Knuckledragger

I linked this in H-C's chat yesterday, but I hadn't posted it here yet: April Winchell Barack Obama is tired of your motherfucking shit [Audio NSFW, of/c]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ibX3TejlZE

I got back one of my C-22 preamps and my MC-75 monoblock from the repair shop yesterday. I've had these things for a decade, and I'm just now getting around to dealing with them properly. I haven't plugged the MC-75 into anything but the AC outlet so far, but I did just spend half an hour futzing around taking pictures of it: The case could use a good cleaning, but I'm not sure what cleaning product one uses on vintage tube amps. The repair tech tested all the tubes and said they did quite well. I understand the power tubes used the MC-75 are quite spendy to replace. I don't have any pitures of the C-22 preamp yet. I'm going to try to integrate it as a phono preamp in my headphone/Quad rig.

Back in stock! Also, 2x:

No, that's not what I was implying at all. Serenity is a wonderful series, tragically cut short by idiot Fox executives. Just as one is really getting into the series, the last disk ends.

That's great for anyone who's managed to avoid watching the series thusfar. For the rest of us...

Today I made it to the sodding audio repair shop before they closed @ 5PM, got home and unloaded two McIntoshes (including a boat anchor of a monoblock) and still had time to grab my camera and chase the sunset. I ended up using my EF 75-300mm F/4-5.6 USM III tele-zoom, which is largely regarded as the worst in Canon's entire line. It managed to get a couple shots nearly in focus enough that I could use them. I processed these two as RAW files in Photomatix, and then worked them over in Photoshop. A while back there was an amazing combination of sunset and fog in my yard, so I went out and snapped a few pix. Idiot me had the camera on landscape mode, which oversaturated the colors and looked like ass. Fortunately, after the first dozen shots I switched to RAW + jpeg, so there are some I can salvage. I've been putting off editing them forever. I still haven't distilled jpegs from the RAW files, but I did run one through Photomatix and make a pseudo HDR image. It required much cleaning in Photoshop and is still kind of messy, but the end result is at least okay: I set the saturation levels very low on all three of these shots when I tonemapped then in Photomatix. My goal was to avoid as much of the cartoony aspect of HDR as possible.

Ran a bunch of errands including picking up my two bits of McIntosh tube kit from the repair shop (pictures Real Soon Now). Managed to get home in time to grab my camera and get a few shots of the fleeting sunset. Discovered that the refurb'd PSU I got from PC Power & Cooling as replacement for my dead unit is also dead. Re-installed my old 420W supply. Spent two effing hours futzing with the IDE cables, jumpers, power connectors and bios settings before I had a machine that would boot from CD and recognize the new system drive. Now I am listening to a techno mix a friend sent me and editing HDR images while I wait for the the Windows installer to finish formatting the drive.

Where's Dom when you need him?

An alternate soundtrack to Koyaanisqatsi. Nice and relaxing while I reinstall windows on my PC.