aerius

Russian choral music was mentioned, so if you don't already have it get a copy of Russian Favourites by the Red Army Choir. Though it's not super dynamic, there's something undeniably fun about blasting Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries on a speaker system. Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite is also pretty fun, particularly "In the hall of the mountain king". Still trying to find a perfect version though, every one I've heard to date has something that's a little off. Moving over to more modern music, there's the opening of "Space Dog" by Tori Amos off the Under the Pink album, and also "Sun Going Down" by The Tea Party from the album Splendor Solis. And though it's not music, it's pretty darn fun. Danley Sound Labs has a few sound files on the bottom of this page which you can download and put on a CD. The fireworks one is pretty ridiculous and the Harley Davidson sound clip is also pretty good.

There's a Simaudio W-5 with your name on it on Audiogon. The other nice solidstate amp I can think of is the Gamut D200, but I'm not sure if you can find a used one in your price range. I've also never heard it on a lower efficiency set of speakers so I'm not sure how well it'll mate with your Harbeths, whereas the Simaudio will happily drive anything short of an Apogee Scintilla.

Shutterfly's not bad but you might want to disable their Vivid Pics setting for portraits, the default setting tends to make skintones too saturated & red. Take advantage of the free 50 pics they give you when you sign up, pick out a dozen or so photos which are representative of your shooting style and print'em up with your free sample allowance. My personal favourite is AdoramaPix since they have a much larger choice of papers, you can get matte, lustre, silk, glossy, and metallic papers, the metallic is awesome if you have a lot of bright bold colours in your photos. You can even get all the colour profiles off their site so you can preview & make sure that all the colours in the photos look the way they should.

So basically what you're saying is you don't want to fucking buy one. Fine. You don't have to. It's a free fucking world. Who the fuck cares? But then you just had to keep whining and trying to justify yourself with a bunch of bullshit and it just reeks of sour grapes.

The Sharks didn't choke. I must be living in some kind of bizaro world. Next thing you know the Leafs will make a run and win the Stanley Cup.

For the Leica faithful, yes, but I'm not a fan of it. The rest of their camera design is nice in terms of ergonomics, shooting quality pictures and so forth, but having to remove the bottom panel just to change the battery is an anachronism I could do without.

Unless you're one of those weirdos who shoots ASA 25 film, or ASA 100 film with heavy filters (eg. Wratten #29). In the modern digital world it might still make sense if you're shooting b&w with the #29 filter on an M9, but let's face it, who the hell does that? Personally, if I went the Leica route I'd want the previous generation Summilux 35mm since it's a hell of a lot smaller than the current version without giving up too much in practical performance. Not a big fan of Leicas though, they still have their retarded take half the camera apart just to change the battery and & memory card design, for fuck's sake, use a nice easy to open door like every other rational camera manufacturer.

Sculpture thingies in a city park

I finally got a chance to hear a couple of the Tape Project tapes on a Studor machine and the only way I can describe it is "holy crap! This is fucking awesome!" I've heard a fair number of good sources and recordings over the years but this was something else, it was like my first hi-fi experience all over again where I'm just sitting there with a silly grin on my face going "damn...damn that's good!" I honestly think everyone needs to experience one of these tapes at some point just to get an idea of how good a hi-fi system can really sound.

Audio Notes. All else being about equal, I always go for the more efficient speaker since it really opens up the amp choices. There's so much more interesting stuff to play with in the under 50W field than there is above that power level, and in my experience the simpler lower powered amps sound better than the big 200W tube amps.

All the Original Six teams in the playoffs make it to the next round, it was pretty close for Detroit and Montreal but they did it.

There's a much simpler explanation Morphsci, HeadphoneAddict needs to get his hearing checked. Seriously. The HF-1 has recessed mids while the K702 and HD800 don't? Are you fucking shitting me?

Cool. I'm used to doing it by hand in Photoshop since if I use plug-ins, there's always something that looks wrong compared to the original and I end up having to do some masking and manually blending it out to make it look right. I guess if I didn't have the original to compare it to I probably wouldn't notice anything wrong with the automatic conversions done by various plug-ins. From today:

If you're going to be using B&W a lot then the channel mixer tool in Photoshop is your friend. Quick example page Once you get the hang of it you can simulate all kinds of filter effects to set the lighting & contrast relationships exactly where you want them.

Teak sounds like a good bet. This is the side of one of my speakers which is made of teak. Closer view of the wood

Quad 57 and Opera Callas SP at my favourite local dealer

Better. Say you have a pro photographer at a football game. A modern photographer with a DSLR will shoot off something like 5000 shots and come up with maybe a dozen good ones which get circulated on the newswires and published in various forms both in print and on the web. 30-40 years ago the pro photographer would shoot off a few hundred frames and get maybe half a dozen publishable pictures.

That's pretty much the way it is. About the only people shooting full manual these days are the ones who still use film and those doing medium & large format photography. And people who use Leicas. Nearly everyone who uses a DSLR shoots in some form of automatic mode, full manual DSLR users are exceedingly rare as far as I know.

Believe it or not, that's our City Hall. The original City Hall is a lot nicer.

Yup, went through that phase myself when I got my digital camera a few years ago. The first few months were pretty crazy, I even took a picture of my bellybutton just because I could. With my compact camera I got the best results with a sheet of notebook paper. I was taking pictures at a party and the flash was making people look pretty horrible, so I used a piece of notebook paper that was lying around as a makeshift diffuser and it worked pretty well. I later tried several other papers at home but the first guess turned out to be the right one.

A big part of road racing comes down to tactics and drafting, you want to be in the front third of the group so you don't get see-sawed and gapped out of the draft every time the peloton slows for a corner. When you're closer to the back there's a hell of a lot more speed variation as the group bunches up and spreads out, and you'll waste a lot more energy slowing down then accelerating hard to get back into the draft. If you're at the back it's only a matter of time before you get popped off and when that happens you're screwed until you can get a few other riders together and form a paceline. Try to stay with the leaders as long as you can, when you can't do it anymore drop off and latch onto the chase group(s), and when that fails drop back to the main group. Never ride alone if you can help it, for instance if you're in between the lead & chase group, don't blow yourself out trying to maintain position or jump to the lead group, ease up and recover a bit, then join the chase group and let them pull you back up front.

I guess it's respectable for a studio album, I'm much more of fan of his live recordings which is where I think he really shines. The Blue Wild Angel version of "Red House" absolutely kills the one on this album, and of the songs on the album where there's live versions, the live ones are always better. Not necessarily in sound quality, but in the way the band plays and how they jam and make the music really take a life of its own. I'll probably make my own version of the album by replacing as many tracks as I can with live versions.

I have a couple of those which I found in a surplus store and was planning to use as a giant night light. The local surplus suppliers didn't have a suitable transformer so I ended up using a computer PSU to power the filament. The project didn't get very far since I didn't have a socket for the tube and it was entirely put together with clip leads.

If it were, that would be one hell of a close-up shot with those lenses. Cherry tree