Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Fixing Audio Transmission
June 05, 2012

I’ve been using a couple of Windows programs for quite a while that make my life better in small, but significant, ways. The first is Power Mixer. The second is BlueSoleil.

Power Mixer allows you to take better control over the audio configuration on your system. It replaces (but doesn’t disable) the internal Windows volume control, which has never worked great for me. There are a couple of things that Power Mixer does that I find very useful. First, it has a concept of “presets”. A preset allows you to set the volumes for all of the audio devices in your system all at once. This may sound a little strange for people that only have one audio device, but I imagine many people have more than one audio device on they system and don’t even know it.

Atmospheric Office
May 23, 2012

One of the many perils of working at home is not having anyone to blame but yourself when the atmosphere in the office goes completely haywire.

I found my office this morning in a sad state. A thick fog rolled in while we were asleep last night and burned off quickly as the sun arose this morning. I left some small fans in my window from yesterday, since it was cooler outside than inside (why does this happen??), and all last night they pumped thick, foggy air into my little office.

Summer School
May 17, 2012

VFS Summer Intensive Programs 2011The kids have a couple of activities lined up for the summer; camps and whatnot. While looking for these activities in the brochures and online catalogs, I noticed there are many night school offerings for adults. Berta and I took a few couples’ classes at the Kitchen Workshop in the past, learning how to make Moroccan, Mediterranean, and Cajun food. Those were pretty fun. But I’d like to take some other types of classes, or participate in other events, assuming they’re affordable.

The one I’m most looking into is a Photoshop training class. I can use Photoshop to a certain degree, but I mostly depend on Fireworks for my day-to-day web development requirements. (Fireworks is better for web work than Photoshop, feature-wise.) But I would like to learn the more compositional/creative features of Photoshop, not just the slice and resample features that I use for work. I’d like to learn how to use Photoshop to compose a graphic, and how to use its retouching tools to fix photos I’ve taken myself. These are things that I either don’t know well or don’t know at all, and would love to have just a basic course to force me through the basics.

iPod Touch Repair
May 16, 2012

iPodLCD.jpgLast Girl Scout Cookie Season, Riley was out with Berta and Abby at one of the tables they had set up to sell cookies near Acme. He had taken his iPod Touch with him to keep him occupied, and it was doing a good job. As they were cleaning up, he accidentally dropped it on the sidewalk and cracked the screen.

Obviously, Riley was upset because his iPod was broken, and Berta wasn’t inclined to buy another one, since we had gotten the pair of them at a deep discount that was unlikely to happen again. I suggested repair as a possibility, having had friends repair iPhones and the like, so we started down this long road.

Non-Event Events
May 15, 2012

calendar.jpgLooking at the calendar on my phone, which is connected to several Google calendars, I see a mess of events. There are things that are scheduled for specific times of day, and there are things that are scheduled for “all day”. That’s what’s bugging me today, the “all day event”.

There are some events that really are “all day”. For example, there are some trips that we’re taking that encompass the whole day. But other events, like birthdays and “last day of school”, are not really “all day”. They’re kind of milestone markers; this is the day this happens, but it’s not something that will keep you busy all day, just something of note.