For my friends Steve and Dorotha -- and any of my other friends who are in the DC area -- I pass along Megan McArdle's observations on the current weather conditions in Washington D.C.

Good luck!

daisy_knotwise bought Katie some new crayons and a coloring book when they went out to the Jewel this evening. When Katie presented me with the book and asked me to color, I carefully colored some sections inside the lines and asked her to color the sections in between.

"I can't do that. It's too hard."

"Sure, you can. Try it."

It wasn't a total success, but it went moderately well. Later, Julie woke up from her nap and found the crayons. I then had to dissuade her from making a glyph on each page of the book and moving on to the next page. Fortunately, she was distractable.

Later, I found random glyphs in orange crayon on the bathroom floor next to our bedroom. Gretchen informs me that Julie had possession of the still-missing orange crayon. Katie would like it back.

I wonder where it is.

And I'm so happy that we have washable crayons!

There is absolutely nothing in the world that's like working with a piece of hardware that you haven't used in several years. I've been intending to use the ProjectMix I/O box, but that intention has been hiding out where good intentions go to hide, I'm afraid. Still, there's no time like the present.

I went down into the basement and loaded up Cubase 5 on the studio computer so that I could update the licenses. Then I grabbed the dongles and took them upstairs so I could work with the new portable. I fired up the nice new Toshiba laptop, then switched on the Bluetooth mouse that I'd used the previous day. And the mouse didn't work at all. About an hour of clicking, swearing, and rediscovery followed to no avail. Finally, I found a post that said that the update to the RealTek network driver that Microsoft had sent out -- and which I'd cleverly loaded -- disables a Bluetooth mouse. So I rolled the driver back and the mouse started working again. Thanks, Microsoft!

Then it was time to install Cubase from the files I'd downloaded the day before. No problem. Now to fire up the ProjectMix I/O. I went to plug in the power cord --

And discovered that the beast wants a 9V 3500 ma wall wart. Ack! Where's the wall wart? Well, it wasn't it the bucket of stuff that I haul around when recording on the road. And it wasn't in the microphone bag. Nor was it in any of the cabinets. Maybe it was buried in that mound of stuff that covers the bookcases in the studio.

The studio was shortly much cleaner. Not clean, but cleaner. But still no wall wart. Damn.

I decided to grab the external eSATA hard disk and haul it upstairs to test it out. When I plugged it into the power strip, it refused to power up. What the heck? I went back to the basement and grabbed a different power cord. Still no power. I grabbed the other eSATA hard disk and brought it up and plugged it in. No power.

Ok, this is ridiculous. Two different drives can't just die sitting on the shelf. One was unlikely enough. I grabbed the power cord out of the power strip and plugged it directly into the wall outlet.

The drive promptly spun up.

After depositing the power strip in the trash and acquiring another one, I hooked up the drive. It glitched slightly upon being connected to the Toshiba laptop, but the glitch was quickly cured and the drive was neatly visible to the laptop. It even had Cubase tracks on it that I'd recorded when I was testing out this setup several years ago. Good! A project to test with.

If only I had the wall wart.

It was about this time that daisy_knotwise pulled out a wicker basket and extracted from it the wall wart and some additional software for the ProjectMix. She'd put it there when I apparently left it "decoratively draped" across the hutch in the dining room. Since that was before Katie was born, draping cords was safer then. I thanked her and plugged the beastie in. It happily powered up.

And the M-Audio control panel software refused to recognize it. Oh, come on!

After a while, I managed to -- pretty much completely by accident! -- trip over the menu item that had been installed on the laptop when I installed the drivers. The one that upgrades the firmware of the ProjectMix to work with Vista. And apparently Windows 7, because once I did that, the control panel software saw the ProjectMix. Yay!

Now, into Cubase. Cubase would happily play back the old project through the speakers on the laptop, but it wanted nothing to do with passing commands or audio from the ProjectMix. Eventually, I went through the old setup documentation for the ProjectMix, translated it to match the current Cubase layout and got the MIDI connection working.

Audio was still a massive failure. At least, it was until I found the right spot to switch to the M-Audio firewire drive and remap all of the channels. And then I was finally able to record and monitor.

I still have to hook up the Octopre and map its eight channels of I/O into Cubase, but when I finish that, I think I'll have this ready to go.

And then I will unleash it on Capricon. :)

Maurita was in town this weekend visiting singlemaltsilk and she wanted to make a visit down to Fry's. Marty wasn't really interested in techie paradise, so Maurita pinged me and we made arrangements to make the trip. After the bunch of us met Marty and Maurita for lunch at Red Robin, daisy_knotwise and the girls headed home, Marty headed back to her home, and Maurita and I went stalking tech stuff.

