Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Earworm. Beatles. "I Will".

"Just talked to a girl named Alison. When it first started she went up to a cop and said thank you for coming out to keep us safe. This is a rough neighborhood. He said that's not why we are here. She asked why they were there and he said a disgruntled employee had said that the bar was overserving people. She told him she had been drinking but that she had a designated driver. He told her that she was fine. She said they only arrested men and seemed to be targeting effeminate men" -- Tammye Nash, 1969-06-28 (whoops, my bad, but I'm sure you can understand my mistake) 2009-06-28, regarding a raid on a gar bar just coincidentally on the 40th anniversary of that more famous gay-bar raid

More at ONTD-politics, Daily Kos, and, of course, Twitter

I had a different quote in mind for today, before news of this weekend's raid came across Twitter.

[Alternate title: "Didn't Sleep, So Footnotes Ate Me"]

Managed to get one hour of sleep before leg cramps woke me; haven't managed to get back to sleep since. Not expecting this to be one of my better days.

But I did manage to post an explosive photo to Flickr last night, so that's something.¹

Confirmed (alas) that when you use about three times as much virtual memory as there is physical RAM in the system, a Mac with a gig and a quarter gets really sluggish, much the way a less memory-full Windows or Linux system does when you get to a little over twice as much VM as RAM. Bleah. (Okay, okay, not the least bit surprising, I know. Nonetheless: bleah.) Still, it takes longer for me to get that far into torture-the-hardware mode on this computer than on any others in the house. And once I get a couple of the projects I'm in the middle of to easy "save, quit, and come back later" points, the machine will be nice and zippy again.

Also may have figured out why the Mac wouldn't charge from the inverter in the car (which is also the inverter I use at Pennsic²). It turns out that the reason the little square box with ears on it that gets so disturbingly hot does get so disturbingly hot is that it's rated for 127-182 VA according to the decal on the side, and the inverter's sticker says it only puts out 100 W (and ISTR that being a peak value, with a continuous rating more like 85 W, but that info was on the original packaging which I no longer have). I'm a little fuzzy on exactly how to convert between VA and W, but I can see that 100 is enough lower than 127 that if the Mac's power supply has a power factor as high as the first Google hit on "convert W to VA" found me suggests, 100 W is just not enough. Feh.

Oh, but wait, a decal on another side of the power ... (do I still call it a 'brick' if it's not brick shaped but still has cords on both sides?³) ... declares that it's a 65 W unit. Oh, right, that's probably the output after subtracting all the power that goes into making Very Warm White Square Thingie so very warm. (Hmm. 24.5 V @ 2.65 A = 64.925 W, so okay, I'm not entirely brain-scrozzled from only sleeping one [expletive] hour [whiiiiine].) So I guess I need a slightly bigger inverter or a DC-DC converter that can go from 12 V to 24.5 V more efficiently than the 12 VDC --> 115 VAC --> 24.5 VDC route. Uh, or I can take the Vaio with XP on it and try not to bore my campmates with whining about how XP isn't OS X. I'll make that an all too likely 'plan C' due to financial constraints.

(Uh ... putting two 12 V lead-acid batteries in series and sticking a voltage regulator between the battery battery⁴ and the computer ... good idea, bad idea, or "might be a good idea if Glenn knew enough electronics to get the regulator right but a bad idea under the actual circumstances"?)

Okay, let's see whether I can at least get a nap, or convince myself I'm alert enough to get something useful done despite the brain-fuzzies.

[1] Yes, I know about the deflagration/detonation distinction. :-þ And yes, it's closer to black than silver under normal light, but it's also very, very shiny and I used a flash.

[2] Yeah yeah, I know, but a computer comes in handy for the photography, and gives me something to do on the days when I'm not feeling well enough to get out of my tent and up the hill. I'm also more likely to want it for transcribing/arranging music during Pennsic than any randomly selected other fortnight of the year.

[3] I feel funny calling it a wall-wart even though I know it can be configured as one, because I don't have the little folding plug module that replaces the AC power cord, so at present, this one isn't a wall-wart.

[4] Intentional, though if I were feeling more obscure I could've just said 'battery' and let folks wonder whether the singular was accidental or I was thinking of the two heavy black boxes as one 24-cell battery; and if I were feeling less smartassy I could've just said 'batteries'. But then I wouldn't have this excuse for yet another footnote, would I?