Once upon a time, someone told me one should never take off all the strings from a twelve-string guitar at the same time, because they were built to handle extremely high tension; in fact, they needed that tension, and taking it all away would shatter the guitar.

Personally, I thought that was a load of bovine excrement. If it were true, how could they build the guitar in the first place, since the strings have to go on after the neck is set? Now, I could see how cutting all twelve strings at once might be a problem, much as cutting a bowstring can shatter the bow, but a gradual release? Still, in my youth, I was a bit more cautious, and always changed the strings one at a time just in case it was true.

Well, I pulled the old girl out yesterday after nearly a decade of disuse, dusted her off, and said to Hell with it. One by one I unwound the strings, and the guitar stayed whole. Ha. So I went through the tedium of winding the new strings on (fortunately, I had the foresight to buy a string winder), and the even greater tedium of retuning over and over again as the strings stretched out.

But damn, that mother pumps out the sound. Accustomed as I am to a fairly quiet classical guitar, and the even quieter lutes, I'd forgotten just how loud a dreadnought twelve-string can be.

Oh, yes. I had mentioned earlier that the Consort was getting together to evaluate the recordings we'd done for the second CD. Well, during the New Year's party, we broke away for a little while and gave ourselves a listen. I'm happy to say that we decided to keep two of the sixteen songs, trash some of them completely, and re-record the rest.

"Happy?" Why, yes. To begin with, I played a sample of guitar music I'd recorded using one of the cheap dynamic microphones we had used to record the songs, and then I played another sample made with one my new condenser mics.¹ The difference between the two was astonishing; whereas the first one was fairly tinny and hollow-sounding, the second one was fuller, richer and very warm. So some of the pieces which suffered from inadequate microphone response curves will be done again, which makes me happy.

Another reason for re-recording is that preparing for live gigs and a radio appearance really tightened up our sound. The stuff we'd recorded lacked a lot of the energy of our more recent performances, so we decided to do them again. Even so, they were still several orders of magnitude better than our first CD, which suffered from dirgelike tempos, among other technical handicaps.

But that latter fact moved us to trash some of the songs altogether; they'd been on our first CD, and while we didn't want our second one to be a re-recording of the first one, we had wanted to redeem ourselves by proving we could do them better. Well, we did prove it, so now we can throw them away and move on. A couple of the re-done songs will probably appear on the new CD, but I think they'll be worthwhile.

I can't wait until we get back to recording. The new gear's arrived, my upgraded computer hardware and software are working like a dream, and our recent performances sounded far better than I ever dreamed they would.

And then? Maybe a side project with Sev to do some jazz; I've got a sax that deserves to be more than a dust magnet.

1. Incidentally, I found out why the Oktava mics are going so cheap at Guitar Center. According to the microphone salesman, Mars Music had signed a deal with Oktava to be the exclusive American suppliers of their microphones, and bought boatloads of them. When Mars went under, Guitar Center snapped them up for practically nothing, so even at way below list price they're still making a hefty profit on them.

Fark's favorite drunk, Henry Earl, was arrested yesterday for the 804th time. His rap sheet includes a database of his booking photos, which one clever Farker used to portray a few lines from Macbeth, which I shall quote here because it's so damn funny.

Act 2 scene 1:


"How goes the night, boy?"


"The moon is down; I have not heard the clock."


"And she goes down at twelve."


"I take't, 'tis later, sir."

Enter MACBETH, and a Servant with a torch


"Who goes there?"


"A friend."

Followup: make that 805 times!

"Have you seen what he wears? Someone needs to submit his name for a makeover. It would be 'Queer Eye for the Queer Guy'."

...and seen on a forum: "Your backwards emoticon puzzles me!"

Custom resin heads for 12" action figures (G.I. Joe, etc.). This guy's got some pretty awesome modeling skills. I can think of some great applications for this sort of thing.

Karen and I went out with Sev and Lisa yesterday to finally see Return of the King, and I came away with a number of life lessons (spoilers galore).

First, if you defeat someone, kill him at once or else he'll come back to screw with you again. This kept happening: Denethor, Gollum, Saruman — except you'll have to wait for the special edition DVD to see that example, since they cut out the entire end plot about Saruman and Gríma Wormtongue escaping from Fangorn and doing their best to ruin the Shire in a blatant allegory about modern industrialism (or so it would be if Tolkien didn't insist that he hated allegories, and nothing in Lord of the Rings was allegorical). But no, they had to give us twenty minutes of Hobbits hugging goodbye instead.

