In which I describe some feverish ideas had which, in retrospect, might have been very profitable.I presume I am not unusual, let alone unique, in the belief that some of my ideas could have been huge successes had I the courage (OK, the wherewithal) to pursue them and bring them into the world. Alas, the gap between “dreaming it” and “doing it”* is quite a chasm and the “doing it” bit is what separates the wheat from the, um, not wheat. That’s the expression, right? Anyway, here are a couple of ideas I had that I am sure would have worked out swimmingly. The solution to motel air conditioners This image is pretty much what all motel air conditioners looked like for several decades. You can probably hear (and smell) it if you ever slept in a room with one of these units. The controls were simplicity incarnate: A temperature dial and a “high” and “low” selector. What it did not have was a thermostat. You had to turn it on and off manually. In practise, this meant that you usually slept with it running all night and often left it running during the day of a multi-night stay to keep the temperature liveable. This led to some chilly nights (I was usually in warmer climates) with the AC on high all night. I expect that this was quite expensive for the motels as well. Now, completely replacing all the AC units with newer ones equipped with a thermostat (or, heavens forfend, central units) would have been very expensive. But what if you made an expensive device that would serve that function without having to make any pricey changes? That would be a win for the motel and the guests! And I figured out how to do it. Are you familiar with these doohickeys? It’s a simple analog timer device. You plug it into the wall, you plug, say, a light into it and turn the light on. You set the “on” and “off” times with the green and red tabs for when you want the light to turn on or off. The device cuts the circuit during the “off” times and completes it during the “on” times. Crude, sure, but simple, cheap and effective. “Ah,” you say, “That’s marvelous for timing things, but how does that replace a thermostat?” And you’re right. But…what if, instead of a time, we put a cheap mercury switch in it instead of a timer? That is, in fact, what thermostats use. The mercury moves based on the temperature, completing or disconnecting the circuit. You adjust the “tilt” of the switch to change the temperature at which it turns on or off. They’re cheap, they’re reliable, and they’re small enough to fit in a little box you plug into an outlet. This little thingie would have saved motel chains so much money. I’d bet the ranch on it. Unfortunately, I had no ranch to bet at the time and I just sat on the idea. These days, almost all the old AC units have been replaced. You could use it with window units, but they’re cheap enough these days that the device would cost almost as much as the AC which lessens the appeal considerably. It was a good idea, but its time has passed. 2. A realistic baseball pitching machine This is a very old school baseball pitching machine. If it looks to you like two electic motors spinning rubber tires, give yourself a gold star because that’s pretty much it. It is, however, far more sophisticated than it looks. By adjusting the relative speeds of the tires, you could have it throw different kinds of pitches. More modern ones even let you tilt the tires, giving you more options to more perfectly recreate specific pitches. It is not without its flaws. It takes some time to switch between types of pitches which real pitchers do not do. More importantly, the motion of “dropping a ball into a chute” isn’t really like watching a pitcher throw a ball. A hitter can definitely work on their hitting mechanics and their ability to hit pitches that move (like a curveball), but it’s not great for preparing for a specific pitcher. Some time in the mid 1990s, I started thinking about how this could be improved. You could project images of a pitcher actually throwing the ball onto a screen. You put the pitching machine on an arched rail so it could match where the ball comes out of the pitcher’s hand. Finally, you let the computer adjust the machine’s setting quickly to match the pitcher’s real abilities (95 mph fastball, 84 mph slider, 78 mph curve, etc.). To me, this seemed like a way to prepare hitters for specific pitchers they would face, something far more useful than the garden variety pitching machine. And I was right! Behold: It’s so close to my original concept it hurts. It’s better than I imagined, but c’mon, the technology has improved a wee bit over the years. It turns out this was genuinely a good idea, but it was too early and, realistically, I was probably never going to follow up on it anyway. I can’t even say I regret not following up on these ideas. They were daydreams, not engineering prototypes, and I won’t pretend otherwise. They’re fun to think about though. I still think, in some cases, the mercury switch box would be handy. But, I still own a manual typewriter, so what do I know?-RK * Perhaps I simply didn’t have enough coffee in me. Side note: You probably cannot imagine this, but in the early 1980s, the coffee industry was doing very poorly. So poorly that they somehow produced a series of ads featuring, and I am not making this up: David Bowie, Kurt Vonnegut, Heart, Cicely Tyson, Ken Anderson, Joe Jackson, Jane Curtin, and the music of the Electric Light Orchestra in an effort to make coffee seem cool to young people. No matter how strange you think the 80s were, I can assure you that they were far, far stranger and more alien.
