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A rare sight for southern California and an even rarer sigh from my back yard. I feel like I have been transported to Denver or something.

Spent part of Boxing Day with my guy, Harold Potter.

Niman Ranch Flat Iron, Garlic Fries, Arugula, Smoked Chile Butter

Supertramp "Breakfast in America" deluxe edition... IMO a masterpiece

Is that stuff flammable?

Get ready gents, the codpiece thrusts itself back into fashion

A classic for Christmas holidays:

No pics, but my first sicilian pizza ..... Sfinciuni Pizze. Not a looker but bursting with flavor. "This traditional pie has a pan style crust, with a sweet and rustic style tomato sauce on top of 2 year aged parmigiano reggiano".

If you do pass from food poisoning, can I have your Molly Dooker wines?

"a textbook-perfect album of post-Beatles, keyboard-centered English art rock that strikes the shrewdest possible balance between quasi-symphonic classicism and rock & roll" - Stephen Holden

Depending on the taste you may try using the beef in a Thai or Cambodian style stew with rice noodles, cilantro, and ginger.

It's a bit wacky.

Sorry Ken, missed this. Happy belated birthday!

We had to add Karen's moms phone to our plan, so we checked out all of the deals and decided to brave going to the local Verizon store Monday. A couple of hours later we had her mom added to our plan and we both had new iPhone XS Maxs (a nice upgrade from our 7+). Total cost was a little over $100 and the monthly payment will actually be a few dollars cheaper. Overall a good investment for a couple of hours. Today we went to BestBuy and each picked up a pair of AirPod Pros. I think I am going to like them.

Boxing Day Breakfast. Sous Vided Soft Boiled eggs + Marmite Soldiers

Christmas dinner.

Last night with guests from Italy and the Czech Republic. I wanted to introduce them to a Southern California Christmas minus the guacamole. Batch of medium prime ribs, batch of rare prime ribs. Twenty four hour brined turkey.

Thanks everyone. Hope you all had a good Xmas or at least a decent break. We spent a couple non-stress days eating and drinking in Sonoma. Now back home, I’d be surprised if I can keep my eyes open past 8pm. #iamold #partyon

Being cooked for ... Prime Rib + bacon weave =

Some good news on my side. I was able to successfully test the GR79xx board. Here's a picture of the GR7915 (left) next to the GR7815 micro (right). I've only tested against my DC shop supply but it performs as expected so far

Here’s the problem, when you measure the wrong thing the wrong way because its relatively easy to measure and analyse you end up optimising the wrong thing the wrong way... and end up with worse ENJOYMENT of the sound. But objectivist don’t care about the actual sound they care about the measurements of simple, fake not existing in nature sounds like 1Khz pure sine. If they don’t know how to measure it e.g. real complex music, it does not exist... what you actually end up with is products where the enjoyment does not exist because the music is not priority. THD + noise has lead to DACs that disconnect/mute their outputs when then recieve an input which is a stream of 0s i.e. silence. As a result the noise looks realy low with silence as an input so the signal to noise ratio will look good. But you are not measuing the noise generated by the device! the output of the device is not connected to the rest of the device. All because the designer of the chip wants to have better *measured* signal to noise but not actually better real world noise when there is a musical signal present... again measuring the wrong thing the wrong way AND cheating to make it look even better.[https://www.evaluationengineering.com/instrumentation/article/13011757/testing-audio-adcs-and-dacs] Now its recognised the designers cheat by recognising test signals and so the measurement devices dont use silence rhey use an idle tone.... (which are still simple tones that dont exist in nature but exists just to stop the dac muting and are simple enough to be easily filtered out... eventually the dac designers will put logic in the chips to sense these idle tones and still switch on the mute circuit)... then the measurement comunity will need to devleop new idle tones.... I see no point comparing devices with 140db signal to noise vs 135db signal to noise at these kind of levels it tells you nothing at all useful about the sound enjoyment. I remember the very early days of CD.... A rich friend read a hifi review of the first Philips player and purchased it motivated by specifications and measurements alone. He demoed it to me and the first peice he played was classical with violin(s) (I am afraid I dont remember the peice of music only the effect it had). The hasrshness, shrillness and sterility of the sound almost took the enamel off my teeth. I said to him that’s unlistenable. He said the specifications of the CD player and CD system are far superior to LP and the CD is more ACCURATE. He even contended that violins sound like that in real life. I said to him I don’t care if everyone else thinks that’s how violins should or does sound; I literally could not stay in the room with the music playing. I stuck with my LPs and ignored CD for about another 20 years. It was so painful for me there was almost zero musicality. Next time I visited he had sold the CD player and was back on LP. he admitted he could not live with the CD sound. I’m not saying ALL digital replay is terrible but my experiences of the *first* CD systems were uniformly frightening. Now we both have digital systems. But I have only been a serious digital listener over the last 15+ years or so. For me iits taken digital a long time to the musicality levels of LP *regardless* of the measurements showing it being "better" from day one...The bottom line is we need measurements that actually correlate to precieved sound enjoyment and we simply do not have that.