Second, if you're building a huge mountain fortress, make sure there's no safety wall on the very top level. That way, burning stewards can run unimpeded off the edge. Speaking of mountain fortresses...

Third, if you have got a huge mountain fortress, and an army of Orcs is attacking you, how about getting the women and children inside and away from the windows? For one thing, they get in the way of your soldiers if they're out on the "streets"; and for another thing, they'll be a lot safer if they're inside, and away from the easily-breached stone walls. And speaking of which...

Fourth, if one boulder from a catapult can take down an entire stone tower, but your wooden door can withstand a huge flaming battering ram for an astonishing amount of time, consider building your fortress out of wood. Credit for that observation goes to Severin, who also noticed that the men of Mínas Tírith had no problem loading fourteen-ton blocks of masonry into their trebuchets, and that Gandalf's only apparent magical powers were the ability to make his staff glow and keep himself utterly spotless when all around were grimy.

Fifth, if you want to kill Orcs, just send in some tasty food and they'll kill each other trying to get it. This happened in The Two Towers as well.

Sixth, Falls from great heights are never fatal in Middle Earth. Gandalf survived his fall in Moria (as did the Balrog), Gollum survived his fall into the chasm outside Shelob's lair... the only reason Denethor died (well, I assume he died, since he didn't pop back up again) is that he was also on fire. This is clearly the reason Gollum contrived his James Bond Villain-style plan to obtain the Ring by letting Shelob eat Frodo and then combing through her fæcal matter rather than, say, pushing Sam and Frodo off the steep cliff and then climbing back down to take it from Frodo's lifeless body.

Seventh, I want a palantír bowling ball. That was even cooler than The Bowler's ball in Mystery Men.

Eighth, the physics of molten rock are different in Middle Earth. In the real world, if you're surrounded that closely by lava, you'll die pretty quickly of asphyxiation from breathing superheated noxious gases. Especially if you're in a mostly closed volcanic cavern like that. Not to mention that your hair and eyebrows will quickly burn away.

Ninth, Dwarves are comic relief. Gimli was my favorite character in the books; it was sad to see him reduced to such a rôle.

Tenth, Hobbits are gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but holy crap, I thought Frodo was gonna start kissing Sam on the mouth there at the end. And they all cry at the drop of the hat; the movie spilled more tears than blood.

Now, don't get me wrong, I liked the movie. And I'm rarely bowled over by special effects anymore, but Gandalf's ride up Mínas Tírith was just flabbergasting in its awesomeness. And though I have no problem with spiders (unless they've got a red hourglass on their abdomens and they're sitting in the recycling bin that I've got to take to the curb), that bit where Shelob appeared over Frodo totally creeped me out.

Now, I don't have an MBA, so this is probably a really stupid question, but isn't it usually considered a bad thing to expend more money than one has coming in? And isn't it also a bad idea, when this is happening, to increase expenditures and deliberately reduce income?

I'm just asking, because judging from today's headlines, my understanding of economics is totally wrong.

Use Fontifier to turn your handwriting into a TrueType font.

It's fairly basic: no kerning, extended characters or advanced effects, and it's missing even some of the standard lower-ASCII glyphs. But on the other hand, it's free.

My inbox is being flooded with copies of the W32.Novarg.A worm. Is Outlook Express still opening attachments automatically, or are there truly that many stupid people out there who open unexpected attachments willy-nilly?

That Superbowl performance was a disgrace. I mean, sure, she's an attractive woman and all, and I wholly support the notion of artistic license, but there are just some liberties that simply shouldn't be taken.

I mean, do whatever you want on your own time, but is it really too much to ask that the national anthem be sung the way it was written? I can't remember the last time I heard someone sing The Star Spangled Banner without changing the rhythm and charging off the melodic path. Is Beyonce (and the Dixie Chicks, and Mariah, and Ray, and Faith...) too good to sing it the way it was intended? Apparently. They can't just sing America's national anthem; they've got to make it "their own". If they ever saw that episode of The Simpsons where Bleeding Gums Murphy scatted his way through it, the message was totally lost on them.

That's what's wrong with the country these days. Everyone's only interested in doing things for themselves that the good of the country is all but forgotten. To Hell with the public good or future generations, we need to enrich our stock portfolios. International goodwill? Screw it, we've got a score to settle. What do you mean, stationed in Iraq? I only signed up for weekends and two weeks a year! The "Me" generation is still alive and kicking, and ru{i|n}ning the country.