Category: Journal
X years
A few years back Nicole and I did something: https://ridleykemp.com/2016-11-3-1504-miles-later-home/It’s been a good ten years. The best ten years of my life, and my life has been pretty good so far. So, to celebrate, we’re doing something close to what we did for our honeymoon (It turns out that our marriage has outlasted the place where we fell in love with on the honeymoon). That wasn’t going to stop us from spending a few nights in a restored vintage trailer: This is our vibe. We had a little false start as we forgot something at the house and had to go back. But, unlike Marfa, Lucky Arrow Retreat in Dripping Springs is a lot less than 8 hours from our home. But we learned something important, or at least I did: Eating an entire bag of sea salt potato chips while one drives is a Very Bad Idea Indeed. I suspect Nicole already knew this. We grilled burgers on night one and they are the best burgers I’ve had in ages. Was the mood? Or just the fact that we live in a town with no good burgers. Maybe both. Probably both. We woke up the next morning surrounded by familiar-seeming friends. Memories of Kitty City The flock were very accustomed to human company and to white powder doughnuts. In fact, they seemed to (correctly) conflate the two things. Unlike the Kitty City peacocks, these were well behave and, thankfully, quiet. If youve ever heard a peacock in full voice, you know what I mean. We poked around a little, made sammiches for lunch, and had a nice chill day. We even played Monopoly and I scored an unlikely comeback victory (I was down to $13 at one point). The railroads, believe it or not, were the difference. Dumb game. Then we played one of those games that’s really just a list of hypothetical questions you’re supposed to answer in thoughtful and revealing ways. We both agreed our answers were perfect, no not. We’d make pretty good co-emperors I think, not that we’d want the job. Last night I read her a new set of vows. I kind of botched it the first time, a combination of nerves and not memorizing and trying to rephrase on the fly. I made sure I was reading a script this time, and the update included the things I’ve learned about marriage over the last decade. I think it went over well, and she deserved a better set of vows. Today, the 22nd, is the actual anniversary date. We got up to make pancakes and then decided that we did not, in fact, feel like making pancakes, so we went into town and had coffee and pastries (as one does). We rented a little cabana by the pool and have spent the day chilling, grilling, and, um…illing? Not so much. There are worse ways to spend a day There are two pools, the “adult” pool we’re next to, which is #$%#$% cold an utterly unswimmable. The kids pool down the stairs is heated and lovely and is the one to use if you come here. And you should, because it’s nice. We grilled hot dogs, or, in my case, Earl Campbell’s hot links, which are absolutely wonderful so long as you do not ask what is in them. I’d like to give a special shout-out to the guy at the counter. His name is David and he’s super nice and helpful. And I saw him feeding the stray kittens near the check-in area, which gets you a lot of points in my book. We’ll do our anniversary dinner tonight at Tillie’s over at Camp Lucy because it’s really good and really close. I don’t want to spend all day on the computer, so I’ll just assume it’s going to be really nice and I will get smooches. And give smooches. Because smooches are nice. Addendum: We did, in fact, dine at Tillie’s. We arrived earlier than our reservation time, which seemed to please the host. While waiting for our table, we near another couple who were also waiting. We started chatting and the host emerged and told us our table was ready. Nicole, being Nicole, graciously offerred to share our table with the other couple. So…we did! It was marvelous. They were also celebrating their anniversary and we all had a grand time. Thanks for still being around if you see this. It’s been a while. I’m feeling the urge to Write About Stuff again. I have some ideas queued up, so we’ll see. <3
It’s a strange world. It falls on us to keep it that way.
