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l cooked Steak a la Stoneham at my dad's tonight. Horace Stoneham was the NY Giants owner who brought the team to SF 60 years ago. My oldest brother came over for dinner and we watched the game while having dinner. My dad took him to the second ever MLB game on the west coast 60 years ago this week. Stoneham got Alfred's Steakhouse -- still in operation -- to make this dish and they added it to their menu. My dad has been copying it ever since. It is strips of steak tossed with spices and flour and fried up with some parsley, green onions and sherry. I'll post the "recipe" if anyone wants it, but it is mostly ingredients and methods but no quantities. Tasty stuff that reminds me of my childhood.

Lemon oregano sous vide pork loin with cumin baked potato, creamed spinach and balsamic-grilled radicchio.

Techie lab learn lunch Catered by https://dishdash.com/

Grilled vegetables and medium rare NY strip steak. I was too hungry to take pictures. Washed in down with 2007 Sea Smoke Ten. They made a lovely couple.

Bike room is now doing duty.

Have you stocked up on peacock feathers yet?

Best bang for the buck, my vote is going to 'Gem Clear' .. for those of us too cheap to splurge on 'Everclear' ! Special vote also goes to anything that comes in an unlabeled repurposed gallon of water or milk. BBW Well for myself, along with all the very sophisticated people living in small mountain towns across 'merica.

Just doin' my research. Need some of those sweet pleated pants, and more hair.

Dusty, if you drank more Mollydooker I think you would be more on top of things...just sayin'

A question about lard... I've just bought a Lodge Cast Iron Skillet and I'm going to try my hand at fried chicken. I wanted to come here for some recommendations on the type of lard (brand names would help too). I've also bought some White Lily flour for the accompanying biscuits with gravy.

And removing solder flux from PCBs.

Knew you'd be along in due course.

I bought a copy for my dad a few years ago (and I read it last year) – it's one of his favorite books. It's well written and full of those anecdotal science/history stories that stick in your mind. My takeaway from the book is that science can change humanity, but it doesn't do much for scientists, sometimes. Many of the inventors/discovers were considered failures in their lifetimes and they suffered through enormous hardship.

What's wrong with spoogey?

They don't think it be like it is but it do.

The Sony UHP-H1 arrived today. I hooked it up to my TV and preamp, updated the firmware, and put a disc from my Dark Skies DVD set in as a video torture test. It was a lower-budget alien invasion series (often considered a ripoff of The X-Files) from the mid-90s that was probably shot on video. It looked pretty rough at first... the picture was really dark (the episode started off with a night scene) and skin tones looked unnatural with some jaggies thrown in (interlacing?). I played around with the settings but mostly turned any enhancement stuff off. I suspect the jaggies are part of a poor DVD transfer rather than an interlaced signal. If you turn all the noise reduction stuff on, the picture starts to look like a cartoon. Then I put in a Blu-ray of The Musketeers (BBC, third season)... much better. I've gotten so used to the excellent Blu-ray playback from my PS3 that I took it for granted. The picture looked a little dark, but I was tired of messing around with settings so I just watched the episode with stock settings. I did notice the sound had nicer separation than the PS3's audio. Having done a basic test of video, I put The Cars SACD from Mobile Fidelity into the player... this was the big test. I've listened to this album many times. It's not hi-fi, but it's easy to compare. There's definitely more detail there. The next disc was from Alison Krauss + Union Station's Live... great stuff. Similar results: more detail, more space, more texture. There may be something to this SACD technology. I'll have to do more audio testing with my headphones, as my stereo experiments probably disturbed my neighbors. Worth it. I'm using an AmazonBasics HDMI cable and 47 Laboratory Stratos cable with Eichmann Bullet Plug RCA terminations.

I guess it needs moar bikes?

My e-bike is in the shop at the moment. I had way too much fun imitating Brent and bent my derailleur hanger and broke the shifter. So I'm back to human powered until the new shifter comes in.

Oops, sorry, my bad. I was reading it, but thought that Al was delivering the whoopass...kinda like watching a car accident. Except verbally and legal. I hope it didn't stress you out too much, and I'll try to be on top of it next time. @justreadingup -- decaf.