Bah.

Cthuugle. The only search engine that requires you to roll a sanity check before seeing the results.

A diatribe seen on Fark, which I think deserves to be spread far and wide:

Okay, perhaps it's a little strongly worded, but sometimes people have to be shocked into paying attention.

There's an interesting, if sickening, article about how AstraZeneca, faced with the expiration of their patent on Prilosec, set up legal minefields to prevent the sale of cheaper generics, while urging consumers to switch to their "next-generation" product, Nexium — which doesn't provide any significant improvements over the older drug.

Stuff like that really makes my stomach churn.

According to one of the propmakers, they used my fonts in The Ninth Gate. How cool is that?

The Ninth Gate DVD was only $10.99, so I figured, why not? They used a couple of different typefaces for the book — none of which were Caslon Antique, I am very thrilled to say — but were any of them, as I was told, my fonts?

Here's a still from the movie, followed by the same text set in JSL Ancient. Unfortunately, I didn't have the entire text to set; since the lines are fully justified, the interword (and possibly intercharacter) spacing will be different.

Personally, I see enough differences to conclude that the still does not contain JSL Ancient. Specifically, the height of the 't' and 'v', the bow thickness of the 'q', the shape of the 'ct' ligature, the ascender height of 'b' and 'd', the shape and size of the comma and the curve of the 'f'.

So perhaps my email informant was mistaken, or perhaps they used JSL Ancient for other props. Oh well.

Took Karen out to eat at our favorite Thai restaurant on Saturday for Valentine's Day. The food was amazing, as always. As we were preparing to leave, a guy a couple of tables over from us was ordering his meal.

"Okay, I want very little fish sauce, you understand? I still want it spicy, but I don't want a lot of fish sauce. Very little fish sauce, but still spicy, okay?" He repeated himself a few more times, then as the waitress moved away, said in an unnecessarily loud voice to his companions, "Have you ever seen fish sauce being made? It's not a pretty sight, I can assure you."

Dude. If the fish sauce is that objectionable to you, there's a whole menu full of other things — including spicy dishes — you can order. Or do you just get your jollies by being a dick in public? I almost wonder if he's the same guy in the convenience shop in the building next door to my office, who snapped, "Come on, hurry up! Chop chop!" to the Asian proprietress because she wasn't moving quickly enough for him.

I wouldn't have voted for Dean (were I able to participate in the Democratic primaries, I would have voted for Clark¹) but I do find it troubling that America has grown so shallow that a candidate can be knocked out of the ring not because of a platform position or evidence of severe ethical shortcomings, but simply because he used a common motivational technique to try and raise the energy level at a rally.

Plus, talk about a fickle public — Gore was roundly ridiculed for being an emotionless robot, and Dean's been pilloried for actually displaying emotion.

1. Even so, Dean was less objectionable than Kerry, who's apparently done nothing during his political career except serve himself, and seems to be an utter jackass besides.

Foreigners get all the cool candy flavors. Like curry-flavored Kit-Kat bars (not to mention lemon cheesecake — sold in Germany and Japan, and possibly soon in Britain — liquorice, saffron and passion fruit). Nestlè, what have you got against America?

Characterization of Organic Illumination Systems is a report published by Digital Equipment Company's Western Research Labs, detailing their experiments in the field of organic illumination.

Or, in less technical English, running an electric current through a pickle until it glows.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!

What the heck? Read the Feb. 13th installment of Ask the White House — the column in which White House officials answer your questions — and let me know if you can figure out what's going on.

Finally broke down and bought a cablemodem router, which is good for a number of reasons. I bought a wireless one, as well as a wireless NIC to put into the MAME machine, so I can update it from the den without having to lug it in and physically hook it up to the network. Karen is worried about hordes of hackers stalking the streets with Pringles cans, so the first thing I did was to set up maximum security on the router, which (naturally) is shipped in a completely unsecure state.

On an unrelated note, after tweaking the registry a bit, I finally got Alcohol 120% running properly. It's a great program; among other things, it lets me copy CDs onto "virtual drives" stored on my hard drive, and it emulates their copy-protection. This means I don't have to stick the CD in whenever I want to use a certain application, which will make using it a whole lot more pleasant.

While I've been pouring nearly all my free time into an entry for the Internet Raytracing Competition, I'm taking Saturday off to go to MegaCon in Orlando. Had I known that Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes were among the scheduled guests, I probably would have bought tickets well in advance — and then been pissed when they canceled.

