Good idea: Berry-flavored antacid tablets.

Bad idea: Adding citric and fumaric acid in such quantities that they appear third on the inactive ingredients list of sixteen items (with stearic acid plugging gamely along in fifteenth place).

I would dearly love to find out what brilliant specimen came up with that little gem. And submerge him in a vat of stomach acid.

So I was reading through my referrer logs, and found a hit on my page of Wilbye's madrigals coming from a LiveJournal community. I clicked through to see what was in the post which linked to the madrigals.

It was Frasier fanfic. Frasier slash fanfic. I think I'll just leave it at that.

Apparently, nVidia uses the same graphics processing unit in its consumer-level GeForce series video cards as it does in the higher-end Quadro cards; the drivers disable certain advanced capabilities if the chip was programmed with a GeForce ID, which lets them sell the "more capable" Quadro at a higher price (say, four or five times the equivalent GeForce card).

While owners of GeForce256 and GeForce2 cards could "upgrade" their cards by clipping a few resistors, a Russian programmer has written a utility which patches the drivers and reprograms the chip to identify itself as a Quadro, opening up the disabled hardware features. There's a version for the older cards, and a new version for the GeForce4 line.

The average gamer probably won't be affected, but 3D apps which use an OpenGL interface should see an appreciable speed improvement.

Update: a quick guide (PDF) to installing (and removing) the patch.

According to the IMDb, the Canadian French title for the movie Meatballs was Arrête de ramer, t'es sur le sable ("Stop rowing, you're on the sand", according [more or less] to Babelfish). I presume that would make more sense to me if I had seen the movie.

Television commercial: "What can glassblowing teach us about investment banking?"

Karen: "Even though it looks exciting, don't touch it."

Recently, I began remastering a collection of instrumental pieces which Sev, Brian and I recorded a while back. We'd originally recorded them on a four-track tapes. Unfortunately, there were three of us, and the pieces were written for five parts, so we recorded three parts (bass, guitar and recorder) on a stereo pair of tracks, and I went back later and put the remaining parts on the two empty tracks, one part at a time.

It worked okay, but sadly, there was some popping when I transferred it from the tapes to my computer so that the songs could be burned on a CD. Recently, I found the master tapes, and began the process of retransferring and remastering them using Sonar (which I hadn't had back when we originally did the songs).

I got everything sounding great. Everything was nice and balanced, the effects plugins sounded nice and crisp (better than the outboard processors I'd used for the original CD). So I burned them onto CD and played them in my car on the way to work. I could barely hear the bass. My computer speakers include a subwoofer, and I'd tailored the sound to that system. Back to the old drawing board, as they say on Mars.

Unfortunately, when I turn up the bass, there are occasional notes with a little more punch, which get too loud. Normally, I'd just slap a compressor on the track, which reduces the volume when it gets too high — but since we've got three instruments sharing a stereo pair of tracks, the recorder and guitar are also reduced whenever the bass gets loud enough to activate the compression.

Last night, I was reading a review of some of the effects plugins that will be bundled with the new version of Sonar (drool!), and one of them is a multiband compressor; you can divide each track into frequency bands, like a parametric equalizer does, and apply different amounts of compression to each band. So it would be possible to isolate the bass' frequencies and compress it separately while leaving the guitar and recorder unaffected.

Unfortunately, the new Sonar won't be out until October, but this morning I got to thinking: if I apply a parametric EQ to the tracks, I could drop out the recorder and guitar entirely, and bounce just the bass to a separate track (and then reverse the EQ so the guitar and recorder are on their own). Then I could apply a regular compressor to the bass track and solve the problem.

Now, why didn't I think of that earlier? It's so obvious.

Could somebody explain to me why, with all the expanded powers ceded to law enforcement by the USA-PATRIOT act which Ashcroft is traveling the country trying desperately to defend, he was adamant that the FBI be denied the right to see if suspected terrorists have purchased guns?

With privacy-killing provisions like "sneak and peek", which gives police the right to search your home without your knowledge, or forcing librarians to turn over patrons' reading lists, or greatly loosened wiretapping regulations, what is so sacrosanct about whether or not someone's bought a killing device?

And why don't I remember reading about this in the Tribune?

No no no no no...

In keeping with today's theme... Over the years, I've collected some music equipment. Apart from my keyboard, the centerpiece of my music setup has been a Yamaha MT3X multitrack cassette recorder. I supplemented it with a pair of multi-effects processors: an Alesis MidiVerb III and an ART MultiVerb III. Because I couldn't stand the "percussion" available on SoundBlaster cards, I picked up a Korg MR-16 "MIDI Rhythm Unit" (not quite a drum machine; it's a slave unit meant to be controlled by an external sequencer). And though I rarely used it, I picked up a Gemini MX-4440 DJ mixer from a friend who was selling it to defray the cost of something else.

