The TL/DR update to yesterday’s post: The house is warm again.
The heating fellow came back out and, after no small amount of time in the attic, was able to definitively diagnose the problem. Diagnose, but not fix. The controller board of the furnace has an issue that prevents it from sending the on/off signal to the fan. The way the things works is that, when the temperature is lower than what the thermostat specifies, it’ll light a flame and start burning gas in a combustion chamber. Once that gets up to a certain temperature, it kicks the fan on and the house heats up.
Since it wasn’t sending the message to the fan, the heat just stayed in the combustion chamber until it crossed a certain heat threshold. At that point, the whole thing shut down. So, we need a new board. Boo. Those ain’t cheap. On the plus side, he’s wired it so that the fan stays on constantly. That’s wasteful under most circumstances, but not damaging. This ensures that the fan will be on when the heat kicks in and we won’t have the overheating problem. Given that the temperatures are going to be in the mid-teens tonight, I don’t imagine the fan would spend much time in the “off” position anyway.
So, the problem isn’t sorted, but it will be shortly and we have an acceptable workaround in the meantime. Phew.
Thus ends a thoroughly unpleasant long weekend. To add insult to injury, once the house warmed up, I sat down to play FFXIV only to discover that the game is undergoing maintenance and will not be up until 4:00 AM. That’s not too bad, or it wouldn’t be if this weren’t a school (work) night. Speaking of work, it’s going to be odd next week. I do have the most passive-aggressive script for the meeting with the vendor I described yesterday. I’m looking forward to it. It’s going to be fun.
On the plus sides, the cats handled the whole ordeal like troopers and are now zooming around the house as though nothing happened. The cats have the right of it. Don’t let a bad yesterday spoil a lovely today. It’s awfully hard to argue with them when they look so happy.
On an unrelated note, remember when I was so proud of my synthesizer repair skills? It turns out there’s a difference between “testing” and “thoroughly testing.” Which is to say, when I put it back together, the keys worked…except for the lowest octave. I had to put it back on the bench, take it apart again, and then reseat one of the ribbon cables. This time, I tested all 61 keys instead of just the middle ones, and we were good.
The reason I’ve been working so hard to get this keyboard in tip-top shape is my little Christmas present to myself: A Retroaktiv DW-8P controller for the DW-8000. “What the heck is that?” you say? OK, so, you may have seen synthesizers that look like this:
Let’s get very slightly technical here: Everything the synthesizer can do can be controlled with one of those knobs or switches. This makes changing the sound very intuitive. You want to change something, you move the knob and can hear the effect it has on the sound immediately. There’s one drawback, though: It’s very expensive to make a synthesizer this way. So, Yamaha made on this way (yes, I know this wasn’t the first of its type, but it’s the one that made this kind of interface popular):
It’s very sleek and modern looking, but where are the knobs? There aren’t any! Most of the programming is done by picking a setting you want to change from a menu on that tiny screen and then using the sliders on the left to change the values. This is a pain in the buttocks, especially for the DX7, but it makes the whole thing cheaper and lighter (lighter is a big deal for folks who have to lug them around).
But..what if you could have your cake and eat it too? The folks at Roland thought “what if we make synthesizers with the menu interface, but we also offer a programmer that you can attach to it that will give you the ability to have one slider per function like the old synths?” So, that’s what they made:
See that little unit on top of the right side of the synthesizer? That’s the Roland PG-800, a dedicated programmer for the JX10 (AKA the Super JX, which is really two JX-8P synths in one box along with a 76 key keyboard and I’ve had two of them and sold them and I am so dumb..but I digress). These days, the Roland programmers go for almost as much as the synths themselves. It makes sense, too-these are dedicated pieces of hardware. What works on one synthesizer probably won’t work on another because they have different functions, different allowable values, and these vintage keyboards didn’t really have standardized ways to address otherwise similar functions.
Still with me? We’re almost there. The missing use case here are the synthesizers that are still considered useful, plentiful enough that a lot of people have them, are crippled by the awful menu interface, and there are no manufacturer programmers available. It’s a niche market, but it’s a market that has encouraged companies like Retroaktiv to create dedicated programmers for these old synths.
Being much more modern, these marvelous devices can do a lot more than just provide a slider for each function. Memory is much cheaper now, so the DW-8P has a memory card that can store 40 banks of 64 sounds on it. Korg actually made a memory device for the DW-8000. It could hold 4 banks of sounds and cost more than the DW-8P. The new toy can also semi-randomly create sounds (you can tell it what sort of sound you want as a starting point). Oh, and it can control two Korg DWs at the same time.
So, progress, am I right? None of this helps me play it, but it does give me all my favorite sounds at my fingertips without having to jump through some hoops (I am a MIDI newbie; it’s probably not that bad for pros). It allows me to dynamically change how a sound…sounds…while I’m playing. I’ve been messing with it all night and it takes a lot of the friction out of messing with my favorite synth and there’s a lot to be said for that.
So, yeah. I crummy weekend landed pretty gracefully. I can’t complain. I got that out of my system yesterday, after all. It’s warm in here. The cats are happy. Nicole made pseudo-pralines with some maple syrup. My tummy hurts, but it hurts in the sort of way that say “it was worth it.” Short week at work next week. It’s amazing how a little thing like 25 degrees inside your house can make all the difference in the world, huh?
Stay warm, y’all.
-RK