Things are such for me, from a professional standpoint, that I haven’t had the energy or focus to write. So it goes. I tried to fight it by writing music, but that’s been a complete bust (although I have an idea that’s going to be a banger-and-a-half when I get back to it). So, rather than try to do anything “big,” I’m just going to talk about something that happened today. Comic artist John Cassady passed away this morning. You may not know him or his work, but he means a lot to me. It was one of his covers that convinced me to check out the book he did with Warren Ellis called Planetary. Look at that. Just look at it. Even with no familiarity with the story, you have an immediate sense of what’s being conveyed: The man in the white suit is a mystery, a puzzle even to himself. He’s pieced everything together except for one final piece, and he is holding that piece in his hand. It draws you in, doesn’t it? What I didn’t know at the time was that this was the penultimate issue and, for all intents and purposes, the end of the story (at least, of Elijah Snow’s story). Nonetheless, it was a glorious book and of course I bought every other issue. The other thing I didn’t know was that almost every issue of Planetary was a pastiche of one comic convention or trope. There was a kaiju story, a golden age of comics story, a 50’s pulp story, a 2001-A-Space-Odessey story, etc. That’s a challenge for any artist, but to make it worse: Every cover was done in the style of the pastiche. It was very clearly “Planetary” but there were few if any design elements in common from month to month. There ya go: All 27 covers—no repeated logo or typeface to be seen. It’s amazing. After a couple of wobbly starts, the art on the inside is every bit as fascinating. Cassaday’s ability to create these images is one of the reasons that Planetary is, push come to shove, probably my favorite comic. I am not sure any other artist on the planet could have equaled this work. Then there’s the Batman issue. Look, posting any of the art would spoil it. Just go find it and read it. It’s called “Night On Earth” and it’s one of the best things you’ll ever see if you have a soft spot for the Bat. Anyway, I didn’t know Mr. Cassaday and I haven’t seen any details of his demise. I don’t need to; I’m just sad that it happened. He brought me more joy and wonder than he ever knew.
Texas I’m Just A Little Lost And Beaten Down
I’ve been struggling to find the motivation to write anything lately so, in the interim, there have been a surprising number of behind-the-scene changes and tweaks that will probably amuse no one but me (If you’re looking for a way to use an audio file as your Google voice greeting, I think I have that sorted). I didn’t want to return like this, but today will be me letting off a little steam. You could tell right from the beginning that the appeal of Donald Trump was that he could be as greedy, as cruel, as hateful as he wanted and he wouldn’t be held responsible for it. For some people, that is a really powerful positive and I’m not being facetious. He gives his followers license to behave the same way, to act as though their bigotry and selfishness are somehow noble or at least not something to be ashamed of. You can argue that he’s a symptom and not a cause and I get it. These traits have always existed in lesser or greater quantities in all of us. But, if he’s not a cause, he’s a catalyst. A friend of my family argued that Jesus would want immigrants arrested and punished because of the Ten Commandments. The one about coveting, which, coming from a Trump supporter, was deeply ironic, but mostly, it was just sad. I bring this up because of something that happened today. My wife went to the grocery store by herself just after noon. There shouldn’t be anything special or unusual about that, but today was different. She was shaking and in tears. She wore a mask because COVID-19 is on the rise again and the store was packed. This was too much for many of the shoppers to bear. They circled her. They leaned in and coughed at her. They squared up to her and stared. There was more, but she wouldn’t talk about it. This wasn’t the dickish mockery we saw when COVID was busy killing more Americans in 3 years than were killed in every war the US has been involved with (I’m not counting those who fought against the US). This was aggressive. This was threatening. This was not OK. I hope this is a temporary uptick in scary assholery. The debate certainly seemed to fire up the “Yee haw obey the law” contingent (seriously, Texans of yore would be appalled). Perhaps it was, ironically, just the church crowd. Maybe I’m overreacting to a single day’s events. I hope so. But…if this is the new normal, the new normal is a serious problem. I can’t and won’t ask my wife to put up with that shit. Now, here’s where the privilege check comes in. This is a new feeling for us. Some people live with worse every day of their life. I don’t know how. And, I won’t kid myself: The option to leave is another sign of privilege. So, we’re looking. Maybe things will get better. But, we need to be prepared in case they don’t.