Maurita was looking for a new laptop for Wes for his birthday. (Wes got a call from the store discussing this, so it's not a secret that I'm blowing here.) There was an Acer in the weekly Fry's ad, and it probably would have been ok, but the slightly more expensive Lenovo had a much nicer keyboard, more hard disk, more RAM, and a dual core processor instead of a single core CPU. So Wes is getting the Lenovo. :)

We also looked at big-screen TVs (because I always look at big-screen TVs :) ), then I picked up some cables that I needed for the studio, and a bag for the new studio laptop. The only style of bag they had that was big enough to hold the new laptop, as it turned out. The new laptop is huge.

I dropped Maurita off at Marty's and headed home. There, I retrieved the new laptop and downloaded drivers for all of the outboard gear along with the versions of Cubase and Wavelab that work with Windows 7. Now, I just need to get everything installed and tested before Capricon.

Ok, stop laughing hysterically...

Well, let's see:

I had to take my DSL modem out in the (fortunately light) snow that was falling to plug it into the network interface to prove that the problem wasn't with my internal wiring.

But Ameritech is closed until Monday, so they won't be fixing anything for a while.

I finally finished installing the software that I spent two days downloading.

But it still doesn't run.

The new recording laptop came.

It does run.

But I still have a metric boatload of software to install on it. :)

daisy_knotwise slipped on a Mega Block and injured a muscle in her upper arm.

Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be serious.

It does, however, hurt a lot.

I decided that maybe we should order in some dinner.

Katie decided we should go to McDonald's instead so she could run around the PlayPlace.

Katie won.

Alas, poor Pooh. Although Katie still has a certain fondness for Winnie the Pooh (and especially for Tigger), we've gone from bouncing around the house to "eek, eek"ing around the house. Katie sleeps with a Curious George pillow and blanket that daisy_knotwise made for her. And I had to go downstairs and find the missing George stuffed doll before she went to bed.

Poor Pooh.

I did a little clean up in the studio a few minutes ago. In order to cover the hole in the ceiling, I decided that the expedient thing to do was to grab the can of spray-on glue and put the foam back along the edge of the ceiling where it had started out the evening. Of course, you don't want to get the glue onto the carpet, so I took it into the laundry room, where the floor is still concrete. I sprayed the foam with the glue, then took it back and stuck it in place. Success!

And then I heard a really loud annoying beeping. The gas detector in the laundry room is greatly offended by the propellant that the spray-on glue uses. I've reset it a couple of times, but it's started beeping again. Audibly. In my second floor office. *sigh*

I guess I'll go down and pull the battery.

In the process of these massive file copies that I'm doing for work, it's become apparent that something is wrong with my Internet connection. So I called Speakeasy today and we confirmed that there's something wrong on the path to my DSL modem. Tomorrow, they call me back and I take the modem outside and plug it directly into the NIC.

But today, I thought of the condition of the wires running from the NIC into the house and decided to replace them. How hard could that be?

Harder than you'd think, because the end of the conduit stub is now in the ceiling of the engineering half of the recording studio. And the first thing I did was pull out the working wire. I tried pushing the new wire through, but couldn't see it. I tried taping it to a second old wire that had been used when my DSL was on a dry pair, but couldn't pull it through. It turns out that was the wire that was in such bad shape that the insulation was cracking off in my hands as I pulled on it. Fortunately, it wasn't carrying any signal.

Unfortunately, it wasn't going to serve as a temporary replacement either.

Finally, I called Jerry. Jerry came over with a electrician's fish tape.

Which we couldn't find either when we pushed it through the stub. *sigh*

Eventually, we took the drill and the jigsaw and cut a hole in the ceiling so we could find the end of the tape and pull the wire through. And now I have phone and Internet again.

And there was much rejoicing.

Thanks, Jerry!

Because filkertom needs to see this, that's why.

Demon sheep. In a campaign ad.

Baaaaa!

Update: And it gets weirder. Hitler weighs in with his reaction to the ad. (With a different bit of footage than the one that you usually see for these.)

I have to pull some enormous files across our network. Unfortunately, they're not on an FTP site, so I'm trying to copy them. And it turns out that the network is merrily glitching today, so there's no actual hope of copying a 700 MB file before something goes wrong.

Thud, thud, thud.

