera that "I know this link uses JavaScript to open a pop-up window, but this is one that I actually do want to see!"

Well, I need to send in a bug report anyway, so I might as well send a feature request at the same time.

I love the accuracy of the two major newspapers in Tampa. One slants to the left, the other slants to the right. For that reason, some of their news stories, even when written about the same event, occasionally read like they're talking about two different things.

But I never thought politics could affect mathematics. Take, for instance, the two papers' top headlines today:

Laptop Probe Draws 51 Agents, proclaims the Tampa Tribune. The St. Petersburg Times, though, insists that 2 Laptops Draw 46 Investigators.

Reading the stories, one discovers (in the second paragraph of the Tribune's article) that fifty-one agents were assigned to the investigation, five being local and forty-six being drawn from around the world. The Times does mention the local agents down in the ninth paragraph, but begins the story with "The Air Force has assembled a team of 46 special agents". Forty-six plus five equals... anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Even more interesting, however, is the difference in the rest of the content of the articles. The Tribune plays up the seriousness of the matter — harping on the one-to-one ratio of agents to suspects — questioning whether or not the laptops were the source of information leaked to the New York Times, comparing the leak to the Pentagon Papers, and quoting Rumsfeld's memo that such leaks were putting American lives at risk. The Times downplays the seriousness of the missing laptops, and portrays the "officials" as bumbling losers who don't even know what was on the computers. They do mention the New York Times story, but don't engage in speculation about whether or not the laptops were the source of the leak.

And why should they? The New York Times story ran on July 5. The laptops were last accounted for on August 1, and reported missing on August 2. Erm, hello? How could the stolen laptops have anything to do with a story that ran nearly a month before they were stolen?

Really, where are these journalistic standards of accuracy they keep bleating on about? Oh, that's right — they went away nearly three years ago, when Peter Jennings declared that popular opinion mattered more than accuracy. Silly me.

When I took Boo-boo (the stray which Karen and I adopted) to the vet, to have her checked out and given her shots, I asked if she had been spayed. (If she hadn't, I would have had her spayed then).

The vet said that she couldn't find a scar, but that the cat had probably been spayed, because it would be highly unusual for a cat to be declawed but not fixed.

Well, naturally, Boo-Boo is now in heat. All the signs are there: the constant caterwauling in the middle of the night. The odd walk. The rolling, rubbing and stretching. The escape attempts. Only three to five more nights of cat screaming before we'll finally have a respite. And then it'll be time to go back to the vet.

The local chapter of the SCA frequently volunteers to man the phones at the local PBS station during their pledge drives. We pick a time slot when the station is showing a historical program, dress up in period costumes, and spend a few hours writing down pledges.

So last night, Severin, Lisa, Karen and I got dressed up, went out in a blinding thunderstorm, and headed towards the station. En route, when it was too late to back out, Lisa told me what was on the program schedule that night. Had I known, I would never have put on a costume... but more on that later.

We were the first to arrive. The first pledge break wasn't until 8:20, but they told us to be there at 7:30; apparently, someone at the station was familiar with "SCA time", in which things happen at least half an hour after they're scheduled. Eventually, we were joined by two more SCAdians.

A woman named Martha, who I assume was the stage manager, showed us the ropes. "You can sit anywhere you like except for here. Larry always sits here," she warned. She went over the forms, and Larry and two other non-SCA volunteers came in and took their seats. We went and sat in the back row, and sat around waiting for things to start as the studio crew pointed and laughed at the weirdos in costumes.

Soon enough, the pledge break started. The hosts were Brian Shuler, Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of South Florida, and a woman whose name I didn't catch. Brian introduced the volunteers (getting the SCA's name almost correct), and thanked us for "dressing for the occasion". What was the occasion? Why, it was Bee Gees: One Night Only, followed by Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night. So instead of having period costumes to complement a history-based program, we just looked like major dweebs for dressing in Renaissance costumes for a Bee Gees concert.

The first pledge break flew by. The phones rang in random order, so some people got a lot of calls. I got one, which just turned out to be someone asking to speak to the stage manager.

