Collisions and Vibrations
Microsoft, in just the kind of bad luck fit that tends to happen when more important stuff is going wrong as well, has had its second major branding debacle in recent memory: first Metro, now SkyDrive has to change its name for trademark infringement reasons. Well, Metro didn’t so much change its name as relinquish its name. But anyway.
Amazon decided to phone in a Prime order and dumped it into FedEx’s deplorable Smart Post system. The fact that the delay only cost a day off of their guaranteed two day shipping, while a third party seller can’t seem to find their packaging tape in that amount of time, is stunning to me and to complain would make me feel small and whiny indeed. But it’s the temperature sensor for the pool, which for some reason has felt extremely important for me to fix, despite it not being at all important to fix. I think the poor advice we got from our “pool school” session made me eager to square the thing away myself as soon as possible. There’s some deep but unimportant psychology going on there, and I’ll be happy to stick a bow on the whole situation and be done.
We got the TV and the non-in-wall components of the accompanying sound system set up in the media room over the weekend. We’d piddled with the TV some already, but last night I cranked up the volume (extensive testing shows we can get away with this after 7pm bedtime!) on the Top Gun final scene. The surround was very effective, “transparent” being the word that came to mind. The TV is glorious and awaits full HD cinematic content versus old DVDs.
But the thought that was stuck in my head, amazingly, was “that’s a darn good sub-woofer.” The sub was the only item for which I overran my guideline expected budget by just a bit, and I couldn’t figure out why I was doing it at the time, but I’m glad I did. It doesn’t bark at you, announcing its position in the room, but it really puts out the vibration. I’m not a bass head, but for a theater room it’s amazingly effective at establishing the “movie feel,” much more than I expected it to be.
I’m also finding that having a true center channel speaker makes the otherwise wretched-seeming audio mixing in modern movies actually make sense. It’s like the dialogue is actually coming out of the television and, with a good speaker, really does stand out over background music and ambient stuff.
Work stuff is really calming down, which I expect to be a trend heading toward the end of the year. This is giving me a chance to think about things more than usual and do some project work. My big programming project has been well-received, which is a load off. MS Access is decreasingly stable with higher version numbers and needs to be eliminated from the majority of my architecture, aside from management tasks. All good stuff to work on in the months to come.
And now it looks like I get to charter my second IT project of the year! Oh joy!