Dear Friends,

Witness the mind blowing irrelevance of our fair FDA
(see below). If you want to trim the fat in
Washington (pun intended), start here.

I believe the next logical step would be for the
President’s Council on Physical Fitness to categorize
playing with a Game Boy as “light outdoor activity.”

“Under an obscure USDA rule, most frozen french fries
have been considered fresh vegetables since 1996. Now
they all are, under a revision last year that added
batter-coated, frozen french fries to the list of
fresh produce.”

The Story

-Drieq-

Got the new TV last night … well, it’s not so much a TV as a
giant computer screen.

It’s a 37″ Sharp LCD/TFT display. It will do 1280×768 resolution,
and can also do a side-by-side screen from different input sources
(computer, tv, dvd, etc).

So far so good — I’ve connected my laptop to it, and it’s just
awesome to be able to compute from across the living room.

A note to anyone who is trying to get the full widescreen resolution from their video card: In my case, the laptop has a Radeon video card in it. The only way I could figure out how to run in 1280×768 was to download Rage3dTweak in order to enable some “hidden” resolutions the card could do. Install the software, enable 1280×768, reboot, then select 1280×768 in the display control panel. Once I did that, I had to manually set the TV to 1280×768 mode and everything was golden.

Also, running the “Auto Setup” menu option on the TV under where the computer signal sync options are set made a HUGE difference in the quality of the picture.

Future Enhancements:

• Today: Get an ART CleanBox, which connects unbalanced RCA to
  balanced XLR devices. Since I’m using the Mackie monitors, I may
  as well hook them up balanced. Also, the Echo Mia has balanced
  outs, so i can have as good a signal as possibly going into the
  receiver with the CleanBox.

• Put a whole computer behind/under it so that I don’t have to
  dock/undock the laptop every day.

• Put the Echo Mia soundcard in the computer, to do Reason and
  other audio stuff nicely

• Put a video capture card in the computer, preferably a hi-def
  model. Initially i can use this to have a “tv window” while using
  the computer, maybe later to be used as a computer-based PVR.

Consumerism? What’s that?

Here are two stories for the archives….

Sometime in 1995 when I was living on Orange Ave in Costa Mesa
with Ryan and Mike, I witnessed a great lightning storm.

It was around 9 or 10PM at the end of a mostly normal, warm, clear
Orange County day. I can’t remember exactly how we first noticed
it — I think I was coming home from school or work when I saw it
– but I recall seeing a flurry of lightning activity far in the
distance, in the direction of the ocean. This lightning didn’t
let up — it was continuous.

We lived on the 2nd (top) floor of a little apartment building, so
we got up on the roof of our place to watch it. We were up there
for fifteen minutes at least just watching this clump of
continuous lightning when we decided to go find it.

We drove down the 55 freeway to Newport, then turned north up
PCH. There was just this clump of clouds just off the coast that
was just going nuts with lightning. We found a place to park near
the sand, and went out onto the beach to watch this thing.

We sat there for a long, long time just watching this amazing
show. There was a lightning strike at least every second, many
times several at once. It was silent too — there was an offshore
breeze, which may have contributed to the lack of noise.

After an hour, we decided to go home. The lightning cloud had
disapated a bit, and we thought it may be drifting toward us, so
we figured it was time to go home.

The other amazing lightning experience I had happened more
recently. Arti, my parents, and I went down to Moss Landing an
evening in November 2003 to do a “Full Moon Kayak” excursion.

There are a few Kayak shops in the Moss Landing area, and several
offer nighttime trips when the full moon provides enough light to
navigate. I had done a similar trip in 1999 or 2000 with Mona and
Musty in Santa Cruz, so I was excited to have another chance to be
out on the water at night.

We paddled out from the harbor at sunset, and slowly made our way out to
the estuary as nighttime made its own slow way over us. An hour
or so later we were deep in the estuary, surrounded by birds,
fish, and the occasional sea otter poking its head up out of the
water.

Looking east, there were some clouds building up near the hills in
the distance. From the shape of the clouds, it seemed that there
was a pretty good wind blowing out there. There were a couple of
occasional lightning strikes as we were paddling out. Most were
pretty dim, others were bright.

This built up slowly over the course of a half hour or so into an
interesting, sometimes continuous show.

It was a great experience to be in a little boat, sitting on the
surface of the smooth water, not a sound to be heard except for
the sporadic calls of nighttime shorebirds, watching this visually
amazing nature show in the distance reflecting off the water’s
surface.