Six Weeks Is Not Nearly Enough
In which I complain about my privilege, albeit a privilege I earned over a dozen years. I took some time off of work. I’m incredibly fortunate to work for a company that offers a benefit like this for employees who have been around for a decade or longer. I’m also incredibly fortunate to have been around for a decade or longer. I’ve made a habit of that without really meaning to. I’ve been in the workforce for forty years or so and I’ve had four full-time employers (one of whom laid me and a third of their workforce off after 9/11). I never even thought of this as a career until it was. Funny old world. Unfortunately, we were a bit limited in what we could do with the time off. We have an elderly cat who needs fluids every day, so we’re restricted to overnight stays when traveling. That’s fine. It’s certainly worth it. Travel is weird these days anyway. I don’t feel especially celebratory with all of this (he says, making a gesture indicating “everything”). We did make one trip down to the coast and found it really depressing. Downtown Corpus Christi is a ghost town, with almost every building either boarded up and/or empty and leasing. We checked in to our hotel, strolled around looking for one of the cute restaurants that had been there not long ago, got seriously bummed out, and went back home. Sunk cost fallacy: avoided! My goal for the time off was to write an album. In this, I failed spectacularly. I have one track all but completed, about six are in various stages of writing or recording, and four that are just ideas at this point. I like what I’ve done, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to concentrate and be properly creative. It was probably something to do with ten+ years of work stress to burn off. The record’s going to be good, but it’s a long way away and I need to re-calibrate my plans and come up with a more realistic timeline. I did get to see David and Kim, a couple of old Kitty City friends. They’re in Nashville now as David’s music career is, from my outside vantage, picking up steam. They brought their son with them and we got to hang a little bit outside a small-town music hall and catch up a little. When we make our next real road trip, we’ll be sure to go through Tennessee and drop in on ’em. Mostly, the time was for relaxing. Nicole insisted I distance myself from work and for that I’m grateful. I had intended to check in and see some folks to talk non-work things, but…nah. She wasn’t having it and I’m glad she wasn’t. I did get to slough off a lot of the stress I’ve been feeling. I did some reading, did some writing, celebrated a birthday. Oh yeah, I had a birthday. That was fun. We had an extended celebration, eating at two disappointing restaurants in Austin and one brilliant one in San Antonio. The brilliant one was Bliss. The others are available on request. Pre-haircut Ridley chilling with a friend One of my birthday traditions, at least over the last few year, has been to visit with a capybara or two. This year, we decided to check out the capybara encounter at Snake Farm. This place has a checkered history but they’ve but a lot of money into upgrading their operation recently so we thought we’d give it a shot. It’s less expensive than the Austin Zoo, they have many more time slots available every day so the wait isn’t nearly as long. That about it for the positives. You get 15 minutes to spend with ’em, they provide 2 leaves of leaf lettuce per person, and the enclosure was not especially clean or large. The capys themselves were wonderful, and I do not regret it for a moment, but it was unfortunate that our zoo guide had absolutely nothing to say about them. The Austin Zoo gives you half an hour, with a two heads of leaf lettuce per person, and the enclosure is immaculate and expansive. In addition, they will not stop talking about capybaras, which is a big plus in my book. It was a good time at Snake Farm, but…there are better options. Nicole also got me tickets for us to see Steve Hackett doing one of his “Genesis Revisited” shows featuring “Foxtrot at 50.” She gets me. The first half of the show was from Hackett’s solo catalog and it varied pretty wildly. This was my favourite tune was a short instrumental called “These Passing Clouds“. He can shred, sure, but I’ve always liked the moody, tonal stuff more. The second half was, well, all of Foxtrot. The singer did a fine Peter Gabriel impression and the band were up for it. Weirdly, the only member of Genesis I haven’t seen perform “Supper’s Ready” is Gabriel. Anyway, it was pretty much nonstop chills from the opening of “Watcher of the Skies” to the end. The encore was “Los Endos,” which is not only a great song to end on, but it calls back to “Supper’s Ready.” If you’re a fan of the old Genesis stuff, Hackett does it justice. Things got weirdly cursed near the end. We had a flat on highway 130, which, if you know it, you know that it’s a Really Bad Place to get a flat. We took the ol’ donut home and went to get the tire replaced the next day. It was only 2 years old and had great tread, but it was shot. Worse, the front tires had metal showing throw. Yikes. So, we replaced all four. The next week, driving to my boss’ going away party, the new tire in the same spot went at almost the same location on 130. Spooky. We assumed it was a wheel issue, but the wheel was fine. Just had a hole in the tire. The road hazard took care of it, but…damn. Also, we need a new donut. They’re only good for ~100 miles, if you were wondering. The same week, we had a big hailstorm coming, so we put the car in the garage. The car was fine after the storm, be we lost…