During the 9:00 break, I actually got two pledge calls. During the 9:48 break, I got no pledges, but I did get a complaint. The caller was incensed that Brian was referring to records as "wax". "They're not wax, they're vinyl! This guy has no idea what he's talking about, and you need to tell him that." So I wrote it down on the complaint form, and when the pledge break was over, I handed it to Brian, who found it extremely amusing. Rose, one of the other SCAdians, informed us that the same guy had also made the complaint to her. "Oh, this is good," giggled Brian. "I gotta crush this guy on the air."

As the program drew to a close, someone on the floor asked, "Is this the last song?" Severin muttered, "Only if there's a God." The whole studio erupted in laughter, and barely calmed down in time for the 9:48 break. Brian explained the history of records for our less learnéd audience members, making certain to elucidate upon the use of wax. Severin got a pledge call, but the caller seemed more interested in making Sev perform for the camera than in making his donation. "Okay, smile for my parents... now raise your left hand..." I got a $15 pledge, but that was the only call I took during that break. Brian came back to the phone desks, and we had a discussion of what else he could say to piss off the audience. He's a lot hipper than I would have expected from an ethnomusicologist, but he's also the whitest ethnomusicologist I've ever met. Severin suggested calling Orbison "The Big O". Then, as kd lang was one of the featured artists on the show, Sev suggested that Brian ask if it was kd lang or Wayne Gretzky, which would "piss off Canadians, hockey fans and lesbians". Oddly enough, Brian took only one of these suggestions; however, back down on the floor, he did make fun of Canadian accents. I tell you, wacky hijinks ensue when you get an ethnomusicologist to host your pledge drive.

During the 10:24 pledge break, they decided to set the video to black and white, to match the show. Brian told the audience not to adjust their sets; it was supposed to look this way. "When was the last time you watched something in black and white?" he asked the unseen audience. Then he mused that "black and white went the way of wax," and all the volunteers cracked up behind him.

Pet Peeve: Brian also mentioned that Roy Orbison had a four-octave range. I'd accepted the media's fawning about Mariah Carey's "four-octave range" as the product of musically ill-informed people, but a college music professor should certainly know better! If someone can sing (for example) from the G on the bottom line of the bass staff all the way up to the G resting on the top line of the treble staff, it is not four octaves, even though it's four Gs. From G to g is one octave, from g to g' makes it two octaves, and g' to g" makes it three octaves. Four Gs, three octaves. Okay, now that that pedantry is out of the way, back to the narrative.

There were three cameras in the studio, but they really only used two of them: one on Brian, and one on the other host. Judging from the angles the third cameraman was using, he was pulling close-up shots of Lisa's and Karen's cleavage.

I got one pledge during this break — $150 — but I heard another volunteer inform his caller that there weren't any pledge breaks on the videocassette given as a "free gift".

Between the breaks, we wondered about the phones. There were a lot of buttons on them, but the intriguing one was marked with an Infinity symbol. There was a lot of discussion about what it might do, until Sev decided to find out. Apparently, all it did was make a beeping noise, quite similar to the one in Captain Pike's wheelchair from the Star Trek episode "The Menagerie". We entertained ourselves by impersonating Captain Pike, staring open-mouthed into space while beeping "yes" and "no" in response to each other's questions, until the phones started beeping back at us.

Just before the final break, the techs started playing around with the colors. Brian had mentioned, on the air, the plastic film that people put over their black-and-white television to simulate color — blue on top, green on the bottom, and a kind of fleshy-colored hue in the middle. The techs simulated this, which, in close-up, made Brian look like Rainbow Man. Of course, you can't have Rainbow Man without a John 3:16 sign, so Sev made one on the back of a complaint form and held it up. All the volunteers cracked up. Sev caught Brian's attention and held up the sign again; Brian laughed so hard he had to hang onto a desk to avoid falling over, which of course made us laugh even harder. This aroused the ire of the stage crew: "Hey, we got a pledge break to do, guys!" came the stern warning.

During the final break, the weirdos called in force. One guy called in to request that Roy Orbison play a particular song. Rather than explaining that Roy Orbison wasn't taking requests due to the fact that he's dead, Sev responded, "Well, if you want to hear it, you gotta make a pledge!"