The problem with writing a song without my guitar is that I don't actually have a set of chords when I "finish" the song. And that's what happened with Tornado. I've spent the last week beating the tune into submission, which included excising little bits of melody that reminded me too much of some other song. Yes, I know about the melancholy elephants, but I try to avoid obvious lifts if possible. :)

I originally started chording this in Am, a fine key. Unfortunately, it was making it too difficult to exterminate the elephants lurking in the melody, so I switched to Em. That improved things and after a while I was able to get the tune cleaned up and found a set of chords that I was happy with.

The only problem was that Em was just a bit low. Ok, let's capo two and go to F#m. That was a bit better, but still too low. How about capo four to G#m? Well, that pretty much fixes the vocal problems, but I don't really like being at capo four if I can avoid it.

Of course, another half step gets back around to Am. And the tune is now safely massaged. Hmm.

Fortunately, Dsus2 and G6 are both playable chords that work. :)

And the song is typed up, printed out, and ready for the filk book.

Julie was clear this afternoon that a nap was not something she was at all interested in. But it got to be 9:30 PM as we watched the end of Phineas and Ferb. I was sitting back in my recliner with Julie between my legs and she turned around and said, "I need a nap."

So she's now working on the all-night version of the nap. Or so we hope.

Julie is 21 months old today, a fact that managed to escape me in the general confusion around here. Since she's suffering a bit from Second Child Syndrome, I'm going to have to pull out the digital camera tomorrow and take some more pictures when we go to McDonald's for lunch. (That's a scheduled activity for days when the cleaning lady comes, because cleaning with Katie and Julie present is just a bit entertaining.)

Julie's language skills are developing rapidly. And she's starting to reject this whole concept of napping, despite daisy_knotwise trying to explain to her that she'll really want those naps when she gets older, but she won't be able to have them then.

And tonight, shortly before we took the girls upstairs to go to bed, Julie was sitting on the couch next to Gretchen. She leaned over and put her head on Gretchen's side and said, "My mommy. My mommy."

And I think that made Gretchen's day.

I continue hacking away at the code base that I'm working on. This would be easier if Katie would actually go to bed. Sadly, I see the light on under her door again.

We've told her that if she wants to sit quietly in her room and read, it'll be ok. With luck, she will.

Update: No, she didn't. She came out, presented me with the new children's book based on Disney's "The Princess and the Frog", and announced that it was too hard for her to read. Well, yes, she hasn't had it read to her a few dozen times yet. I told her that she'd need to read it herself.

So she took it to daisy_knotwise who was already in bed. That didn't go well either, so Katie went back to her room and cried.

After a bit of this, I took pity on her and went in and read the book for her.

And she went to sleep.

Juanita Coulson's e-mail address has changed. If you want her new address, ping me and I'll send it back to you. (I'd post it here, but why give the spammers that big a head start? :) )

I've been looking to clean out the front hall closet so that the Rock Band paraphernalia can be stored there instead of in the middle of the library floor. daisy_knotwise was looking for a purse that was buried somewhere in the same closet, so she's spent a good chunk of the last two days excavating the floor of the closet. This brought a great many things to light that would be desirably stored on the shelf in the closet, but the shelf in the closet was full of a tub of stuffed animals and a box of assorted hats and scarves. I decided to pull those down for inventory.

Wallace and Gromit are now hanging by the hooks in their head over the entrance to the dining room. This is a little bizarre, especially given the look on Wallace's face. We bought a couple of milk crates to store the assorted hats and scarves that are actually useful, as they can be stacked and will take up less room on the shelf. The tub of stuffed animals is supposed to come up and go into Gretchen's closet. Eventually.

And the bowling balls have been exiled to the basement. I expect mine will probably come out when it's time to teach Katie and Julie how to bowl. :)

I also found the Unisynth in the closet. If I can get the corroded battery compartment cleaned up, it will probably play again. That will make Katie and Julie very happy. (If you haven't seen a Unisynth, well, it's the Hammond Chord Organ of guitars. :) )

In other news (as in, here come the nibbling ducks):

The zipper in my winter coat gave way, so it spent three very cold days at the cleaners getting the zipper replaced. Thankfully, I have it back now, just in time for the twenty degree warmup.

And I got to see the dentist on Tuesday, where I informed him that the bugs that created my toothache eat Penicillin VK for lunch (and had gleefully consumed a week's worth of it without really being noticeably bothered by it). I now am on Amoxicillin and the swelling is pretty much down so that I can chew normally. The rear molar is still cracked down the middle, so something is going to have to be done about it eventually, but chewing no longer hurts, which is good.

