episiarch

I'll be very interested in learning what you choose - and what you think of the A5 if you come to it from the M200MKII. I loved my M200 (mark I)s but somehow they didn't make it into the container when I moved to the UK, and it's a pain to have them gotten out of storage and shipped here at this point. Tried Audioengine A2s and they are completely wrong for me (excessive fakey bass at the expense of clarity), so I had more or less written off the A5s on the assumption they shared the same house sound.

Thanks, Al. I appreciate the sacrifice. I might have to drink a bit myself to forget the pain of you forgetting the pain. Off-topic, what does a guy have to do to graduate from n00b status to actually being able to see the for-sale forums?

Sorry to hear that. My own cold/flu kept staging little comebacks this month, so I think I know the feeling. Spent a couple days mindlessly replaying old video games when I didn't have enough concentration for anything else.

*Gazes wistfully at the

Can a brother get a Chunka-Chunka-Chunka-Ding!-Zzzzt!-Chunka-Chunka-Chunka-Chunka for an ASR-33 connected to a timeshared 32kB minicomputer in Berkeley? (...thought not...) But trust me, you put one of those in the way of a door, and the door's not moving.

Not wanting to take a deep, deep dive down the political well here, let's just say that both my US and UK taxes pay for some public policies that I'm pleased to help pay for and some that I'm not. To be honest I haven't yet crunched the numbers to see which one is really the most painful monetarily all things considered. But the UK tax law primers I'm reading make the universe of things that are taxable here seem bigger and scarier than the US system that I'm at least accustomed to. Example: sale of our home in California closed after we had arrived here in the UK. We should have opened a separate bank account to receive the capital gains. Because, you see, it was income realized after we had become UK residents. Therefore this income - in the USA but received whilst 'resident and ordinarily resident' in the UK - may (like all tax primers these are full of mays and coulds) contaminate the other money we have in the US with which it is now commingled, potentially subjecting any portion of that larger pot that is later remitted into the UK into something with significantly less enjoyable tax treatment once it reaches these shores. I honestly don't have all the details down yet. Just the outlines, but they're unsettling. I think I just realized why I'm having trouble getting to sleep tonight and sitting here at the computer instead.

<hypno-eyes>Join us. Don't be afraid. You know you want to. All your friends are here, waiting to welcome you. It's so peaceful here. Here, drink this. It makes crossing over so much easier. Soon you will be among us.</hypno-eyes>

Started - yeah, a little late in the game - reading up on all the ways my UK taxes will differ from <cough>suck more than</cough> my USA taxes. Set up new printer/scanner in my den since the old scanner chose tax season to die. Ordered JH 13s.

Congratulations on both of those. I love the K501 and jazz - vocal, brass, or otherwise. What are you amping yours with? I remember you were looking for a higher-end SS amp not long ago, but I don't recall what ultimately happened.

Palo Alto and East Palo Alto are different cities. EPA is mostly - but not entirely - on the east side of Highway 101, PA mostly on the west side. So there's a big, physical, other-side-of-the-tracks feeling when you go from one to the other. Since most of EPA is in that relatively unattractive and uninteresting little slice of land between the freeway and a big expressway that runs along the Bay, it feels like something of an isolated nowheresville. It's perfectly fine light-industrial land, but to me it seems like a mistake ever to have zoned it for housing as well as business. Because the geography and road locations make it fairly bleak to start with, it seems almost destined to wind up as the kind of place that concentrates people who don't have a lot of great options.

We drove an XC90 until last year and were crazy about it. Well, my wife was. It was too big-feeling for me, but that's my fault and not the car's. Our newest is the XC60, the XC90's smaller cousin. It's their newest model and has darn near everything*. So Volvo definitely has the tech - we're driving it - and hopefully they'll get around to updating the rest of the line sooner rather than later. * Yes rain sensing, yes keyless start, not sure about On Star since I wasn't paying attention for that but maybe we have something like it here under a different name. Plus a bunch more features, some of which I haven't seen elsewhere. It has radar all over the place, lane sensing, and something called 'city safety' that jams on the brakes for you if you're in stop-and-go traffic and start to drift into the car in front while your mind wanders. Apparently this is some statistically worthwhile chunk of all damage-causing accidents (I think it might have been 15% or something) and the system is tuned so it triggers only in very specific situations and also so that when it does trigger, it's no fun (we were encouraged to try it in our demo ride and I can confirm this): they don't want you using the automated brakes as a substitute for actually driving the car. The car radar also tells you when someone's approaching in your blind spots, and it talks to the adaptive cruise control so you don't have to keep adjusting your speed as traffic ahead closes in or accelerates away. The backup assist has a video camera with superimposed "here's where you're about to be" guide overlays, plus proximity warning indicators courtesy of more sonar or radar. Some of this stuff isn't unique these days, I know. But overall this thing is really an impressive package of tech.