It's just as well I've already seen Mercedes McNab, since I plan to spend the day on the exhibitors' floor, hanging out at one booth in particular and soaking up as much information as I can; I've heard many times how edifying it is to see their demonstrator at work. While the thought of giving up an entire Saturday when the competition deadline is less than two months away isn't pleasant, I'm hoping I can pick up enough tips to speed up the creation process.

Besides which, I have email conversations with their support tech and programmers several times a week, so it'd be nice to actually put some faces with the names.

A bug in my blog code prevented it from automatically starting a new archive at the beginning of each month since January. While attempting to fix the problem, I accidentally reset the date/time stamps on three months' worth of posts to today.

Before I started, I thought, "Maybe I should back up the database, just in case. Nah, what could go wrong?"

Idiot.

Okay, for Sev and Lisa, here's a rundown of my MegaCon experience, such as it was.

The directions to the Orlando convention center were pretty easy. I followed the signs for parking, and ended up in a lot about half a mile away from the actual con. Fortunately, there was a shuttle bus, occupied by one other con-goer when I got on. Unfortunately, the driver had the short-term memory of an avocado, and asked us four times en route which convention we were going to, as there were several scheduled at the center that day (one of which was a national cheerleading competition).

I got there right at nine, which was a pity because the doors didn't open until ten. So I waited in line, surrounded by comic book fans. Apparently, the new hotness is to denigrate everything about the con experience, as all I heard was sarcastic sniping about the guests, panels and attendees (apparently, Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons is less of a caricature than I thought). Among the few costumes I recognized, I saw a couple of Sailor Moons, a Spike (from Cowboy Bebop, not Buffy), a group of G.I. Joes, and of course the local detachment of stormtroopers.

One of the stormtroopers was female, and had a midriff-baring breastplate (complete with breast cups). One of her compatriots was wearing full stormtrooper armor from the waist up, but below that was wearing a neoprene kilt over bare legs and Doc Martens. A third had a large backpack which continually played music from the original Star Wars trilogy. It was certainly the most interesting stormtrooper squadron I've seen.

There were other interesting costumes. There was a group of people who were all wearing small transparent umbrellas on their heads. I have no idea what they were supposed to be. A lot of cat-ears. Someone wearing an entire plush suit, but I'm not going there.

None of the panels or speakers interested me enough to go to them. I walked once around the exhibitor floor, looking for something interesting to buy Karen, but there really wasn't anything that moved me to purchase it.

Pretty much my whole day was spent hanging out at the Hash booth. Another A:M user showed up, and we chatted while the Hash guys were demonstrating. Fairly early on, a couple of goth kids came by, listened to the demonstration, and then asked if the software was available on Kazaa. Now that's chutzpah.

Across the aisle from Hash were two voice actors from Dragonball Z, there to sign autographs. They epitomized the reason I hate English dubs on anime: they did the most annoying, ear-piercing voices, though their normal speaking voices were quite pleasant. Of course, they didn't use their normal speaking voices much, preferring instead to shrill the same "ad-libbed" lines into the microphones every half hour. And for some reason, their PA speakers weren't aimed at their audience, but directly at the Hash booth. And they set the volume knob on 11 and then broke it off.

Towards the end of the day, one of the Hashes had to leave the booth because he couldn't stifle his laughter; a prospective customer was accompanied by a pair of friends, one of which was a guy wearing a miniskirt, opera gloves, go-go boots and a leash, with his neck covered in hickeys. The other Hash, amazingly, was able to keep a straight face.

After the con, we went out to dinner with the Hash guys, talked about this and that, and then we all went our merry ways.

Publishers face fines of up to half a million dollars and up to ten years in prison if they edit any works from Iran, Libya, Sudan and Cuba. They can publish them "as is", but it's forbidden to edit (for spelling, punctuation, grammar, etc.), illustrate or peer-review any works from embargoed nations.

Peer review is one of the fundamental processes in the advancement of scientific theories, and editing is a basic function of publishing, which directly affects the publishers' reputation (and therefore, their income). But here in "the land of the free", they can also be considered collaboration with the enemy, and therefore punishable by fines and imprisonment.

I've never played HeroClix, but this Galactus figure is pretty cool. Be sure to check out the Invisible Woman at the bottom of the page, too.

