What the fuck is wrong with people? I was in the restroom just now washing my hands as another guy was finishing washing his. He proceeded to take no less than six paper towels, quickly wad them up and wipe his hands and then throw them all away. 90% of that paper was completely dry. I know this because when I dry my similarly wet hands I’m able to get them completely dry using one paper towel.
It’s just frustrating, especially when you see little things like that all over the place.
I ordered a CME VX6 keyboard controller last Friday. On paper it looked like an excellent controller. I was able to get one for $750, which definitely isn’t cheap, but it had the right mix of features that I was looking for without much extra. To get that same blend you typically need to go into the much more expensive full keyboard workstations, so this seemed like a good compromise.
However, when I picked it up yesterday from the shipping depot and brought it home I had a bit of a nasty surprise. The thing was built like absolute shit. To start with, it just felt very cheap. The controls and inputs were all pretty “meh” in my opinion. Rough edges on some of the plastic parts, knobs feeling fairly gritty (not smooth) and cheap feeling button switches sealed. Definitely not what I would consider pro-audio level.
Worse yet however, many (I’m talking just about a dozen) of the keys had their weights on the underside coming unglued! Most were hanging down, partly glued to the key. Others had somehow found their way into the keyboard itself and were scraping around in there, banging into electronics as I moved the keyboard out of the box. On top of this the keys that did have their weights in place properly just felt bad. I mean, I wasn’t expecting a really top of the line key action, but this was pretty awful. The worst thing was that it was just inconsistent. A few keys felt pretty good while others were just really soft and had no bounce to them.
I can’t comment on how the software worked or how it performed as a controller because I had seen enough. Poor fit and finish and a defective keyboard… There’s no way that is acceptable for a controller that expensive. I’ll be sending it back for a full refund. I don’t know about the rest of CME’s stuff, but honestly I won’t be bothering to find out. You’ve been warned.
I guess I’ll just save up my money for a Korg M3 or something…
My storage drive appears to be toast. I’m a bit too distressed right now to really go into it, but I probably lost 200 GB of data easy. The rub is that I just consolidated all my data onto that drive because I was planning on building a file server with redundancy in just a couple weeks.
I’m still hoping for a miracle that I’ll be able to rescue the data, but honestly at this point it doesn’t look good. At all.
Apparently if it’s after February you can’t buy a shovel in Michigan, at least around me. I broke my other good one with the last ridiculous snow we had and with another 8 inches on the ground I had to do something about it. So yesterday after work I went to the hardware store near me to get a snow shovel. Nothing fancy, just a good normal snow shovel. They were sold out. I tried another home improvement center: nothing. Then another. Then WalMart. I ended up trying five different stores (4 of them quite large) and they did not have any snow shovels.
Their garden centers were however stocked with lawn seed and fertilizer. Awesome.
My sister was good enough to come over with a couple shovels from my parents house and give me a hand. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do with another 10 inches projected for this weekend.
Spring please.
I watch what most would probably consider a below average amount of TV. The shows that I do watch tend to be the kind that usually inform. For example, I’m a big fan of a lot of stuff on Discovery HD Theater. Not just because it makes my Bravia look amazing, but because there’s some genuinely cool stuff on there.
But whenever there’s a show that has to do with nature at all – especially documentaries – I have this constant, underlying fear that they will cut to a closeup of a spider. I mean, spiders are in nature right? Well, apparently nature is made up entirely of spiders in my world view. Shows about forests will have all kinds of terrible wolf spiders and black widows. A show with the desert will invariably have camel spiders the size of small SUVs. Even places that have no right containing spiders will have them. Mountain dwelling spiders. Arctic spiders. Subterranean sonar-using spiders. It doesn’t matter where that NatGeo or Discovery camera crew goes, I somehow feel that you can count on the fact that there will be spiders there and that they feel it is their duty to display those spiders to you in an arbitrary fashion.
This makes no sense. The vast majority of shows that feature nature have nothing to do with spiders. And in fact, I like to enjoy nature in person quite a bit so I have first hand knowledge that there are not spiders waiting for impromptu cameos around every tree. Believe it or not, it can at times be harder to find a spider than it would be to simply not find a spider.
I don’t even hate spiders that much. I’m not a fan by any means, especially when they get above a certain size, but I can deal with them. Something about one-thousand eighty progressive lines of spidery detail (particularly when it is hairy and features numerous eyes) given without any warning bugs me. You could be watching something entirely relaxing, like a tree canopy, or water fowl and then it’s an immediate cut to a horrifying spider view. Put away the fucking zoom lens, mister camera operator.
I’m not entirely crazy for feeling this way since I’ve gotten burned before, but I’m still overreacting. Thankfully I think I’m starting to get over this. It hasn’t been easy but little by little I grow more accepting of spiders and that they simply are in nature and sometimes they get caught on camera.
Well not completely fried, but my M-Audio BX10s has developed an unfortunate problem. It appears the right channel is kind of dead. I say kind of because the crossover seems to still be kind of working, i.e. audio will still play from the right monitor, but the low end (the lower half of the crossover) is completely absent. This problem doesn’t exist on the left channel, but there is some line noise there. No, it’s not cables, I checked.
Edit: I’m also quite sure it’s not ground loop. It’s probably the crossover on the right channel, or the mix between the left and right crossover.
This is annoying enough but it’s more annoying because it’s out of warranty now. So I will get to pay to ship this heavy subwoofer to California, pay $40/hour to get it fixed, and then pay to have it shipped back. Honestly buying a new one might be cheaper.
I’m half tempted to see if I can fix it myself. Crossover circuits aren’t exactly complicated and it’s already out of warranty. I swear, it’s always something.
This whole “owning a home” thing is a scam.
Well, maybe not quite that bad, but there’s plenty of annoyances. For example, my furnace decided to not work when I went to flip it on late last week. This was troublesome, because it was working a couple weeks before when the temp dropped down and I felt the need to kick it on.
So, I look at it myself a bit. I’m pretty handy, but I wasn’t able to figure out what was going on. Neither could my dad, so I didn’t feel too bad. It was clear that the pilot wasn’t coming on though.
Yesterday the furnace guy comes out and we look at it, and it turns out the flame rollback sensor had tripped. Easy enough to reset, but why would such a safety critical sensor trip? Oh, perhaps because the intake blower motor is starting to go bad.
At least that’s what the guy says. I could see what he was saying though, the motor did take a bit to get moving, a sign that usually means the windings are shorting out a bit. The part isn’t extremely common though, and therefore is expensive. Just having him out yesterday was $120. The part would cost $320, and then labor to install it. Ouch.
So I’m going to see what I can do myself. Ideally I can get Ducane to send me out a new blower motor, seeing as the furnace is really not that old. Other than that, maybe I can find one online for cheaper and install it myself.
At least the heat is back on.
Naim is a 27 year old software magician, electronic musician and puzzlematician. By day he is a pro software architect and developer. By night he is at the helm of KnowLogik, a tech-creative R&D, strategy and design outfit. Naim is an information and design geek who loves making and learning stuff. In his spare time he writes, takes photos, and is chill.
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