What Coulda Been/What Might Be
These days, my Instagram feed is mostly cats and other animals, synthesizer/electronic musician stuff, and friends. The posts that really get to me are the ones with animals. In particular, the ones with animals looking very happy, or people rescuing animals that are hurt and are going to be euthanized, or befriending wild animals. It may sound overly sentimental because, well, it is, but those photos and videos tug at my cold, cold heart. It hit me the other day: People could be like that all the time. We could be the best animal, the one that befriends all the other animals. The one they look to for comfort or shelter or food. We have that in us. I would like to take this moment to stress that, no matter what it sounds like, I don’t partake of any chemical amusement aids beyond the odd drink once a month or so. Not even the relatively mild, almost-legal, and ubiquitous one. It’s not my thing. The key fact is that I have not partaken of anything at all recently. I’m just kinda wired like this. That thought makes me sad. There’s no need for us as a species to be total assholes to pretty much every animal on this planet. I’m not saying “Everyone should drop everything, go live in a forest, and take care of possums,” but I’m not not saying it either. It seems a lot more fulfilling than most of what I organize my life around. Regardless of what the Big Blue Boy Scout says, right and wrong often exist on a spectrum. Most of what I do lands firmly in the gray zones, not so much “morally hazy” as “morally neutral.” Maybe it’s worse than that. I don’t know. But taking care of creatures who can’t help themselves? That seems unequivocally good to me. Maybe I’m just feeling emotionally raw. The world’s a rough place and people don’t seem to be making it much better. This possum is named Gandalf. All the possums that eat on our porch are named Gandalf. OK, I have an idea for a kid’s activity: Get a bunch of small bones or bone-shaped objects. They can be plastic, wood, plaster, whatever. Various sizes and shapes. But, you want to make sure that you have multiple examples of the same shape. Let’s say you’ve got 4 kids doing the activity, you want four sets of bones. Find 4 boxes and fill them with sand. Put one set of bones in each box and mix the sand around so the bones are hidden. Get 4 sets of “tools” for the archaeological dig. A small comb, a brush, a little pan, etc. Bring in the kids and have them dig for the fossils. They can only use the tools you provided to retrieve the bones; using bare hands or sifting the box is no good. After X amount of time, each kid will have a similar, but probably not identical, set of bones. Their task is to assemble those fossils into what they think would be the skeleton of a creature. Bonus activity: They can draw what they think the creature looked like when it was alive! Have them explain why they arranged the bones to they did. What did they think the creature was like (could it fly? did it swim? was it a predator? of course it was a predator, kids love raptors!)? Now, I’ll admit several things here: I have no clue if this sort of activity already exists, and I also have no clue if kids would find it fun or interesting. I think it would be fun and interesting, but you may already be aware that my wiring is all screwy and the things I think are fun and interesting might very well not be either. Sometimes people delight me. I am a fan of Gerry Rafferty. I firmly believe that, on its own, “Baker Street” justifies 70s soft rock. I also believe that it justifies the existence of the saxophone in rock music. It is with great pleasure, then, that I share this from Paisley, Ireland: The dude shreds on the guitar at the end, but he misses the beauty of that one-note solo. This is how you celebrate…everything. The very existence of this video makes the world a fractionally better place to live. Why is there no celebration of this sort in Texas? Texas has music. Texas even has good music. Bob Wills, Willie, Jerry Jeff, Buddy Holly, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Janis, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Boz Skaggs, Steve Miller, ZZ Top…I could go on. I mean, I couldn’t go on very far, but I could definitely go on. You get the idea. There’s beautify in this world. Celebrate it. Lift it up. Share it. Remind people of it.