PS: If you haven't seen the "Heroes" parody of the short-lived animated "Clerks" series, it's definitely worth a viewing.

Being not terribly enamored of the job of cleaning our cats' litterboxes, I've often thought about buying one of those automatic ones, which are supposed to sense when your cat has done its business and then rake itself, depositing the matter into a hermetically sealed container for easy removal.

One of the guys at Penny Arcade has such a device, and after reading his experiences with it, I think I'll stick to the old-fashioned method.

Here's a nifty resource: a directory full of game demos.

Update: Gee, it would help if I posted the link to the actual directory, and not the demo I downloaded therefrom. Duh.

In colleges and universities throughout the land, people major in Sociology. I never actually knew any Soc majors in school, nor do I know anyone who did major in it, but I know of them.

Where, exactly, does one get a job in Sociology? I mean, apart from a job teaching it?

The court reporting office I work in often provides ASCII copies of transcripts on diskette. One firm asked for them on CD-ROM. This is a little wasteful; the transcripts in their case have been averaging around 235 KB, and the CD-ROM holds about 623 MB when formatted (so that's less than one twentieth of one percent actually used on the CD).

I thought maybe the attorney had an iMac, and thus no floppy drive. But no, his office recently called and said he was having trouble reading the CD, so could we send another one to him on a floppy disk?

Thanks for wasting our blank CDs, guy.

Would you care for a DVD-quality copy of Night of the Living Dead, legally downloadable from the Internet Archive's feature film collection? Or the classic film noir, D.O.A.? Perhaps Sing a Song of Six Pants for devotees of the Three Stooges? How about Hemp for Victory, a propaganda film from back when the United States government was promoting the use of hemp rather than suppressing it? Or the seminal Reefer Madness and its cousin, Sex Madness?

Oddly, the main page says there are 39 films available, but only 31 show up in the alphabetical list. What are the mysterious eight films, and how can I get them?

Something nice happened yesterday which was completely unexpected. But of course now I'm asking myself if I actually deserved it. Well, there's only one remedy: do something to remove all doubt.

So here I am, 9PM, sitting at work. I'm upgrading our server (which, of course, means it has to be done after hours). We're going from a 166 MHz 6x86 running Windows 98 to a 1.8 GHz AthlonXP running Windows XP. Fortunately, I brought my home PC along, so I can back up the server's files onto two DVDs as opposed to a whole bunch of CDs. Unfortunately, I'll probably be here into the wee hours: backing everything up, transferring the hard drives into the new case, temporarily relocating the CD-ROM from my work machine to the new server, formatting the hard drives to NTFS, installing Windows XP, getting the network settings right, and finally transferring all the files back from the DVDs.

And that's if everything runs smoothly.

On the positive side, during the format and XP install, I can spend the time playing computer games. Right now, though, I'm sitting here bored because my work machine has absolutely no good games on it. Should've copied MAME over from my home machine before I started the backups...

Update: 12:13 AM — Backups made (redundantly, in the case of the payroll and billing databases), drives transferred to new machine, hard drive reformatting. The floppy drives aren't connected, because they always return an error when the system boots. They're so old, they've got edge connectors. And one of them's a 5¼" drive. Speaking of old, the motherboard only has ISA slots. Which means I can't hook the bill printer back up, since both parallel ports were on add-in I/O cards.

Update: 1:21 AM — Drive formatted, XP installed, copying files back to the server. Hungry, but the only things in the fridge are a tub of Land O' Lakes "buttery" spread, a jar of jam which expired in 2002, five cans of Diet Sprite and a V8. I could make some Otis Spunkmeyer® brand cookies, I suppose. I should probably tell my boss how old his jam is. On the other hand, April Fool's is coming up...

Update: 1:26 AM — Found my boss' stash of Halloween candy. I presume it's from this past October, but given the date on the jam, I'm not quite willing to find out firsthand.

Update: 1:31 AM — Damn it, I know there's a stash of Doritos and Cheetos around here somewhere. He puts out a dish full of munchies for the lawyers before each depo. And there's only so many drawers in this office.

Update: 3:48 AM — I think everything's set up okay. Just a few tests from various workstations to make sure, and I can go home. Wheeee! Never did find the Doritos. I even looked in the filing cabinets.

Update: 4:14 AM — Finally finished after eleven hours and six minutes. I'd say it wasn't even worth going home for a couple hours' sleep, but somehow I don't think the Bluntman & Chronic T-shirt qualifies as businesslike attire.