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Pioneer in all its glory

more multi working on the left cabinet for time being… lots of multi-vitamins

Finally she (in the middle, on the Prosecco) arrived from India. Surrounded by her new family.

Have a great one Jeff! Cheers!

What is better than Garfield? The joy of catching up to almost 11 years' worth of brilliant short animations. What a labor of love. Off to the Vet – Simon's Cat

Went and looked at Motorcycles.

Thanks everyone. I did in fact enjoy buying myself tons of gifts. Nice change up from the normal days when I just buy myself tons of stuff.

Who says fencing is a nerdy boring sport? Alex in this video is the Czech Republic Olympic fencer who trained at our club in December and will return to train for the world cup in Anaheim this march. Alex practices with Lance and kicks his ass regularly. Despite the Youtube persona Alex is one of the nicest, respectful engaging people you could meet. He speaks four languages and his side hustle of music is helping fund his training for the Olympics. I had a great conversation with him at our house discussing his plans for life after the Olympics. When he comes out in March I hope he brings his entourage... Fencing Can Be Cool...really BTW, the women in the video really are internationally ranked fencers No not really.

Test Tone @ Home live right now: http://mixlr.com/illuminator/chat

Happy Birthday! Buy something nice that you don’t already have. Oh, wait…

I was lucky enough to have a long email conversation with him around 10 years back. That was where he shared the bet with Widlar. He actually contacted me, because he worked out that (feel sorry for my wife at this point) I am a Tektronix test gear collector and restorer as a hobby. The conversation moved progressively to AI, which he was agnostic about - but he reckoned the future was in Augmented Reality, where embedded computer systems would elevate our processing power and intellect. And here we are thinking 5G is a shiny new thing... A hell of a thinker was Barrie Gilbert.

Was at the local pet store the other day, and, as always, I went to play with the adoptables that were on display. Went to pet this guy and he just rolled over. Almost took him home. I thought this would make a great poster.

I will still love you even though you are a carb criminal.

Good to hear about your progress even though the pics have me salivating wildly.

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.

I have heard of books on tape or CD but never on vinyl. That sounds quite cumbersome...?

A while back my PS-X7 stopped maintaining platter speed and resulted in a really weird Beck album before I caught it. I put it to the side to troubleshoot for a bit. Now it maintains speed just fine and I live in fear of the Eldritch god of chaos that now lives in my turntable. They prefer Wilco over Beck. Sounds good though.

Bad news for vinyl. Pasted from Analog Planet,.. Sadly this is not April 1st, and this is not a joke. The Banning CA facility housing Apollo/Transco lacquer manufacturing burned today and is apparently a total loss. More than 80 firefighters fought the dangerous chemical-laden fire. I haven't had a chance to get into the story details but hopefully no one was seriously injured in the blaze. This leaves but one lacquer producer in the world: Japan-based MDC. Whether or not Apollo/Transco plans on rebuilding or whether California with its stringent environmental protection laws will even allow it, remains to be seen. It's not going to be easy even if Apollo/Transco plans on rebuilding because there's no "off the shelf solution and will take quite a bit of time in any case. That leaves DMM for those who aren't MDC customers. That company fielded calls from around the world telling anxious potential customers that it was not able to take on any new business.

RIP Barrie Gilbert, analog design titan. Brit who moved to the US to work at Tektronix. He was responsible for the on-screen readout in the 7000 series scopes, and the Gilbert Cell that was used as the core of the Tek custom amplifier chips up to and beyond 1GHz. Is also used in every 4-quadrant multiplier chip out there. He was so good that Analog Devices hired him from Tek by agreeing to build a whole facility out in Beaverton for him to play in. The story was that he had a bet with Bob Widlar to design a minimum component constant current source. Gilbert lost (he came up a three transistor one) when Wildlar came up with a 2 transistor one. The Widlar source is used in just about every op-amp, and every AB power amp that has been built since. In full flow in 1991 describing what is known as the Gilbert Cell "The translinear amplifier" Aged 83 - RIP Barrie Gilbert.