Little Distractions
This is a photo of Ramza and Aymeric on my MG-1 flying through space. Check the alt text to read about why I need distractions. It’s pretty depressing, so feel free to skip it. OK, now, let’s talk about pointless stuff, shall we? One thing I keep meaning to mention because I find it both fascinating and baffling is proliferation of “guess which number is bigger than the other” games on mobile devices. Games where, for example, something with a name like “Hero Quest” or something. You have four soldiers and you have to choose a path where you fight either three soldiers or six soldiers. The larger number always wins. That seems like a really dumb concept for a game and maybe there’s more to it (or maybe the game is nothing like the ad, which is a common occurrence). But, there’s a part of me that lights up and tells me “Ridley, you would be really good at this!” I’m annoyed by this part of me because that’s obviously what the advertisement is designed to trigger. Would it really be that easy? So far, I’ve resisted the urge to download one of ’em, but their existence and the number of them available are such an interesting phenomenon. Why? Why are there so many of them? Are they that popular? I’ll never know because I don’t care that much, and having shared this, I’m hoping I’ll stop thinking about them altogether. Speaking of cats (I know, I know, we weren’t “speaking” of them, but I put a big picture of them at the top of this post, so please just give me this one), I hasn’t updated y’all on the Cat Situation lately. Do we have a situation? Oh, you know we do! That’s Red Velvet, the senior member of the crew. She turns 14 this year and it’s a hard 14. One of her kidneys has stopped kidney-ing, so we’re giving her fluids every evening. She doesn’t much mind on account of the fact we give her a Churru at the same time. She’s lost a good deal of weight from her peak, but she’s pretty stable and spry right now. She went in for a checkup last week and the vet was impressed with her condition. She remains as standoffish as always, and she does not like being photographed, so this is what you get. And here are the boys. Top to bottom, we have Aymeric (age 2), Ramza (age 3), and Calvin (age 1). If it looks like they’re all sleeping on my legs, well, you have good eyes because that’s exactly the case. They are all snuggly AF (please read “AF” as “As foretold” instead of any other possible option. AF = “As foretold”) and they all love crunchy food, which is too bad, because they mostly get wet food. We use the crunchy stuff to lure them away when it’s time to give Red Velvet her fluids. Beware of Ramza: He likes to jump on your back or shoulder when you’re not looking. He is heavy. He is also sharp. We have fewer outdoor cats come by these days. Milly still wanders over from across the street. We had a weird political situation where we had three void bois who did not get along at all. As a result, Ardyn and Panthro left the field and Fuzzy became the undisputed king of the porch. He’s kind of an ass, but he tries to be nice. We have seen Panthro wander by again lately so hopefully things are cooling down a little. I took this photo a long time ago. It still gives me the jibblies. Saw my mum a couple of weeks ago. She’s just up the road in Texas, but the drive is the equivalent of Boston to Philadelphia. It was a one-day there-and-back, so that’s closer to NYC to Detroit or a bit longer than London, UK to Inverness at the north end of Scotland. It’s a hike. Texas is ridiculous. I mean, it’s ridiculous in a lot of ways, but it’s ridiculously big considering neither terminus of this trip brought me anywhere near a border. Anyway, mom is…she’s very much herself, but the years are definitely present in her. Some of her infirmities are self-inflicted, which makes me wonder which activities of mine will come back to haunt me. I’m sure it’s a matter of “when” and not “if.” Nicole got a PS5 today which is an absolutely cracking piece of kit. We’re reasonably sure that the new FFXIV expansion will requires the PS5, so, well, you gotta have your priorities. The graphical capabilities of the 5 are well beyond what our TV is capable of displaying, which means that the game still looks better than anything I’ve seen on that screen. It’s hardly a “need” but it really is a game changer for her and, c’mon, you know we’re gonna be putting in way too many hours on that game. More on that later. That’s it for now I guess. I feel suitably distracted. Some posts don’t get linked on social media and this is definitely going to be One Of Those Posts. Sometimes, it’s just writing for the sake of writing as opposed to having much to share. I will close by noting that my creative sense remains strong. I’ve written three songs the last two weeks. It may be that none of them will ever be completed/produced/posted, but they’re all good exercises if nothing else. Night all, and take care, -RK
All’s Well That Ends
The TL/DR update to yesterday’s post: The house is warm again. Unlike, say, this. This is what I woke up to. Those are Fahrenheit degrees in case you were wondering. That’s 4 degrees in Celsius. 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…
Ridley Kemp’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day(s)