Sev then took another call, wherein the caller complained that Brian was a complete idiot, demanding to know why the audience had to listen to him. I got a caller who wanted to know what year Roy Orbison died. (What do I look like, Google?) I took a call from a sine wave. My final call was from a viewer who wanted to complain that Brian was wearing an American flag pin on his right lapel. "He should wear it on the left lapel. He shouldn't be wearing it on the right side. It's supposed to be on the left side! You make sure and tell him that." I promised her I would, so after the pledge break ended, I handed him the complaint form, which he rubbed on his crotch. That wacky ethnomusicologist!

And with that, the night was over. Volunteering at a pledge drive is great fun, as long as you go with the right group of people. But next time, I'm definitely checking the TV Guide to see what'll be playing during our block of time, so I can dress a bit more appropriately. Sheesh.

Next week, the Consort is going to begin recording material for at least one new CD. So I've been making preparations — making sure we have enough microphone stands, double-checking the mixing consoles, downloading and applying the latest Cakewalk patches...

One thing I didn't like about the first CD was that we had very little control over the tracks once they were laid down. Mike, our recording engineer, only used two tracks (left and right), so we could do very little balancing of the voices and instruments afterwards.

However, since we're doing this one completely digitally, using Cakewalk recording software, I decided to set things up the way I want them, and one thing I wanted was one track per instrument or voice; that way, after the recording is finished, each part can be tweaked for the final mixdown. Unfortunately, the SB Live! will only permit recording from one source at a time (microphone, line in, aux, etc.), and Cakewalk Home Studio can only handle two channels per sound card (left and right).

There are sound cards out there with more inputs, but Cakewalk wouldn't handle them anyway. So, since SB Live! cards are dirt-cheap, I looked into adding a second one into my machine. Creative Labs said it couldn't be done; trying to use the same driver for two cards would create a conflict. However, I found the kX Project, a set of freeware audio drivers which, among other things, will permit the use of multiple cards, even identical ones.

So, thanks to the magic of the kX drivers, I've got four working input channels. However there was a slight problem: I could only monitor one card at a time through the headphones.

After a number of failed attempts to coerce Cakewalk into sending out a monitor signal of all four channels, I pulled apart a CD audio cable I wasn't using, cut off the plug from an old pair of headphones, soldered them together, and connected the line-out jack of my "slave" card to the Aux In connector on the "master". This doesn't affect recording, since the source is set to Line In, but the auxiliary input is passed through to the Line Out, making it possible to monitor all four channels while recording.

Some time ago, my monitor died. Sizzling noise, puff of acrid smoke, and then all was darkness. My father had recently upgraded his computer and monitor, and had offered them to me. I called and asked if he still had the monitor, and if I could still have it. He brought it over, but he also brought the computer as well. It was a 200 MHz Pentium II, which was a little slow for my needs, so Karen and I were going to try and donate it.

Well, nobody wanted it, so I was just going to cannibalize the useful parts and throw the rest out. But then I remembered that I'd picked up the Corel® Linux® OS Starter Kit for $7 from the remainder table at Borders a couple of months ago. I'd planned on creating a Linux partition on my hard drive, but my ancient version of Partition Magic didn't run under Windows XP.

Looking at the back panel of the computer, I realized that I had a motherboard with an 800 MHz Duron that might fit, as the ports appeared to be positioned in the standard ATX configuration. So I pulled out the innards, and spent a couple of hours trying to make things work.

For starters, the motherboard wouldn't quite fit; it had two serial ports, and the Dell case only had a cutout for one port. Fortunately, the cutouts were on a separate panel, which I knocked out. I also had to remove one case fan, because the CPU fan on my motherboard was too tall. Since the Dell motherboard didn't have a CPU fan, I wasn't too worried about taking out the case fan.

Next, I discovered that the Dell power supply wouldn't work with my motherboard. It had two connectors (ATX and auxiliary), and wouldn't send power to the ATX connector unless the auxiliary connector was also attached to the motherboard — but my motherboard had no auxiliary connector. So I pulled that out and stuck in another power supply I had lying around. Unfortunately, as the motherboard was a bit shorter than the Dell's, the front-panel cable wouldn't reach (and had a different pinout anyway), so I juryrigged an extender to the main power switch. The LEDs aren't necessary for operation, and I can get by without a reset switch for now.

