I found a place on the web where I can order the parts to fix (probably) the DAT player, so the parts are now ordered and should be on their way soon. Actually, it's just one part, but I bought two of them so I'd have a spare, since this particular part tends to go bad just from the DAT player sitting unused. *sigh*

And then, I should be able to do these transfers.

So I went down to the basement to try to transfer some old DAT tapes to the computer. Neither one of the DAT decks appears to be working correctly. *sigh*

I've found a part number for one of them, at least.

I wandered over to the studio computer while doing laundry to send kriel an MP3 that he'd asked for. Naturally, the computer refused to boot up.

I eventually reset it to boot to the last known good configuration and managed to get it up and running. And the MP3 is in the mail. :)

Rassen frassen hardware...

Because it is two days until WindyCon, I should have expected that the hard drive in my main home machine -- the one with all the interesting data on it, including the Girl Genius presentation that I spent two hours working on last night -- would pick this moment to fail. *sigh*

Fortunately, that hard drive is part of a mirrored pair, so I've recovered the presentation from the working drive and will shut this down in just a minute. Then it's off to Fry's to buy another drive to replace the dead one.

I didn't have the hour to spare, but I surely don't have the data to spare.

By way of Instapundit -- and special attention to min0taur! -- I bring you this report on an upcoming space mission for lightsails.

You may remember last month's post about how Lieutenant Stockwell is busily saving the timestream from the Large Hadron Collider. Well, apparently he's got the birds working for him too.

Do you know how long it takes to train a bird to drop a piece of bread in exactly the right place to disable the LHC?

When it gets to be November 1st (and Daylight Savings Time ends), it's hard to continue the delusion that it's still really summer. Accordingly, I have removed the cushions from the new patio furniture and stored them on a shelf in the garage until next spring. daisy_knotwise and I have to figure out where to put the items that the cushions displaced, but they're less bulky than the cushions. :)

I picked up a three-pack of licenses for Windows 7 Home Premium today and am installing it on one of the laptops. Having tired of staring at counters slowly incrementing on a screen, I grabbed the second laptop to get online with. And thus I'm here.

And Julie is eighteen months old today. After her bath -- which should remove the fine layer of chocolate that she's coated with following Halloween! -- there will be pictures. :)

Ok, this seems counterintuitive. I'm playing around with picks of various gauges. It seems like it's easier to play softly (that is, with less volume) with a heavier gauge pick than it is with a lighter gauge pick.

Hmm.

After having looked at kevinnickerson talking about buying one, I wandered down to Fry's today and found the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ with two 500 GB drives on sale with a $100 rebate. And I bought it.

Now, I'm backing up my office computer's data to it. We'll see how that goes. :)

Before I could leave for lunch today, Katie insisted that I turn on Rock Band and sing "Eight Days A Week" for her. I may have created a monster.

In a good way. :)

Rock Band: Beatles for the Wii arrived just before we left for ConClave. I carefully did not open it on Monday, because the cleaning lady was coming on Tuesday and increasing the amount of mess around seemed counter-productive.

Tonight, I set it up and we gave it a try. Katie is interested in the drums and guitar, but we have to get her to actually pay attention to the game long enough to do something.

Of course, she's not three yet. :)

daisy_knotwise's cellphone died while we were in Texas. I bought her a pay-as-you-go phone as a temporary stop gap while trying to figure out what to do. And after way too much time spent studying the situation and stalling, because none of the phones and plans were quite what I wanted and new phones are on the horizon, I've bid on a phone just like mine on eBay that I should be able to activate on our existing plan.

We'll see if I get it. :)

daisy_knotwise has been a bit frustrated, because I'm sitting in the office here at home all day (and sometimes late into the night), which means that she can't get at the computer that has all her files and applications on it, even if I'm on the work computer. This has greatly delayed her wrapping up some of her Capricon responsibilities as she passes on Dealers' Room info to the new folks running it.

Today, I realized that she could use Remote Desktop to access the home office computer while I'm working. I just set everything up and tested it successfully from the computer in the bedroom.

Yay!

We bought an MP3 player for Dodeka so that we could use it to demo CDs to folks who wanted to hear what was on them before buying them. The trick, of course, is getting the data from the CDs to the MP3 player. But I'm working at home now.

So I've been doing work on the work computer. And every five minutes or so all afternoon, I've been flipping over to the home computer, inserting another CD, and ripping it to the MP3 player. At this point, I've just about finished two of the big boxes of CDs, which is probably a bit more than 25% of the total. So far, I've only had to enter info for a couple of CDs.

Four boxes to go...

I have type two diabetes. I take a couple of pills a day for it, along with a couple of shots of Byetta -- which I understand will soon be available as a weekly injection -- and my blood sugar is in a happy, healthy place. Losing weight would be a good thing (as well as a hard thing to do), but modern medicine is keeping me relatively healthy. I'm fortunate to have a good job and a good health plan that subsidizes the cost of these drugs, of course, but I'm immensely thankful that the pharmaceutical industry has developed them and I don't begrudge the fact that they're making money on them. I also know how much it costs to bring a new drug to market, and it isn't cheap.