Dear Reader, On most occasions, I make an effort not to complain too much. My rate of success is well south of 100%, but I don’t want this to be a blog of “things that get my goat” or whatever the kids say these days. This weekend, however, has been One Of Those Weekends and I’m going to blow off a little steam. I reckon the title may have given that away, so consider yourself doubly warned. Let’s start with Saturday morning. Early Saturday morning. Pre-sunrise Saturday morning. I am a long-time supporter of Leicester City football club and their match this weekend was at 12:30 PM in the UK. That translates to 6:30 AM in my neck of the woods, so I got up early, put some water on to make tea, and settled in to watch the match. Just before halftime, we scored a goal to take the lead. Somehow, between that goal and halftime, one of our players did something very bad and was sent off. That meant we had to defend a narrow lead for the entire second half short one player. We did a marvelous job for half an hour and then we…didn’t. We gave up three goals in the last fifteen minutes for a very demoralizing defeat. Reader, I am not kidding when I say that this might have been the highlight of the weekend. It was about the time the match was over I was awake enough to notice that it was unusually chilly in the house. I checked the thermostat and…uh oh. The current temperature was 58 degrees while the thermostat was set to 68. Nothing on the thermostat looked out of the ordinary, so the next step was to ensure there were no outages with our gas provider. There were none. Nonetheless, I put in a call to the gas company to send someone out and started a ticket with the home warranty company to get someone out to look at the furnace because it makes sense to get the ball rolling ASAP. I tried to look at the furnace myself, but it’s in the attic and the attic is only accessible by climbing a ladder to get on the roof and going in through an access hatch. I might as well have been looking at hieroglyphs for all I understood. Fortunately, the gas company was very responsive and had a fellow out there in an hour. He was super helpful, confirmed that the gas pressure was good, climbed into the attic, checked the furnace, fiddled with some simple stuff and then we did some testing. It would come on briefly and then stop. Nothing he could do about that. He turned off the gas at the furnace and unplugged the unit to ensure nothing caught fire, which I appreciated. Anyway, good thing I started the other service call. In the meantime, there was some work-related goodness going on as well. One of our vendors finished a server replacement at one of our sites. It was critical to do this quickly because we had to be able to get the date to that vendor’s above-store reporting tool so we could run payroll for the site. With this being a holiday weekend, this was critical enough to have the payroll team standing by. We’d arranged for the vendor to have their team that installs the data movement software ready to go as soon as the server came up. The server came up at 11:30 AM, so I let the payroll team know that we should have their files shortly. This was a mistake. I saw the ticket go to the vendor’s team at 11:30 AM. I heard nothing from them, so I followed up. I followed up seven times. I asked for ETAs, or at least when I would receive an update. I never heard back, so I kept bugging them. Pro tip: When dealing with work stuff, never hang up the phone without both parties understanding when whatever task is being discussed is due and/or the update cadence. At 11:30 PM, I gave up. I had also not heard anything from the furnace service company. That was extremely worrying as, while Saturday was quite pleasant, Sunday was going to be cold. Monday and Tuesday were going to very cold. So, this morning, I followed up with the home warranty company and they seemed shocked that I would expect emergency service from one of their subcontractors. I pointed out that the types of service that one would have a home warranty for tend to be emergencies, but their ears were a rocky place where my words could find no purchase. They suggested instead that I could expect a call to schedule service on Tuesday. This represented A Problem. So, Nicole found a local vendor who did weekend work and we called them. Fingers? Crossed. In the meantime, the vendor had finally completed installing their data movement software at 8:30 AM. This should have marked the end of the issue, but alas, while they installed the software, they did not retrieve the missed data. And, thanks to a recent update to the process, I no longer have the capability to initiate this retrieval. So, I called them again. I should point out that calling them is a special sort of ordeal. We have a local phone number for them, but this number does not work anymore. So, we have to call the corporate office and navigate a phone tree rife with unskippable instructions that require 9 button presses to get to the support team. I bring that last bit up because, while I was dialing, I was installing another vendor’s software on the new server. I needed a code to complete the installation, so I opened a ticket with them. I received a response that they were working on the ticket. Then I received the code I needed. I did this all in the time it took for me to navigate the other vendor’s phone tree. It took another three hours for the original vendor to pull the data into their system so I could run a report for our payroll team. At least that much was now right with the world. It was about this time the gent from the heating company showed up. He was a…
Last Night I Dreamed I Returned To Azeroth