I booted the computer, and it started loading Windows more or less properly (it complained of some drivers not being found), so I rebooted and started the install of Linux. Or at least I tried to. The splash screen assured me that it was loading Linux, starting Linux... and then nothing.

After a great deal of headache, I discovered that the drives were jumpered to use Cable Select, rather than being explicitly set to Master/Slave, and I'd rearranged the cable order due to the shortened motherboard. So Drive C was the (empty) Zip drive, and Linux didn't appear to like that. Once I got the hard drive as Drive C, Linux installed without a flaw.

The environment (a modified KDE) seemed quite spiffy, but lacking a network card, I felt pretty limited; I couldn't download updates or install new software (it came with Netscape 4.7, for example). So today I'll be buying a network card and a KVM switch (so I can get the second keyboard and mouse off my desk, and quit having to swap the monitor cable between computers when I want to use one or the other).

I'd always heard horror tales about how difficult Linux was to install, but once I got the drive-cable problem sorted out, it actually went in faster and easier than Windows XP. And since I use a lot of multiplatform software on Windows (The GIMP, Opera, POV-Ray, etc.), I shouldn't have any trouble bouncing between systems. Before I customize my system too much, though, I think I'll download different Linux distributions and see which one I like the best. Corel Linux seems nice, but the latest edition is two years old.

Now comes the difficult part: what to name the new computer...

Last week, I ordered some software. Having received an email from the company that my order was received, but hearing nothing about whether or not it had been shipped, I called to ask about my order's status.

The woman on the other end of the phone gave me the FedEx tracking number, then told me "It's in Florida now, so it should be there either today or early tomorrow."

Wonderful! But, just out of curiosity, I went to FedEx's site and looked up the tracking number. The most recent entry shows that it left the FedEx ramp in Franklin, Massachusetts, last night at 11:52 PM. "Well," I thought, "Perhaps FedEx's Web site is only updated at certain intervals. I'll try calling them instead."

The phone-tracking system told me only that the package was en route last night at 9:16 PM (which was when it left New Hampshire). Wow, even less current!

I assume she wasn't lying — that would be stupid, since she had just given me the information that would enable me to double-check her claim — but it just seems weird that she was able to provide more current tracking information than FedEx itself.

The glTron computer game. It's a really well-done re-creation of the "Light Cycles" sequence from the movie Tron. It looks absolutely fantastic on my machine; my video card's full-screen antialiasing makes the graphics look exactly like the original movie's.

And it's available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh. Now that's service.

Fortunately, I won't have to bring flowers and candy home for this one. No, I just noticed that Saturday was the one-year anniversary of this blog.

Weird. It doesn't seem like that long ago.

What a difference comes from having the right equipment and taking one's time!

Last night we recorded The Comical Dreamer and Gaudeamus Igitur, both of which appeared on our first CD, but we weren't happy with them. (For example, Comical Dreamer was a ponderous dirge the first time around, so we re-did it with a nice upbeat tempo that better suited its playfully bawdy nature).

We started recording the first song somewhere around 7:30, and finished the second at about 10 PM. After putting away the equipment and wolfing down some Chinese take-out, we mixed Comical Dreamer (deciding to put off mixing Gaudeamus until the next time, as Brian had to be at work in five hours).

The "final" version of Comical Dreamer is as far away from our prior version as it's possible to get without being a different band altogether. For starters, it doesn't sound like we're singing in a closet, the levels are set right (so there's no audio clipping during forte passages) and it's about 50% faster than the original (which makes it much more vibrant). And Sid's delivery is several orders of magnitude better than the tepid, soulless vocal stylings of our previous female singer; she has fun with it, and that fact comes pouring through in her voice.

Karen was a real trouper, running the desk without complaint, as we cut short take after take due to dissatisfaction with a wrong note or an accidentally muted string. Once the input levels are set, there's little for her to do except hit "record", "stop", "rewind" and "undo" (and, on the rare occasion when we make it through a take successfully, "play"). Hopefully she won't get bored with doing this week after week; she did a great job and really made it easier for us.

May all our sessions go that smoothly...