episiarch

It is . . . though that 'eliminate your rival and give yourself a monster arm in the process' feature is pretty creepy.

Not that anyone is interested, but when I posted that humidifier on my Facebook page and asked friends to guess what it was, I got: smokeless ashtray * football slurpee * pepper mill * portable smoker * modular housing for the space age * fondue with a straw * sonic wok * space-age hibachi * incense burner * tripod * armored Mars lander with telescope * portable sauna to turn any room into a sweat lodge * neighbor as seen from space, cigarette firmly in mouth * ashtray from the late '50's * an orange, now gone bad, with a straw puncturing the skin, preserved on a fancy tripod stand, commemorating a more sunny moment * green heating: garbage incinerator / portable heater with toxin-fighting exhaust filter * the new MacGadget * foot-warmer, or maybe just a steam-heater * little tea pot, short and stout

Is that it? It's my first time buying with them. Saw them mentioned in a New Yorker article a while back and decided to give it a try. And thought, "this isn't sounding too great but I don't have my original CD handy to compare so maybe I'm fooling myself."

Crikey. Now I'm missing K1Ks and an HD800. Must postcountwhore faster.

That humidifier just begs for a downward-firing subwoofer.

If Al's electronics are not getting zapped in the foggy part of SF where he lives, I think you're 100% safe with a humidifier in SLC as long as it's not exhausting water droplets directly into your rig. You prompted me to do a little reading up on this myself - we had a couple of very dry weeks recently, and may have some more - and besides humidifying, apparently some antistatic treatments are effective on new carpets. Including, by some reports, rubbing a laundry fabric softener/antistatic sheet on the carpet.

Right, the main store is lossless / CD quality (the argument being that this is 'HD' compared to most downloadable stuffs) and only the HiRes store is > 16/44. I bought Kind of Blue, remastered to 24/96 by Pristine Audio. Not sure yet how much I like it. Feels like some instruments got unnaturally hot. But my regular CD is still packed from the move and I don't have a lossless rip, so it's thoroughly possible I'm misremembering its sound.

How's that HD Raven? I was hovering over the Buy button on it just the other day.

I lived in Arlington for a while, and I know what you mean. A lot of people in the area aren't aware they have to adjust their habits until they start skidding. And that part of Virginia gets the kind of light snow + freezing rain that a few days later leaves the road looking like it's just a bit wet, with snowy patches, and that's when the real trouble begins. Glad you have the option to work at home.

And harder than an iPhone to accidentally drop in the toilet.

The message you have entered is too short. Maybe you shouldn't have used the chainsaw.

Following. Hoping the FS-teases don't drive me crazy while I'm still a low-roller.

Criterion Collection - $5 off soon-to-be-out-of-print titles More notable for the soon-to-be-out-of-print than for the $5, but still.

The OS can support it, it's just that at present the system forces apps to terminate fully when they are not in the foreground. But there's clearly a call for some types of apps (music streaming being a particularly clear example) to run in a non-foreground mode. So I fully expect that at some point there will be an official way for developers to make their apps backgroundable. But background will come with very strict limits - you get only so much use of the radio, the CPU, the RAM, etc. - while the app is backgrounded, and they will test for this in the app store approval process. And I'll bet there will be a tight limit on the number of backgrounded apps running at once. In other words my personal opinion (not as any sort of insider but as a Silicon Valley ex Apple ish kinda guy) is that multitasking is coming, but it will not be laptop/netbook-style run-any-apps-you-want-simultaneously multitasking.

Dealt with a neighbo(u)r who felt my nanny's parking job had not left him enough room to move his car. Eyeballing it when she parked I thought he would be fine, but he didn't. Fine, that's his right, and anyway we wouldn't want his spotless Benz getting within nose-upturning range of her lowly Fiat, would we? In truth the conversation really consisted only of his muttering and glowering, except when I asked him how fast he needed me to get the car moved (the nanny was across town with my daughter by this point) and he said he had a mate in Birmingham, the only clearly understandable words he said the whole time. I spent the next two hours wondering whether the mate in Birmingham was mentioned for relevance to his timetable - Birmingham's a good two, maybe three hours from here - or whether having a mate in Birmingham was code for "I will have you killed." So far my poll of native speakers of UK English is split between the two interpretations but the consensus is that actual violence is unlikely. Unless I accuse the Birmingham mate of being a Duran Duran fan.

First day with new nanny to look after the toddler! More of a training day than anything else, but still got some time to myself and a few things done.

A lot of good recommendations here, so I don't have a lot to add. But do check out Accelerando by Charles Stross. The whole text's available at that link, in various formats, so you can try before you buy, or never buy at all.

Middleman 13th episode Comic Con Table Read Yes, that's a very geeky thing to be watching. But I loved the series. And so, I'm fairly confident, would a number of you, if it hadn't been on ABC Family (WTF??) and completely invisible and cancelled after 12 episodes. Here's the trailer for the series, in case I can tempt anyone to give it 61 seconds worth of a chance. (Warning: lame voiceover. Ignore that.) On DVD and iTunes, not sure about Hulu.

Stephen Fry lurves him some iPad: Best not to click through. Drooling isn't really the best look on him.

Various Artists - Poplife Presents Poplife Sucks Got it mostly because it was the only proper recording of Prisencolinensianciusol I could find, but there's lots of other fun stuff on here.

I have the TWiT Live coverage running and they just wondered whether the tablet is The One Ring. :grins: I was thinking I'd concoct some silly playlist to have running while the liveblogs and tweets streamed past, but this is funner.

Audio Advisor via Amazon.com, Klipsch Image X5, $149.99

My desktop rig is Mac optical -> DA10 -> Gilmore Lite, with loop out of the GLite continuing to some desktop speakers (Swan S3W). I've known for a while that the speakers were sucking a ton of SQ out of the headphone rig, which sounded anemic and hollowed out with the speakers connected, and massively better when they're unplugged from the loop-out. Today I finally did something about it: revived an old desktop Pimeta to serve as a buffer between the rest of the rig and the speakers. Hurrah! Proper headphone SQ restored, and I don't have to connect and disconnect the speakers all the time. It sort of bothers me to be using a whole OPA627 Pimeta just to compensate for a crummy speaker input circuit, but I wasn't using the amp for anything so I'm trying to be pleased to have a productive use for some old equipment.

Sunpower N90AT, aka WM080 for England.

+1 to the and to the hope they'll be fully appreciated in their new home. Closed deal with a nanny for the 1 1/2 year old. Come next month it's time for me to stop being a full-time dad, go out into the world, and make something of myself.