I like lists. I’m a sucker for lists. So…we’re gonna do more lists. Last night, for some reason, I fell asleep thinking of World of Warcraft. Specifically, I was thinking of my favorite raid fights. WoW isn’t like Final Fantasy XIV, which is about story and characters. WoW is all about game play and it’s something that they did very well. They may still do it well, but it’s been a decade or so since I’ve played, so keep that in mind. I played the original game through the first four expansions (up through Mists of Pandaria), so there may be better fights in the more recent expansions, but I can only go with what I know. First, a few honorable mentions:Opera Hall (Karazhan) A very silly, chaotic fight in one of the best raids in the game. Be sure to pay attention to the dialog between the NPCs. Onyxia (Onyxia’s Lair) Like most fights, this was impossible until suddenly it wasn’t. Onyxia was a one-boss raid, but it was very well balanced and a lot of fun when you did it right. Or when you failed spectacularly. Valithria Dreamwalker (Icecrown Citadel) An unusual healer-focused fight where you don’t kill the boss, you heal the captive dragon. Way better than the final fight against Arthas IMO. Thorim (Ulduar) Another candidate for best raid in the game, Thorim was the most interesting fight in the raid. It was a split-the-party fight and I am a sucker for those. C’Thun (Ahn Qhiraj) The first of the Lovecraftian final bosses, this was a deeply unfair fight but I had to admit it was different an interesting.Here are the five that I remember most fondly from my time playing. Gothick The Harvester (Naxxramas, Vanilla/Wrath of the Lich King) Naxxramas was a weird one. It was originally released as part of the original game but then withdrawn when the first expansion came out, and then re-released in the second expansion. I know this post is about individual fights and not entire raids, but Naxx was probably my favourite raid. It had 15 boss fights, and they were all good. Each one of them was memorable and they all felt like challenging but fair fights. The Gothick fight probably had the most interesting mechanics. The raid was split into two separate rooms. The first group had to fight wave after wave of opponents and then Gothick, being a necomancer, would turn the corpses into undead in the other room. They monsters were slightly easier as living creatures, which mean you could kill them faster, which in turn meant you could wind up overwhelming the second group. Once the minions had been dispatched, Gothick himself would join the fray and zip between the two sides and make life miserable until the barrier between the two rooms fell and you could clobber him. It was in some ways the most typical of Naxxramas fights in that, if you just beat on the boss without considering other things, you were doomed. You had to coordinate 40 (vanilla)/25 (WotLK) people in a fairly delicate dance to keep either side from getting buried, and it was immensely satisfying to finally beat. Garrosh Hellscream (Siege of Orgrimmar, Mists of Pandaria) OK, I’ll be honest, it’s not that great a fight. It’s incredibly busy and very punishing, but it’s not really fun. I suppose it’s an appropriate end to an expansion, but it’s not really as interesting as, say, Illidan Stormrage in the Black Temple. However, it was a personal grudge match for me. The writers did a fantastic job of really pissing me off and wanting to kill Garrosh. You see, I played a Tauran shaman (Taurans being huge bull-people, like minotaurs but goofier). Garrosh killed the Tauren lead, Cairne Bloodhoof,, in a duel. It was probably an accident as someone poisoned his blade, but the thing about Garrosh was the he was exactly the kind of guy who never should have been made warchief of the horde. It was in-character for him to kill allied leaders because that’s just the kind of guy he was. Plus, he created an order of “dark shaman” which, speaking as a shaman…”dark shaman” is not a thing. It’s like being an “anti-druid” and going around killing every plant you find because you’re just that evil. His “dark shaman” were abominations and their existence got under my skin more than it should have. So, for the raid, I transmogrified my gear into the traditional shaman starter kit look and when we finally took Garrosh down, I had a four-macro speech I recited over his body decrying everything he’d done. My guild thought there was something wrong with me, which was very perceptive on their part. Anyway, it felt good to kill him even if it wasn’t the greatest fight. Spine of Deathwing (Cataclysm, Dragon Soul) To be fair, this one may not have been the greatest fight, but it was a good one. The raid takes place on the back of a dragon. The dragon is too heavily armored to harm, so your job is to remove some scales from its back to allow a giant weapon to fire on it and presumably kill it (“presumably” because it doesn’t quite work). There are several damage gates where you have to do X amount of damage in Y time or you’re boned. It’s also a movement fight. The trick is that you don’t want too many people on one side or the other of the dragon’s back, or it will roll in that direction and throw you off. You are ALWAYS moving. Which is great fun for everyone except shaman. We had no instant cast heals at the time, so my ability to do anything useful was very, very limited. We tried over and over and over and kept failing and, to be honest, it was my fault. Sean’s druid and Jenn’s paladin (I think Sol was gone by this point) could heal just fine, but I was useless. Finally, we tried something a little weird. Instead of focusing on healing, I would be their battery. I would keep their mana topped off so they could cast more and heavier heals. Weirdly enough, this wound up working. I always built my character for mana regen anyway and that included maximizing the regen…