But once I bought Sonar, I started doing all of my recording on the computer, and used the MT3X as little more than a mixer. Since Sonar has a wide range of effects plugins, the outboard effects processors started gathering dust. I don't use percussion (and if I decided to start using it, Karen has a drum kit), and the Gemini mixer has seen very little use as long as I've owned it.

Last night, I bought a Yamaha MG12/4 mixer, mainly so I could start using condenser mics when recording the Consort (since the board we have on permanent loan from one of our former members doesn't supply phantom power). It's a nifty little board which perfectly suits our current needs (with independent subgroup outs, so I can have a separate channel for everybody), but also leaves a little room in case we add another member.

So, since the MT3X has now become wholly redundant along with the rest of that equipment, I figure I might as well put it all up on eBay for some musician(s) who could actually get some use out of it, rather than hanging on to a rack full of dust magnets. The MT3X won't go up immediately, as I want to go through all my master tapes and dump them all to my computer, just in case I ever want anything that's on there.

Though there's a part of me that wants to keep the MT3X just for æsthetic purposes, since the rack above my keyboard would look so bare with just a mixer on it. Isn't that stupid? And another part of me is whispering, "Keep the effects processors in case the Consort ever wants to add reverb during a live gig," despite the fact that we've never even used an amplifier, let alone effects. See, this is why I can never throw anything away; there's always that nagging question of what if I ever need this again?

Giuseppe Arcimboldo painted some rather bizarre portraits involving fruit and vegetables, flowers, even chickens — but this maiolica plate indicates that he had some stiff competition.

Probably not terribly safe for work. ("But it's art!")

As there was no rehearsal on Friday evening, Brian, Karen and I went to see Underworld. I enjoyed it, but it's one of those movies which, the more you think about it, the less sense it makes. Warning: Spoilers ahead

I mean, ignore the little stuff, like the fact that it occurred somewhere in Europe where there were umlauts in the street names, yet everybody spoke English (even more mystifying because, although most of the characters' English was British-accented, the steering wheels were on the left).

No, I mean the big stuff, like why it would be shocking for a vampire to learn that another vampire would feed on humans, or how Selene managed to recuperate from her blood loss under the pier (not to mention why she didn't happen to notice that Michael was bleeding profusely from his shoulder where Lucien had bitten him), or exactly what the Lycans expected to accomplish with their little Mendelian experiment.

The movie was okay, but it suffered from the modern cinematic affliction of putting more work into the visual effects than into the script.

To my dreaming mind, "home" is the house I grew up in. The last time I was in that house was seventeen years ago, but any time a dream occurs in a home setting, the mise en scéne is always that house in Connecticut.

Not once can I recall a dream occurring in any of the apartments I've had since then, or in my present house; it's as though my brain has locked that particular locale as the dream shorthand for "home". I never notice, during the dream, that I'm in a place which ceased to be my home over a decade and a half ago. People and objects from the present may show up, and they don't register as being out of place.¹

I wonder why that is.

¹ Then again, I don't tend to notice other inconsistencies during my dreams, such as one from last night when Karen brought home a stuffed "Hobbes" doll which soon mutated into an actual living cat. It seemed natural at the time.

A couple of years ago, when I tired of dialup and decided to go to broadband, the helpful Time Warner customer service representative asked if I wanted cable as well.

"Sure," I said, "give me just the lowest-tier cable there is." I don't really watch a lot of TV, but when I did watch it, the set-top antenna resulted in a lot of snow. So the cable guy came out, installed RoadRunner and cable, and that was that.

Until tonight, when two representatives of Bright House came to my door and informed me that I was only listed in their computer as having (and paying for) RoadRunner, and I needed to either buy cable or shut it off. And though it would cost me a $60 "installation fee" to have them leave it exactly as it was, plus an additional $15/month to actually watch it, I could get the digital cable installed free, pay $40 for one month at the "special rate", return the cable box and then drop back down to the $15/month "limited basic" package I had been receiving.

They were crack dealers. No, really. They gave us a "free" hit of digital cable in hopes that we'll want to keep it. Yeah, we watched Spongebob Squarepants. We watched "And Now for Something Completely Different". I could watch Stargate SG-1 when the new episodes actually come out, instead of watching them in syndication two years behind, at midnight on Monday morning. It's very tempting indeed. But I don't think it's $65/month worth of tempting, thankyouverymuch.

The first I really heard of the upcoming Battlestar Galactica remake was in articles about Edward James Olmos (Commander Adama) warning fans of the original show not to watch it, because they would hate it. Everything I heard after that — Cylons were going to look human, Starbuck would now be female, the characters were Earthlings — made me wonder why the producers didn't just give it a different name and try to pass it off as a Sci-Fi Channel Original.