I have to admit, her gnocchi was pretty awesome! She might have won if it was a contest. But my clams were really good! And their bark was much worse than their bite! [emoji6]

Me: Barked clams and house made spinach linguine aglio y olio. Anne: Portobello stuffed gnochi

'Twas dee-lish!

you either add a unbalanced/balanced to balanced input stage which adds lots of parts and space, or supersymmetry which forces a low input impedance. so let me explain further, lets say you have an amp with a gain of 5 now you put 1v on both the + and - xlr inputs. Output voltages are +5 for both. Difference is zero, but if you have unbalanced headphones, then 5v on the headphones which is bad now you do the same thing to a true differential amplifier. Output voltage is now 0 for both channels which is why a true balanced amp removes any common mode voltages and noise this does not help you with a single ended input. or a single ended input converted to balanced. In the first case there is 5v on the SE output. In the second case the + output has +5v and the - output has -5v

At least three people stepped in as CEO's or sales managers of Cavalli over the years and I heard they all paid a huge investment for those positions. That was really the issue with Cavalli aside from amps needing a lot of servicing and not being made to be serviced, too many fingers in the pot. I spent a lot of time working on the LLMk1 and ended up completely rebuilding it. New PSU, new output stage, new input stage, new gain stage and even a new transformer. I lost a pile of money on it too but I knew that going in. We do this because shitty products should be exposed. I was at the local Senn dealer today to setup my HE-1 audition (tried to get them to bring it to my place but no dice ) but while there they were asking my advice on some amp designs and one of the guys said "you are always so negative about the designs!!". I said "true but that's because for every Headamp amp that is built properly you have dozens of posers who don't have a clue what they are doing. If they were charging 250$ then who cares but 10K$ for the Goldmund pile of fail is just too much to take." That's pretty much what sums it up for me, nothing has changed from 2005 when nobody wanted to discuss the amps in detail. It was all about the beautiful, beautiful music and any dissent to that was crushed. This is a wider subject for me though as people are willing to swallow just about anything, regardless of how stupid it is. Just see something like Elon Musk's "Hyperloop" or classics like Solar roadways... Stupid and bad shit needs to be called out.

Sören being a fucktard...glad to see nothing changes when I take a week off in Niagara. So pathetic... As for the review, if anybody thinks that I had anything to say about any of it... you have clearly never talked to Bob or followed any of his work. He told me he would write what he wanted and I got zero say in it, which is exactly what I wanted. This wasn't even supposed to be a review, he just asked me if he could borrow a Carbon to give the 007's an equal platform against the dynamic competition. I was happy to oblige, sent him my personal Carbon and also offered him a Pure Bipolar to try out, to create an even more even playing field. Both sets being driven balanced with amps that share the same design ideas. This was back in February or March and it was only after he'd heard that this grew into a kind of review. I knew he liked them as he bought the Pure Bipolar and will probably buy the Carbon as well but I didn't have any idea what he would write. Hell I didn't even know when it was posted, I only heard about it when my inbox lit up. Now normally I would never even entertain the idea of having reviews as pretty much all are garbage, done by people with the integrity of used care salesmen/realtors and are just verbal diarrhea. Just look at the garbage Jude is posting and he's far from the worst. You may disagree with Bob's findings all you want but he sure as shit is more entitled to his opinion that most. He did expose Focal and I know from experience that it isn't easy to hold up an opinion that goes against the "norm", no matter how wrong the "norm" may be. I have fond memories of the death threats I got from some unstable people after I said the HE90's were far from the best. I can also imagine how happy Focal were about all of this...

I'm sure Justin will chime in later but here is a short guide: 1: let the amp warm up for at least two hours (maybe more since I'm not sure when it is running at full temp) 2: place the probes of the multimeter between the + and - output for that channel (in the Stax socket seen here, red in the + output, black in the -) and adjust the back pot for 0VDC. 3: Now remove the black probe and connect it to the shell of a RCA socket on the back (aka ground) and adjust the front pot for 0VDC. 4: Repeat for the other channel.

Sauce turned out a little spoogey. (Upon review on larger screen.)

WTF humans? Actual signs from bathroom at work I took today