Paranoia Runs Deep

In the last three days, we have had nearly 100 hits from all over the world, with most finding us by Googling some version of "world ends september 10" and hitting this entry. Of course, the more clicks, the higher that blog entry gets in the Google listings, making it more likely that the next person will wind up here.

Still hasn't reached the level of traffice we got from "debbie's boob job" several years ago, but we still have a week to go.

Not much happening here other than reading and watching movies. Microsoft managed to mangle Media Player somewhere along the way so that when you watch an mpeg video file, the music volume is normal, but speech is nearly inaudible. I assume that as most speech is on the center-front speaker, with music and sound effects on the right-left front-rear speakers, there is some problem with the surround sound settings. I didn't have the patience to dig very far, so I just installed the Windows version of VLC. I wasn't much impressed with its quality of video playback when I ran it under Ubuntu a couple years ago, and I have seen nothing to change my opinion of the current version. At the time, I wasn't sure if the video problem was VLC or Ubuntu, but given that it's no better under Windows, I'm guessing the issue is with VLC. But it will do for now, and it fixed the audio problem. I may yet poke around in the control panel and try to fix Media Player, but I'm not in any hurry.

Speaking of audio, I made another upgrade to our entertainment system. Up until yesterday, I had the laptop's headphone jack plugged into the TV's audio. It worked, but there was a great deal of distortion. For five years or so, I've owned and Edirol UA-1A (essentially an external sound card that plugs into a USB port), but I didn't have a cable to mate the UA-1A's left-right RCA jacks to the stereo 1/8" plug on the TV. I literally had every other audio cable you can imagine except that one. Yesterday, I finally stopped at the Radio Shack that I walk by every day on the way home from work and picked up the appropriate cable. The difference is unbelievable. I had considered getting some external, powered studio monitors to upgrade the TV's audio, but now I'm not sure that I will bother. Anyway, getting the audio sorted out means that we are left with getting a magic black box that will let us wirelessly print to our laser printer in the office, and finding another magic black box that will give us the full native resolution of our TV (1920x1080) from our laptop. I expect the first to be easy, the second to be nearly impossible.

It's also time to sort out our disk space situation. I'm currently running two half-terabyte SATA drives in MX-1 enclosures and an aging 60 gig Western Digital Passport. Files are sort of scattered around with a big xcopy job that copies every file to at least one other place. Not an ideal system, and the Western Digital has been running continuously for six or seven years. I'm seriously considering a Drobo with two 1-terebyte drives plus my two half-terabyte drives. The Drobo uses its own version of RAID to prevent data loss if one of the drives craps out, so I would be able to ditch my xcopy backup system and use more of my disk space for data instead of backups. But all that will have to wait for funding; the Drobo itself plus a couple 1 terabyte drives is running around $700.

Well, time for bed.