Olmos seems to know science fiction fans a lot better than the producers do; fans' attachment to their favorite shows borders on the pathological, and any deviation from "canon" is met with horror and hatred. However, after doing some research, it seems that at least some of the scuttlebutt was incorrect; the characters aren't from Earth, but as in the original, they will be trying to find it after the Colonies are destroyed. Starbuck (and Boomer) will in fact be female, but what the hell, it works for Sam Carter on Stargate SG-1. At least they don't seem to be blatantly aimed towards the same demographic that the "Seven of Nine" and "T'Pol" characters on Star Trek were created for (no, apparently they've got a character named "Number Six" who seems to fulfill that role. At least she's sexier than Patrick McGoohan, the other Number Six, but her name indicates that there might, in fact, be some truth to the "Cylons look like humans" rumor).

As a twelve-year-old, I thought Battlestar Galactica was the coolest thing since sliced agro primaries. But looking back on it from an adult's perspective, perhaps a "modern reimagining" wouldn't be such a bad thing. Upon rewatching a number of the original episodes, there are a lot of cringeworthy bits:

• That damned robot dog — not only did it have the most annoying bark in the world, but every single time it went down to a planet, it ran off, causing Boxey (q.v.) to run after it, causing the adults to go looking for them both. You'd think after the seventh or eighth time, the adults might consider reprogramming the dog to, say, not run off. Or maybe destroy it. (Good news: it won't be in the remake. That in itself has made me more receptive to the idea of departing from the original canon.)
• Boxey — Why, oh why do we have to stick a cute kid in there and just load on the Family Circus-style sweetness to the point where the audience needs insulin? If they'd handled him like on Everybody Loves Raymond, I wouldn't care; an acknowledgement that there are children around, that's fine. But why do we have to see him, again and again, stowing away on shuttles, wandering away, endangering the adults? Cripes. (Bad news: there's a kid named Boxey in the cast list for the new miniseries.)
• Commander Adama — Part military leader, part new-age mystic, part Ben Cartwright In Space. The writing for him was embarassingly uneven, and he never had the cojones to openly stand up to the...
• Newly re-formed Council of the Twelve — Hey, let's destroy all our weapons so the Cylons will no longer see us as a threat! Hey, let's insist that all of our warriors leave the entire fleet unprotected, so that we can hold an awards ceremony down on a planet! Hey, let's release these "Terrans" who were trying to wipe us out! Hey, let's welcome the Terrans with open arms and no warriors around after they've broken out of the prison ship and possibly killed everyone aboard! Hey, let's give Baltar the benefit of the doubt once again, even though he's betrayed us every fracking time! With morons like these in charge, the human race deserved to be wiped out.
• Cylon marksmanship — With the way these guys shoot, it's absolutely impossible that they could have taken control of half the universe. Which reminds me...
• Not even the simplest understanding of space — "Earth is in a galaxy similar to our own." Yeah, with a fleet traveling at the top speed of the slowest ships, which aren't capable of light speed. Do you have any idea how many thousands of years it would take to get that far, Mr. Glen A. Larson? No, apparently you don't. "As long as the Cylons have Gamorray, they can control half the universe." One planet gives them a foothold on half the universe? Do you have any idea how ridiculous that is, Mr. Glen A. Larson? No, apparently you don't.
• Stock footage — Yeah, I know special effects were extremely expensive back then. But every time we had "space mines", we saw the same damned sequence from the pilot. Every time we encountered a Cylon tanker, there just happened to be two of them, and we saw the same damned sequence from the pilot. Every time we saw that chick on the bridge with braids in her hair, she said the same thing, because it was just the same damned clip from the pilot. Oh, and every time the Cylons engaged the Galactica in battle, they crashed a ship into the hangar bay, causing a major fire and preventing the pilots from landing to refuel and rearm. Just like in the pilot. Build a garage door, for crying out loud!
• Mormon theology — Okay, I'll grant that using Mormon theology was an easy way to introduce an exotic and unfamiliar mythology/backstory to the majority of the show's viewers. On the other hand, from a writing standpoint, it was kind of lazy. On the third hand, I was highly amused that the corrupt and evil "Enforcers" in one episode (The Long Patrol) were wearing the emblem of Scientology's "Sea Org" (the inner cadre who've signed a billion-year contract to serve Scientology).
• The interior decorators — I'm sorry, guys, but bubble wrap does not look like a futuristic wall hanging. It looks like someone stapled bubble wrap to the wall.

There's much, much more, but this entry is far too long as it is; so perhaps slavishly adhering to the original isn't necessarily a desirable thing. The ships and the Cylons were visually appealing, but the writing was pretty awful. I'll give the "re-imagining" a chance; it could hardly be worse than the original.

Well, no, that's not true. It could be as bad as Enterprise.

An open letter to the person whose car was adorned with a "Jesus fish" and a whole array of Jesus-oriented bumper stickers, including "WWJD?":

For some reason, I can't seem to find where Jesus taught, either by words or by example, If thou seest someone in front of thee who signalleth his desire to enter thy lane of travel, speed thou up until thou art next to him; and then match his speed, that he cannot enter the lane except he doth slow down and try again behind thee.