I had to postpone my software demo scheduled for Friday, because I'm still shuffling code around. This will eventually stop, where "eventually" needs to translate to "soon". I'm sure that it will, but it's one of those processes that just makes you crazy.

Despite the petty annoyances, life is good. And Katie and Julie are annoyingly cute, even if Katie did run out of Red Robin without me and have to be retrieved from three rows away in the Woodfield Mall parking lot. Says Katie, "I looked both ways!"

Yes, dear, I'm sure you did. *sigh*

I heard Dr. Bob this morning on WDRV as he was doing a commercial for Pfizer.

If the CArchive::ReadObject function in MFC would temporarily cache the CRuntimeClass pointer for the object that's being read in a visible member variable so that the object's Serialize function could see it, I could make a miracle occur.

Unfortunately, it doesn't and I can't, so I'm going to have to do this the hard way.

A little geekish background: It turns out that you can initialize the CRuntimeClass structure so that the CRuntimeClass structure belonging to class A can be used to create a different class B. This is useful when you've serialized class A in your archive, but you want to rearrange the class structure so that you create class B -- say, for instance, that you've renamed the class or you're converting an existing class to a virtual base class and adding various derived classes down below. In this case, class A is now a virtual base class and class B is the new class derived from it. (Presumably, there will be more classes derived from class A in the long run, but the first class that's derived is usually the direct inheritor, so this trick works.)

Say, though, that you've got virtual base class A with classes B, C, and D descended from it and you want to get rid of B, C, and D and collapse back to a single non-virtual class A. If B, C, and D each contain unique additional data items that you've decided to just stuff into A and ignore when they don't apply, you can't get the serialization to work (unless the schema numbers for B, C, and D are completely disjoint, which isn't likely).

You can cause the CRuntimeClass structure for the now-obsolete classes B, C, and D to create class A during serialization, but you've got no way to tell in A::Serialize which of classes B, C, and D you're reading the old data for. You could figure that out if you could see the CRuntimeClass structure that CArchive::ReadObject just pulled off of the archive, but you can't. It's just kept in a local variable inside of ReadObject.

*sigh* So at this point, I've determined that the only way to do this is going to be the hard way. I have to read the obsolete classes and then convert them -- and all references to them -- to the base class.

On the other hand, it means I can go back to bed and stop worrying about it.

I am in a maze of twisty C++ templates, all alike.

On the other hand, I finally got the templates straightened out so that they compile cleanly. Whether they run is another question altogether. :)

It wasn't because of the wonderful opportunities to work with nasty toxic stuff that I left chemistry some years ago. It was more like a problem with a nasty toxic Ph.D. advisor. But when I read about some of the things that this fellow will not work with, I feel somehow better about the whole thing.

And I laugh. A lot.

I wrote this song on the way home from Confusion. (That's two years in a row now. One more time will make it a Sacred Tradition^TM.) The tune is not quite fixed in place yet, which is one of the hazards of writing without guitar in hand, but I bought a steno book at my first stop to get something to drink, so I was able to compose a verse, find an exit, write it down, get back on the highway, and do it again. It only slowed the drive down a little. :)

I got the germ of the idea for this during s00j's concert at Confusion. It was another one of those "Here's the picture. How the heck did he get in this mess?" songs.

Anyway, although the tune is still in flux, the lyrics are stable, and since that's all you can see right now...
( Lyrics inside... )

I'm back from Confusion, where I had a wonderful time. I was immediately mugged by two small girls who will now be going to bed. I suspect daisy_knotwise and I will follow shortly.

Well, my bags aren't packed, but the van is cleaned out and the stuff for the dealer table is loaded into it, the second car seat has been removed so it can be plugged into the Five Hundred, and -- despite Katie having gotten out of bed to come down and "help" us -- we're pretty much as ready as we can get for me to head out to Confusion in the morning.

Sleep would be good. :)

Katie has assembled all of the kitchen and dining room chairs into a rocket ship. Everyone was required to be on board for launch, but I'm now on a space walk which has taken me upstairs to log onto the work computer for the mandated scheduled password change (and to take some more penicillin and ibuprofen for my sore tooth). After that, it will be down to the basement to do some more laundry.

Later tonight, after the girls are in bed, daisy_knotwise and I will take out the trash and then pack up the van so I can leave for Confusion tomorrow.

Eventually, we'll get some sleep. :)

For those of my friends who might understand why it's appropriate this evening, below there's a link to a video of my favorite ABBA song. (Yes, I am allowed to have a favorite ABBA song.)

And if you don't know why it might be appropriate, well, you can always just enjoy the song. :)