Via FriendlyAtheist:

There's a good chance that people's notion of "human solidarity" will triumph in the end, slowly but surely.

I was left a comment tonight from someone saying "I want my money back - from your blog."  Apparently I have not written enough this summer to suit some!  I don't apologize for not blogging, nor for mentioning articles that will come out some day.  In the words of John Carmack "It's done when it's done".  I also try to keep the signal to noise ratio high as opposed to blogging about my trip to Starbucks or how fun it is to mow the lawn.    I haven't been able to blog at work lately, and at home I must confess I've been sucked back into acoustics for a while.  My acoustic treatment project is turning out to be much more complicated than I thought, as the science of the field has advanced far beyond "Master Handbook of Acoustics".

I haven't been able to try my lighting technique yet, so for now you'll have to put up with more bad photography.  Here is a shot of the seating I mentioned:

My car stranded me on the side of the freeway this morning, the alternator belt dropped off.  My Subaru dealer suggested that 'rocks or animals' might be responsible.  Yeah, the gophers in my yard must have it in for me.  Anyway add 'car' to the list of things I've broken recently.   I got my projector back today at least, and chilled in the home theater for several hours tonight while I wrote some code.  I should be back in action on nearly all fronts tomorrow, my productivity has been abysmal of late.

• I've been enjoying the HBO Series "Rome" via Netflix.  I could never comit the time to actually keep up with a miniseries while it's on, but HBO's original programming is interesting.
• On Thursday the home theater recliners Jen and I bought come in.  They are very nice Palliser leather home theater chairs.  I've also made some cosmetic changes to the home theater, so I will experiment with lighting and try to take some decent pictures; I think this is going to involve me carrying lamps down there.
• I often post about audio/video related gatherings, often as part of the Klipsch Forums group.  This week people from Indianapolis, Maryland, Chicago, and California are coming up for a Lake Country gathering taking place at my house and two others.  Friday at my place is the first event and we are watching "300" on BluRay, this will be sandwiched between what is usually hours of system tweaking, scene demoing, watching trailers, playing HD games, equipment auditioning, and audio geek stuff like that.  Lots of jazz and beer, and I should be fully recharged by sunday afternoon.

That's all for now.  I have WORKING HARDWARE so I can resume my technical articles.  I need to get some sleep now so I can perform my scrum master duties tomorrow.

Milton Friedman, not strictly an objectivist, has some great quotes in Capitalism and Freedom.  Today, musing over my issues with UPS (didn't deliver my projector), Dell, Subaru (the local dealer not the car company that I still admire), and others, one idea from his book came back to me.  I'm going to slightly mis-quote this admirable thinker rather than dig through his book for the exact words of this quote, forgive my laziness:

"You can coerce people to be at a certain place at a certain time, and to perform a task in that place for a certain number of hours, but you cannot coerce people to do their best."

You cannot use force on people to get them to give up the best products of their minds. 

So I get a box from Dell today.  I open it, its a completely different system than mine, which they told me was still a shipping configuration, so I could pull out my old HD, stick it into the newly arriving system, and be on my merry way.  This new Vostro has Vista on it which if I remember right from Brennan's blog means I'm shit out of luck insofar as downgrading to XP, or at the very least in for a lot of pain.  The latest version of Mobile Device Center does seem to work with my CE 4.2 devices that I need, so maybe I'll just use Vista on the laptop.  Of course they seem to have given me a slower HD rather than the 7200RPM serialATA I paid for.  I don't think I'll purchase anything from Dell in the future.

My beloved HD projector started exhibiting some issues, mostly during Blu-Ray playback over the HDMI port.  Cruising some forums it seems that this huge purple line or white flash I sometimes see could be fixed by either firmware (not user upgradable) or a stuck dynamic Iris.  My projector (PT-AX100U) uses a dynamic iris to increase the contrast significantly.  My home theater and gaming depends on this device, I'm incredibly spoiled by always playing games on a 106" screen in a huge room in 5.1 so I'm not going to bother with any games until I get it back.  This would be the 4th piece of technology I've broken in a very short period of time.

Movies at Damon's, which I know some readers are on the mailing list for, will resume when my projector comes back.  300 will most likely be the next title, as it is supposed to be stunning in HD.  Anyone in the metro Milwaukee area who wants to be on the mailing list, leave or send me your address.

It was suggested that virtualization with Virtual PC might be a solution to the problem of future hardware crashes (and re-crashes) making me unproductive for days on end.  First, the last I checked, Virtual PC does not support USB ports for performance reasons.  PDA and Digital Camera development is a lot of my time and requires those newfangled USB ports.  In addition to this drawback I like my programs to be responsive.  VS2005 is now very responsive with my new machines but Outlook 2007 (while I like the program and its functionality) is barely tolerable and can still hang the entire system for several seconds during a send/receive.This is after following the performance improving ideas from Scott Hanselman and others.  I still can't fathom how anyone actually likes web based email. 

Grant's idea of ghosting your machine once in a while got me thinking.  A fantastic backup scenario for hardware failure would be as follows: when you want to take a backup you use a tool (I'm thinking a new improved Virtual PC) and just tell it "build a virtual machine image out of my current configuration".  This would make one giant virtual drive and image out of all of your programs and files.  This file could then be backed up and in case of a catastrophic hardware failure you copy this image out of your backup and continue from your last backup from inside virtual PC on whatever hardware is available.  Equally swell would be the option (you would certainly not always want to depending on the age of your last backup) to take your work from the virtual machine image and installify it onto your real physical hardware after repairs were done.  Yeah, that would be great.

This may already exist but I don't think so.

After working for an amazing 5 hours my Dell roasted again, same issue as before.  I guess the issue was not the motherboard, and perhaps deals with the power circuitry or USB ports?  Dell is sending me an entirely new machine for the trouble of wasting quite a bit of my time, of course I won't be getting it for 10-15 days.  Despite their efforts to make things right I won't be purchasing anything Dell related in the future.  My last Dell laptop drank some Starbucks (my fault entirely) but it took three tedious round-trips to the repair depot to get it fixed.  Humoursly enough there is an insert in the repaired laptops when they come back that states that the unit has undergone "rigorous testing".