1995: Ring of Swords

Getting the festival of 1995 underway, I picked the book I knew absolutely the least about first.

It seemed like a pretty nice hard-ish SF novel, so why hadn’t I read it already?

Now I remember…  I had bought it along with a swarm of other touchy feely SF books, and I had kinda gotten tired of reading that for a while.  So it sedimented downwards.

Anyway, it turned out to be very nice.  Perhaps a tad much So Much Drama for my tastes, but The Drama passed pretty quickly, and the rest of the book is quite neat.

I’ve already bought a few more books by Eleanor Arnason.

Rating: Esseffericious

Ghosts in the Speakers

I’ve got two sets of D’Feldt Audioengine 5 “active” speakers (i.e., with built-in amplifiers).

Yesterday one of the sets (in the office) started making a thunder-ish noise, but only in the “sattellite” speaker.  So I disconnected it.

This morning I was awoken by an insane noise.  It sounded like someone were putting asphalt down in my apartment.

It turned out to be the other set of the speakers, in the bathroom, was making the racket.  It sounds kinda like the noise in the other set, only louder.

The sound is very much like the sound that broken amplifiers make when warming up.  Just listen:


<div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkexrGfSsvM

See?

There’s nothing connected to these speakers except electricity.  There’s no audio signal.

What are the odds that two pairs of these go bad — this bad — one day apart?

It sort of seems not very likely.

Does anybody have any other explanation for this phenomenon?  Animal magnetism?  Comic rays?  Neighbors conducting experiments with their home-built hadron collider?

Filmin’ Finish’d

Peeps decided to film (bits of) a movie in my apt.  So I went away to various parts of the world and wrote the Gwene web interface.

I came back on Friday and had to like (eww!) work and stuff, but now I’ve gotten the apartment wired back up again so that I can listen to music and stuff.

The movie peeps moved most of my furniture out of the apt., and their stuff in.  They did an admirable job of putting All My Precious Stuff back where it was, but the computer stuff…  It’s complicated.  So I did that myself.

Unfortunately the main piece of equipment in my stereo setup, the RME Hammerfall DSP Multiface II (that’s a mouthful), just didn’t want to work.  So if you’re googling this, the symtoms were that the digital “firewire” interface worked perfectly.  The driver loaded, all the meters worked as normal, bopping up and down, but no sound came out of the analogue ports.  And nothing came in from the analogue input ports, either.  It was like the entire analogue bit was dead while the rest worked.

I went to my friendly neighborhood audio shop, ProLyd, and asked for advice, but they hadn’t heard of those symptoms before, so I bought a new one. And it worked!  I have music!

So that’s apparently a thing.  The Multiface II can semi-die.  I’ll ship the old one off for the fiords.

So unfortunately I have no harrowing stories about a trashed apt. or anything.  The film peeps were very nice, and everything proceeded as much according to plan as anybody could expect.  No new mysterious holes in the floor or the walls.  No mysterious footprints on the ceiling.  Or anything.   

Very disappointing.

They did some final tiny shoots today, and now they’re off forever.

However, I just discovered this in the room next to the bathroom:

Doesn’t everybody dream of having a bathroom like this?

So chi chi.  So recherche.

Ok, I should send them a message…