trisweb.com

I pride myself in my sound system, which was recently reestablished in my room by way of wall mounts. The biggest problem, as you can see, is the size of the speakers. They’re about 2’ x 1.5’ on the front, and another 1.5’ deep, so it’s hard to find places to put them other than on the wall. So recently I got some wall mounting brackets from Radio Shack and stuck ‘em up on the wall, and I’m finally getting to use them again. They’re 3-way Yamaha floor speakers made a few decades ago, and as my dad would say, they’re pretty flat (which is actually a good thing—it means they have an accurate frequency response), and they sound great.

I’m driving them with a relatively new Kenwood 200-watt-per-channel sterio receiver, which has Dolby Pro Logic surround, but not Dolby Digital surround. That basically means it extrapolates the surround sound from 2 channels (with a very clever method, google it if you’re really interested) instead of carrying extra channels like today’s surround receivers. Pro Logic surround is still nice though, especially for movies.

So that’s my sound system, which like I said, I’m pretty proud of. I love music, and I love when it sounds the way it should.

I’ll give a little story to go with the photo this time. This is Mammoth Peak, in Yosemite—or, really, Tuolumne Meadows, the part of Yosemite that most people don’t visit. This is where I go… whenever I can. It is my second home; a place where I feel as comfortable as I am in my own backyard; because it is, really.

So I climbed this mountain with my dad a few years ago. If there ever was, or ever will be a time when I consider myself growing up a notch, that was it. I conquered a mountain; I stood above the rest of the world, looked down, and stood in awe.

Actually, it’s quite hard to think profoundly at 13,000 feet. It’s not the lack of oxygen, but something else, I don’t know what. All you can do is watch. Thoughts come later, like when you’re sitting at a desk getting electrons shot at your eyes all day; you close them, and the view from the top of a mountain is there, and all you can think about is how amazing it is, how much you want to be there right at that instant, free from everything.

If only life was always as simple as a mountain….

Late to music rehearsal, but the light was perfect.

Thanks to my bottomless pit, I’ve had the wonderful liberty of keeping all my audio in lossless format. This means that I store it on my computer like you would an mp3 album, but without compressing it. The audio is identical to the CD. For those who are technically interested, I use FLAC to do a little compression (about 50-60%) to get the albums down to about 400MB.

I just wanted to say how nice it is to listen to uncompressed music casually. That’s the excuse most people give when they make their mp3s—“I’m just listening to them casually, so I won’t notice any compression”, which is usually true. But I actually think your ears get used to listening to compressed music, and forget how nice the real thing is.

189 Gigabytes (left) isn’t unlimited, even though I’d like it to be, so I’ll probably continue to encode in Ogg Vorbis, probably at quality 7 or something. But for those deserving albums like the one I mentioned yesterday (which keeps getting better every listen), no bits will be spared.

These days, Starbucks has some pretty mediocre coffee. They’ve replaced all their real espresso machines with automatic ones that always spit out the same thing regardless of what idiot’s operating them, which is great if you never take the lid off your drink, and get shots of syrup injected into it, and blend it with with chocolate and carmel and other crap, and call it a “macchiato” even though it isn’t anything close to a real Macchiato.

That was me being a coffee snob. I don’t go to Starbucks for the coffee, even though it is pretty decent when there’s no other option (for instance, when you’re in Dixon, California, between hicksville and Davis, don’t go to the local coffee shop and order a cappuccino), no, I go to Starbucks because I have gift cards for Starbucks. Lots of them. So the best thing I’ve found to use them on is the music. Last year, Starbucks bought a small Berkeley record label called Hear Music, and they’ve put out some great collections of great music since then. Today, I picked up their “playlist volume 2, a quarterly guide to music”, after thouroughly enjoying the first volume. I highly reccomend it. The album is nearly a perfect mix of eclectic, thoughtful, diverse music, concluded with my new favorite song of the week, Alexi Murdoch’s “Orange Sky” [iTunes]. So if you’re a Starbucks regular, or if you just have some extra gift cards, don’t miss the music. It may just be the best thing there.

Ever wanted to take a stroll around the solar system? To the nearest star? Cluster? Galaxy? There is an awesome program I found a while ago that lets you do just this in a very realistic 3D simulation of, well, everything we know. Celestia is an open-source galactic simulation program, with accurate placement of almost every star in the galaxy, along with the planets, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft, all modeled and viewable.

It’s a lot of fun to play around with if you’ve ever looked at the night sky with any interest before. You can start at Earth, find a star, click it, and fly to it in one three-second warp motion, with all the stars around you flying by with mathematical precision. The zoom is also fun—start with Earth again, and hold both mouse buttons and pull back all the way to a stunning view of the entire galaxy, and then zoom back in. It puts things in perspective.

It’s a very cool program, I highly reccomend checking it out.

Suddenly, I have unlimited space. I’d say I don’t know what to do with it, but I really think if I challenged myself I could find ways to fill it up. 191 Gigabytes free certainly feels unlimited. Things I’ve thought of so far:

• Music


• Reinstall all the software I uninstalled to make space for music


• Re-rip all of my CDs to in FLAC format


• Rip/compress all my DVDs


• Install as many alternate operating systems as I want (The old 40 Gig is getting a fresh stage 1 of Gentoo ASAP)


• Comment with other suggestions

I guess this is what you get for your birthday when you complain about your hard drive filling up. Other recent upgrades include a new Radeon 9600 Pro and an Athlon XP 2600+, courtesy of a housemate who shipped his tower from Florida to Berkeley without writing “Fragile” anywhere on the box; to his credit, UPS really should have treated it better anyway. But thanks to them, I get some decent new equipment, which along with the bottomless pit hard drive brings my computer nicely up to date.