I want us to keep developing newer and better medical treatments. So does Dean Kamen, who is a very smart man. :)

(If you haven't heard of him for anything else, well, he's the guy who invented the Segway. And a bunch of other things that are arguably much more useful.)

Via Instapundit, here's an article about an outfit that thinks they've got a process where microorganisms eat sunlight and CO2 and produce ethanol and hydrocarbons as waste products. As observed, the trick is to figure out how to scale up the process, but apparently -- if it does scale! -- you could satisfy the U.S. appetite for liquid fuel with an area the size of the Texas panhandle.

That's a substantial improvement on current techniques. And you can do it in areas where you can't grow food.

I rather dislike burning food.

Which reminds me that it's time to go fire up the grill and put the steaks on. :)

When I got home yesterday, daisy_knotwise let me know that Katie had distinguished herself by turning off the air conditioner at the switch in the basement. It's the same switch that she previously used to turn off the furnace. But the good news was that Gretchen had detected the problem when the house started to feel warm and had gone downstairs and turned the switch back on, so we had a working air conditioner by the time I got home.

I got up early this morning to go to work, as Gretchen has an appointment to have her blood drawn and Katie has an appointment to have her stitches out. I turned on the shower to heat up while I took my morning regimen of pills, then stepped in to discover that things were not very warm. I turned the handle all the way to hot and got sort of lukewarm, suggesting to me that there was a problem with the hot water heater and I was now working with fossil hot water -- that is, whatever heat was left in the tank.

I went downstairs after showering and getting dressed and took a look at the heater. The status light wasn't blinking, which I took as a bad sign. And the control knob on the front was distinctly not at the right setting. I decided to call the warranty number on the tank. While I was talking to the fellow there, I realized that the fact that the light wasn't flashing simply meant the pilot was out. Which would go along with the fact that the knob had been twisted to the off position.

So I thanked him, hung up the phone, and followed the procedure on the side of the tank to relight the pilot.

Whoosh! And once again, men make fire.

The water was probably not very warm by the time Gretchen needed to take her shower.

But it was progress.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any good way to Katie-proof these knobs and switches.

She and I are going to have a discussion later. *sigh*

I got the new dual monitor KVM switch yesterday and brought it into work to try it out. It seems to work, mostly, although I'm having trouble getting the hotkey switching to work at all.

But it will make things much better when I have to take all this home.

Supposedly, the modern versions of Windows have lots and lots of resources available. It was, thus, with some disappointment that I discovered that there appears to be a limit on how many menus an application can open. The CMenu::LoadMenu call in MFC returns a NULL pointer (which I did cleverly check for), but when you call GetLastError to find out why you failed, the answer is an uninformative value of "0".

Isn't that special?

It's amazing how much more sound you get on your recording when you turn on the stinking microphones. This was the last of my misadventures for the evening, which included a stuck microphone cable, a shorted out microphone, and a remote control with low batteries for which I need to go back and read the manual.

Other than that, we're all fine here. :)

I have just become extremely fond of my copy of WaveLab. I just drew a rectangle around three instances of feedback in a live recording and made them go away. I can almost make the crying baby go away, but it sounds a little better left in. :)

We actually haven't had much time to investigate the Wii, but I did play a bit with the Wii Sports disk. As a result, I promptly went out and bought the set of Nerf baseball bat, tennis racket, and golf club. Because it just works better that way. :)

In a few minutes, daisy_knotwise and I are going to try a race in Mario Kart, unencumbered by Katie's attempts to grab the wheel away from Gretchen.

Well, downloading Vista Service Pack 2 didn't make the occasional tendency of my main office computer here at home to hang up in Windows Explorer so that you can't start any new programs go away. If it did this all the time, I'd be at wits end, but a reboot usually cures the problem.

My latest attempt to fix the problem led me to read through the event log and remove the "Bonjour Service". Given that it was installed by Adobe Creative Suite 3 and this is both the only computer with CS3 installed on it and the only computer with this particular problem gives me hope.

We'll see if it works.

Eventually.

Since the problem is intermittent. *sigh*

Actually, more like Wii.

I went out and bought the video game console today. It's the first video game console I've owned since the dedicated one that played Breakout and a couple of other games mumble years ago. I got it, because I hoped to interest Katie in things like the Disney version of Dance Dance Revolution in the hope of getting her off the couch.

So far, she's been perfectly content to watch Daddy play. Except when she wants to grab the remote control in the middle of a game. Hmm.

We'll work on this.

Well, that was entertaining. It took a while to get everything working, but I've just successfully recorded a couple of tracks into Cubase while standing in the studio using the mic pre that's in there and the Tranzport remote control. Then I sent those tracks out from Cubase to the d8b mixer, mixing them down into WaveLab. Now I'm sending the mixed tracks off via FTP.

If I can just figure out how to get the mixer to recognize MTC generated by Cubase, I'll have this licked. That used to work, but I had to rebuild this computer completely since the last time I had it working. *sigh*