For those curious about the hearing-loss mod, here's my email exchange with Jerry (edited slightly for brevity on my side): His reply: What a thoughtful and helpful response. I'll be placng my order after we get the little one put to bed tonight, unless she wears me completely out first.

I usually get memory from RAM Memory Upgrade: Dell, Mac, Apple, HP, Compaq. USB drives, flash cards, SSD at Crucial.com but that's probably more habit than anything else. Still they do have excellent tools for knowing exactly what's compatible with your system, and I like to reward them for that with my business.

Interesting utility: Choose Wisely Lets You Select Your Default Browser on a Per-Link Basis - Web browsers - Lifehacker I use Firefox most of the time, but I prefer Safari's handling of PDF links. And I like Chrome's isolation of plug-ins, so I use Chrome for YouTube. Choose Wisely only works when launching a link from somewhere outside of a browser - for example, from email or from a desktop Twitter client. Those two uses were useful enough in themselves form me to install it. Doesn't come with any instructions on how to set it up, so here they are: 1: drag to Applications folder. 2: Launch it, then drag your other browsers besides Safari into the little window it shows. 3: Launch Safari, go to Preferences, and make Choose Wisely your new default browser. (Yes, you do that in Safari, not in System Preferences.)

Oh, right! I forgot to put moto on my list, someplace I've been wanting to try for a couple years now. If you're a guy like me who likes to hang out at TechShop, you just have to go to a restaurant that cooks with lasers and liquid nitrogen.

Last week there was a small-plane crash in East Palo Alto (SF Bay Area), killing three Tesla Motors employees and knocking out power to a chunk of Silicon Valley for much of the day. (Amazingly nobody on the ground was killed despite the plane striking a home child day-care facility.) East Palo Alto contains some dodgy areas, and is outfitted with the ShotSpotter gunfire detection system. It turns out the crash triggered ShotSpotter, which is designed to log and triangulate on loud, sharp noises, and to log the sounds preceding and following them. NTSB expects these data to be useful in reconstructing the events around the crash. Palo Alto Online : ShotSpotter system records tragic plane crash

Intelligentsia really is destination espresso. For many of the people who care about espresso the way we care about sonics, it's the reference espresso. I haven't been in person to Metropolis Coffee (which I suggested above) but I've bought their beans and they're very, very good. If you're a home barista, definitely get some - it's way easier to pull a good shot of Metropolis Red Line at home than of Intelligentsia Black Cat, and FWIW Red Line's flavor profile makes it the espresso to use in desserts or to pour over ice cream. In the (unlikely, I know) event that anybody wants a decaf espresso, Metropolis is the only roaster I've encountered whose decaf tastes just like their hi-test. Metropolis is also next door to what my friend tells me is her second-favorite sex shop, but that has no bearing on my interest.

Until you posted that, I thought portable drives topped out at 500GB. I'm behind the times.

I'm not a native but if I were going my objectives would include: Patricia Barber at the Green Mill if she's playing that week (it doesn't say she is but maybe her local calendar's not updated that far out) Intelligentsia Coffee Metropolis Coffee Topolobampo or Frontera Grill Big Jones Completely ignorant about beer places, I'm afraid.

Really sorry to hear that. I don't suppose an iPad would meet her needs? Half the weight of an Air...

Your own Imperial Dalek, ony

No bathroom break in there. You are one tough hombre.

durgol-ed the espresso machine to clear the limescale out of the boiler. I'm not used to living in a hard-water area. Only just recently realized, duh, this really isn't optional over here.

FWIW it's strongly rumored that there will be new MacBook Pros coming out shortly. When that sort of thing happens, the remaining stock of the old line immediately turns up in the Apple refurbished/clearance store (go to store.apple.com and scroll down until you see the "special deals"/"save" section). Expect to save about 15-20% off today's prices. You have to be sort of prepared to jump on the last-of-the-old-models deals quickly, because the best ones don't last long. (Then you have to wait for actual refurbished units to show up there. Which they do - that's what's in that section now - but at a slower and less predictable rate.) FWIW personally I'd have a 13" MacBook Pro over a MacBook Air. Yes, shaving the pounds is nice, but the extra 2.5 lbs gets you an optical drive, a full suite of connectors including SD card slot, and a longer-lived battery, and saves a few hundred dollars. YMMV of course.