Winter?

Why do I bother waking up in the morning?

statue

A thing

I'm kind of proud of that.

Leaking!

The hallway between Taliaferro and Key is leaking now that the ice on top of it is melting. The whole hallway.

I got and

That from a box of tart sweethearts. It's the only thing written on it. I guess the fortune cookies were wrong.

Reversed 28 mounted on 1.4x teleconverter, 1/30, indicated f22, flash set to 1/4, angled down, catchlight used as a reflector.

Another Movie Thought

When 23 comes out, I predict that, if it makes any money at all, they will want to make a sequel. I also predict that the followup will be called 5, because Jim Carey's character realizes that 2+3 equals 5 and he therefore didn't reduce enough, and so he has to go around telling everyone he already told that everything is 23 that everything is really 5.

You heard it here first.

Seriously, do they even try?

Important administrators have to park in and walk out of that lot.

Blocked in

School opened on time today. Presumably, crews worked through the night doing an excellent job clearing sidewalks and making the campus safe for both pedestrian and vehicle traffic.

That's what I'd think, anyway - they used to write that kind of self-congratulatory pap on the website whenever it snowed and they decided to keep campus open.

Imagine my surprise when I get to campus to see the following in front of my building:







Sigh.

What are the odds?

I got to campus (after a failed first attempt thanks to the fact that I left my ID at home and they locked the buildings today) at about 5:10; it took me an hour to hash out staff assignments for tomorrow. There are still two cart appointments that need to be added, as well.

The big question? What are the odds school's on a delayed opening tomorrow?

I ask because on the way out of the building, I almost fell over and died on the hill behind key. Oh, and all of the roads are ice again, thanks to absurdly low temperatures.

Guess what

I found something. Reversed A28, indicated aperture 22, flash 1/32 output.

Seriously...

... I don't want to be here.



See, the sky is like a multi-segment area of grossness, and it's just kind of snow-leeting, and it's depressing and they're going to close school early or something, or they won't. I'm leaning toward the latter.

Tomorrow

I hereby declare that, in the event of snow, I will be preparing chili from scratch for the first time ever.

It will be delectable, as it will feature my favorite spice ever (apparently): allspice.

I hope somoene else wants to eat it, but if they don't, I will be happy with my pile of food for several days.

and one of the proudest...

Tube replacement

Well, success: I went to Chuck Levin's to talk to Pro-Tech; they sold me three tubes (two 12AX7s, and one 12AU7) for a total of 33 dollars. I brought them back, had lunch, and dove into the amp. I decided that, since the circuit diagram said the tube gain control only has an effect on the output side tubes, I would try there first. I swapped the 12AU7 to no avail, so I took both out (since you basically have to to get to the 12AX7), replaced the 12AX7, reinstalled the old 12AU7, and plugged everything in. Success. The old Sovtek 12AX7 had gasped its last. So I took pictures of it.



There's some other stuff here, to include some notes about how I took that shot above.

Whee!

State of Grace

It's just kind of an indication as to the kind of week I've been living. I got so frustrated with work today that I just pulled out a sharpie and wrote "I draw on hand" and then drew a picture of a happy bear above it.

Snow der

10mm view from the back porch.

On the Fusion of Requests and Haiku

Today, we received the following somewhat cryptic request:

Equipment request for tomorrow at 6 pm
one video projector

Whether or not you work here or ever have worked here, I'm sure you can list at least some of the problems with this.

I proposed the following as a response, along with a link to our request form:

Equipment request:
Art/soc loan? Classroom Support?
Too many questions.

Calendar

Friday night, true to their word, OIT applied the daylight savings time experiment patch to the calendar system. This meant that any appointments scheduled between March 11 and April 1 had to be moved back one hour, because neither the university nor Oracle could devise a way to change these appointments automatically. This in spite of the fact that ALL events stored on the calendar system are stored in UTC, not the local time zone according to the date they're scheduled.

It would seem there was a problem manufactured somewhere.

Regardless, true to my word, I spent the initial two and a half hours of my day dutifully moving appointments. Right as I finished, my supervisor came back to tell me that she was listening to other people complain about having "just found out" they had to move their events.

Let me rephrase that: I moved 271 appointments in less time than it took some other people to merely complain about having to move two dozen.

Ahh, efficiency.

Remember this post?

How do I fix my amplifier?

Yeah, well, after determining not very much except there wasn't anything wrong with any of the components, I gave up.

Until tonight.

I plugged my footbox thing into my practice amp, and wouldn't you know it - quiet/dirty sound from it too. I started trying to adjust the volume and that with my foot, and immediately, the noise jumped WAY up in volume, and became nothing but 60 cycle hum.

Started dissecting things... lo and behold, the cable coming out of the foot box was corroded beyond recognition. It was no longer shiny at all, and had pitting all over it like crazy.

The Grand Moff wins a cookie - it was caused by upstream noise being amplified.

How did I fix these cables? Well, coca cola plus foil = chrome polish. I don't have any foil, so I threw some coke on a scrubbing thing and tried that - not much success. Next idea (and a brilliant one, if I do say so myself) was to take the orange pumice soap under the sink, apply it to a wad of toilet paper, and give it a good sanding. That seems to have restored some of the luster, though a lot of the pitting is still present/evident.

Moral? I guess it's "always unplug anything that's headed to a 450 watt amplifier when you're done with it."

Happy Birthday, Dennis

I found these flowers on a bench near my car. They bore a card that said "Happy Birthday, Dennis." It took me a second to realize it, but the bench was placed in memory of Dennis.

Two different celebrations of life.

Shooting

I'm taking out a roll of film today.

I shudder to think of how much it's going to cost me to have it developed. That and I still need batteries for my MX meter.